bigbendtexas

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First four pics - Historic stretch of Rt 66 in Amarillo.

Bottom - Preparing our last meal together

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3rd row - I don't remember seeing a Caddy with a trailer hitch.  Only Texas I guess.

4th Row - E leaving her "Mark" that will probably not last a day or at most a week.

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Top row - Headed to the "Cadillac Ranch" art exhibit.  The pic on right is right above a graffiti painted fence post. We saw a pic where someone had painted on the sign itself.

Bottom photo shows what Heinz and Susi were so amazed about that we sometimes take for granted.

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Top row - Warnings about the buffalo in Caprock State park, the home of the Texas state buffalo herd.

2nd row - the only evidence that there are Buffalo in the park!

Just some interesting, to me, geological and neat scenery pics.

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Top left - My "Hole-in-one" at Meadowbrook Golf Course, Lubbock.  No 1 and 2 holes were in a prairie dog village.  I actually had another "hole out" on my second hot. So, two holes-in-one on the same hole!

2nd row- Caprock Canyon so named because it is a three layered area with a "cap" of hard rock. 

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As an addendum to the Carlsbad trip, I wanted to buy a t-shirt that was on the 50% off rack. So I picked up a shirt that was originally marked $9.99 that was marked down to $5.99. I went to the cash register to pay for it and they said that will be $6.37. I said “Excuse me but half of $10 is not $6. Half of $10 is $5.”  She said, Well that's how they marked it.” I had asked her earlier if this was the 50% off rack so she knew what I knew. The computer wouldn't let her take 50% off of $9.99 and she was flummoxed. I said I would pay $5 and no more. She couldn't figure it out so she entered $5.99 and took 50% off that and the computer said okay. Bottom line, I paid $3.17 for the shirt. Sometimes people just can't think outside the box or maybe it was 50% off the lower marked price and she didn't know that, but the computer did.

 It was very cold last night, April  22nd, around 36 degrees here in Amarillo. With no insulation in the walls of the RV, I think it was 36 degrees inside. We survived and headed out to the Cadillac Ranch not long after breakfast. It's an interesting art display of several Cadillacs half buried in the earth showing the evolution of tail fins on Cadillacs. Apparently a Texas billionaire brought some San Francisco hippies in to design this art form on his land. At first people just looked at it with humor and then people started taking the tail fins off or taking door knobs or various parts of the cars, etc until they no longer resembled Cadillacs. And then people started spray painting them. Apparently the owner got upset at first and then decided to let everybody paint them as they wished. Now they are probably thousands of coats of spray paint on some of the vehicles in some places. There are spray cans littering the cornfield that the cars are standing in. Most of them still have paint left in them or someone will give you a can of paint to do your own decorating. Elizabeth and Susi did that. Pictures to follow. I also noticed that several cars have one rear shock removed and one had both shocks removed.  I also noted that the first or last Cadillac in the series had a different kind of shock that I had never seen before. After that we headed toward the Wal-Mart to pick up some diesel exhaust fluid for the Mercedes and pick up a few things for Heinz and Susi. We had hoped to see the quarter horse Museum and a trading post but they were both closed for Sunday. We went down to the historic 6th Avenue stretch of Route 66 because that was recommended by the tour guides. It's not the best part of town and it was nothing to write home about. We did manage to kill an hour or so before lunch and then headed to the Kwahadi Museum of the American Indian. It's only open on Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5. It has an interesting collection of Indian art and artifacts from the Hopi in Arizona and tribes in Colorado, etcetera. Elizabeth managed to find a bracelet made from turquoise that she couldn't live without. Heinz wanted to buy a painting of an Indian girl, but when they took the painting out of the frame to roll it up for him they found out it was actually a poster on poster board and not able to be rolled up for shipment back to Germany. They were very kind and gracious and happy to find out that the painting or poster could not be sold without the frame. After that we went back to Wal-Mart to get Susi's nose pieces fixed on her glasses. Then we went back to the campground for a leisurely afternoon on a relatively warm day with only a 30 mile an hour wind blowing. It was quite nice to relax and enjoy an afternoon without trying to make it to a campground. We enjoyed a nice coffee break at 1500 hours together and cooked hamburgers for the evening meal after the cocktail hour. We had a really nice discussion about living in and visiting foreign countries and how nice it is to learn about other cultures. We just got a very little bit into politics, mostly making jokes about politicians in both countries. It was a very relaxing dinner and discussion afterwards, but I forgot to take any pictures of our last meal together. We will leave tomorrow morning and should be in Tulsa late in the afternoon or early evening. It's been very much fun to travel with Heinz and Susi. They are a lot of fun and have been very patient following me to places where Siri may have been confused where we were going and I had to adjust for construction or missing a turn. We will always remember our first trip with another couple fondly. It's not often, as I said earlier, to find someone you can travel with and still be friends at the end. There will be pictures posted after we arrived back in Tulsa.

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Top pic shows how a scientist lost a toe when he lowered the maintenance platform w/o paying attention!

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top is the granddaddy telescope with the mirror sections

Bottom - End of the original 80" inch telescope installed in 1936?

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Top two how to make a huge telescope from mirror sections instead of ground glass because it's gets too heavy and "breakable" above 10 meters. This one only cost $20,000,000 and it still needs nylon straps and ropes to hold it together

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Top- El Capitan in Guadalupe Nat'l Park.

Dead motorcycle I pushed up the hill from the visitor's center

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Words can't describe everything. Just enjoy

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Bottom pic I a very strange looking stalactite or a wire hanging from a 100 high ceiling.

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Second from top just a fantastic formation.  The others are self-explanatory

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Bottom Rt is where the scooter "died"

Lower left - Road down from Carlsbad Caverns

The inevitable "Gift shop" a the end of your tour, 750 ft below ground.

Top - Some lucky explorers who get a private tour of the cavern not open t the general public.  I think you have to reserve it weeks in advance, maybe.

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April 20-22

We broke camp early and went up to Carlsbad to have breakfast waiting for the caverns open. The winds were howling and if I were to guess steady winds of 40 to 50 miles an hour with gusts higher. When the winds rock this RV back and forth and we were protected on one side by hill, that’s some serious wind. As we went to exit the van for the caverns, I held onto the door as hard as I could but the wind still ripped it out of my hands and broke the retaining rod and slammed it against the side of the van. I thought it might have been broken, but the door is fully hinged so it still works. I had to stand outside behind the door holding it for Elizabeth to get out. In retrospect, we should have exited to the driver side door, but the winds might have been shifting at that point and really done some damage to the driver side door which is not fully hinged. Anyway, we got to the caverns and we were the first persons in the door. We were the second couple along with our friend, Susi, in the elevator.  Heinz is not fond a being underground and not being able to get out quickly. We took the elevator 750 feet down to the great room. You can walk in but it takes quite a bit longer. We'll come back later and do that. If you have been to Carlsbad, you know it can't really be described in words. The tour of the great room is 1.4 miles and they say one and a half hours. I thought we've been down there about 45 minutes, but it turns out it was over an hour and a half and we didn't really dawdle. I really have too many pictures to show and they are all beautiful even in the low light. I will have to cull them again and upload them soon. We headed toward Lubbock to get a phone for our traveling friends. Susi had dropped her IPhone and needed one before she headed back to Germany and for the rest of her trip. BestBuy had a phone on sale it was supposedly unlocked quote in quote for $160. It turns out that the only phone that was on sale was a demo model and couldn't be sold, supposedly. I told the young gentlemen that he should go across the road which was actually freeway and get one from the Best Buy mall store for us because we were driving two 24-foot RVs and we weren't going to cross the street. He talked to his manager and the manager said “Well, we can sell this one.” To make a long story short an unlocked IPhone is not really unlocked in this case. It would be “unlockable” after you paid for three months service on a local phone company like Cricket.  Even the manager didn’t know until he checked it out. We went from a phone that cost $160 to a phone that cost $450 that was truly unlocked. I told the manager he could do better than that so he knocked off $50 as a gesture of goodwill. So they tried to get the phone to work with the German chip and it didn't seem to be working, but they worked and worked and finally got it to work. An IPhone in Germany would have cost over $800 so Susie and Heinz were okay with the $400. By the time, we were finished, with my steely-eyed looks and more talking with the manager, the total price for the phone with a $49 Defender case was $364. They somehow managed to reduce the phone by $150 when their margin was only $50 at the beginning. Susi and Heinz were very happy. It took 2 hours plus and when we got to the campground it was almost 7:30. We had planned to cook, but decided to have sandwiches and call it a day. The campground was closed, but when we went to the door to see where we can camp the owner opened the door and said we could have 2 spots side by side 50 feet from the bathroom. What a deal. We didn't know what a good deal it was until we looked at the bathrooms. They are as good or better than the bathrooms we have at home. Completely ceramic tile floors, walls and showers and only $27 a day with our discounts. On the 21st we had decided to go to the Buddy Holly Museum and play golf. We made a tee time at a local course and set off to the Buddy Holly Museum. It only took 30 minutes so we had a long time to wait. It turns out Lubbock has the National Glider Museum which was half a mile from the campground, but we didn't know it at the time. So we went from the campground to the Buddy Holly Museum turning around and went back to the glider museum and then turned around again and went to the golf course. We saw a lot of the same streets in Lubbock, mostly I-27. We had already decided to spend the night at the campground again and we got the same two slots. Susi and Heinz did not know anything about the role of gliders in World War II including how the Germans used gliders in Africa. Her dad was in Rommel's Afrika Corps, got captured and spent the remainder of the war years in a prisoner of war camp making condensed milk in a Libby's factory we think in Illinois. He never spoke much about it except to say he gained a lot of weight because he drank a lot of milk during his shift because he wasn't sure when he would get more food again. We saw a small 15 minute film about the glider warfare.

  It was a nice day for golf, if all of us had played better golf. I was awful the first eight holes. Susi was pretty consistent (she had four pars) and Heinz was inconsistent like me. Elizabeth has a pretty good golf swing just the ball doesn't like to go very far. I got on track a little bit in the back nine and made two pars and a birdie with some other scores. I did have two holes in one on number two. There are prairie dog habitats on both holes. My drive rolled into a hole and I dropped the ball for my second shot and my second shot rolled into a prairie dog hole. It was crowded and slow but we were playing golf. It's a city run golf course and not marked/signed very well. We actually skipped two holes by accident cause there were no marking showing where hole number 5 was. After we completed the number four hole, we actually went to number 7. The guys who were in front of us originally came back to the tee box at number 8 and said we had skipped five and six so we went back and played them and number 7 again. After golf we hit the Wal-Mart for some provisions and cooked some burgers and brats for dinner and packed it in because it was getting cool and windy. It's cold this morning as I dictate this and we are headed to Caprock Canyon Park and the Palo Duro Canyon Scenic Drive on the way to Amarillo for a day or two before heading home. Pictures will be a little delayed. Before we left, we decided to try to get Susi’s original phone fixed. We found a place that would look at it for free and try to fix it. Bottom line, they replaced the screen on the German phone and we put the AT&T chip in the new, unlocked phone and everyone is more than happy. They have an IPhone Heinz can use in the US and Susi has all her photos and contacts back with her original phone.  Alles es gute.

  We had a nice boring and spectacular drive through Caprock Canyon Park and the Palo Duro Canyon Scenic Drive on the way to Amarillo. It is some stark landscape, separated by some boring flat tableland and ranches. Unfortunately when we entered Palo Duro Canyon, there had been a wreck and we couldn't see if a car went through the guardrail and down the five hundred to a thousand foot drop because there were lots of fire trucks and rescue squads nearby. We weren't held up, but there was what looked like a body covered on the side of the road. We continued on to the Amarillo Ranch RV Park. It's very nice and only a mile or so away from The Big Texan Steakhouse. They have a free shuttle from the campground to the steakhouse and we decided to have dinner there tonight. Free means you don't have to tip the driver but you probably should. They were Cadillac and Lincoln Continental limousines with Longhorn steers horns for the hood ornament. Very impressive. We tipped the driver well and were delivered to the front door. If you've never been there, and we hadn't, it's a big place but surprisingly not very noisy. We were lucky enough to get a table on the balcony so we can look down on the other diners and see the decor. Our waitress was a little new and didn't get the right beer orders for Elizabeth and me but we managed. We all ordered steaks, of course, and they were delicious. Elizabeth and I shared an 8 ounce sirloin I'm not sure I could have eaten the whole one by myself. It came with steak fries and salad for each of us. They have their own microbrewery and we tried the Palo Duro Pale Ale. After dinner, we took another limo back to our campsite to retire for the night. We will do some sightseeing tomorrow with Susi and Heinz and leave on Monday morning or afternoon to head back. We should be in Tulsa by noon on Tuesday.

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April 19

 We got up at our regular time and had a leisurely breakfast before heading to the Guadalupe National Park. The drive toward the park was pretty boring for the first 20 or 25 miles. Then we started climbing and you could see the tallest peak in Texas off to your left. The park is only for day hikers and dry camping. We do neither, so we looked around and headed for Carlsbad Caverns. We forgot we were traveling into the Mountain Time Zone. When we got to the RV Park we thought it was 11 o'clock, but it was actually 10. The camp site can't be given out until 11 o'clock because people may come back to the front and reserve for another day. There's no problem for Elizabeth and Susi. They went shopping in the gift shop and I tried to upload some pictures. They were successful but I was not. We got two camp sites a couple of spaces apart and settled in to wait to go to the caverns. We only wanted to go there once and wait for the bats to come out at 7:15 MST. I finally got the motor scooter off the rack and we drove the seven miles to the park. We were going to take a self-guided tour of the great room and then have dinner before the bats come out. 

 As they say "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.” We left the campground about 3:20 to go up the cave. As we entered the park we saw the sign that said the last elevator down to the cave is at 3:30. We got there at 3:38. Oh well.  The scooter did fine taking two people up the mountain. I turned it off to wait for Elizabeth to check at the desk. When I tried to start it again, nothing. No “juice” going to the ignition. I rolled it out of the way and asked permission to park it in an improper place because of the problem. We drove back down in Heinz’s RV to pick up our RV to haul the motor scooter back down the mountain. I found out in the meantime by calling a repair shop in Tulsa that there's probably an inline fuse broken. There was and it should have been a quick fix. However, I had no seven and a half amp fuses in my fuse box. I tried bridging a 10 amp fuse between the contacts but they always blew. So I pushed our motorcycle up to the RV where everyone was waiting to have dinner before seeing the bats fly out of the cave. At least we accomplished one mission.

 We went back to the campground and decided to come back up early in the morning to get the first tour of the great room before heading off to Carlsbad city to play golf. It was a calm hot day yesterday and then we woke this morning to a cool and breezy morning. When I say breezy, I mean 60 to 70 mile an hour winds! We still drove up to the top of the mountain to have breakfast and wait for the caves open up at 8 a.m. We felt like we were in a row boat in a gale. Maybe I’ll say more about that later. We did get to see around 250,000 bats come out of the cave last night and Susie and Hines we're very happy, as were we. When they came out from under that bridge in Austin, Susi and Heinz said they couldn't see them very well, but here they were silhouetted against the evening sky and you could see every bat that came out of the cave. It was really nice, no pictures, videos or recording devices of any kind are allowed, but we will always have that picture in our mind.

 Now as to the glider flight I have not spoken about. Susi's father was a glider pilot in Germany but had to give it up when he got married because her mother said no more gliders or no more me. That's why we have Susi. He took her to glider shows many times and told her about it but she had never experienced it. A day after I decided to go, she asked if she could go up also. She says she doesn't know where she got the courage, but she's very glad she did because it was very awesome. The glider pilot, Burt, ask her if she wanted to do any maneuvers or just fly. She said just fly, please, nice and calm. She doesn't like takeoffs and landing in a regular airplane. I on the other hand asked Burt to do a loop if he would. He said he doesn't fly upside down anymore, but we could do some hard banks if I wanted to. I said why not that's why I'm here. The flight was only 15 minutes or but I'm sure he could have stayed up that much longer. Almost at the end of the flight Burt asked if I was ready for the barrel roll and I said of course. Well, it wasn't exactly a barrel roll, but he put it into a moderate climb and asked if I were ready for a hard bank turn and then we went first left and then we climbed again and did a right turn and a short dive from a near stall and then we went back again for one more hard bank to the right before we came in for a landing. Burt had been in the military but had not flown in the military. He goes to Germany to coach at least twice a year in the spring and fall to fly gliders and to train and certify glider pilots. Yes the controls right in front of me were to use if I were a student but I was not allowed to touch them. No cameras of any kind are allowed because some bozo dropped a phone and it got entangled in their glider controls and must have made for an interesting flight. In the interest of safety Burt banned all recording devices and I can understand it but I didn't like it. Some idiot trying to use a phone instead of a camera with a strap around his neck or around his wrist ruined the experience for everyone. As they say “que sera sera.” It’s 7:41am on April 20th and we're about to walk down to the visitor center to get in line to go down in the cave I will add more about our adventures in the caves later.