Panhandle Perambulations: Day 4

On the fourth day of our Panhandle trip, we stayed put in one city and saw more history and beauty than the entire trip in total. We spent the previous night in a hotel in Canyon, praying that the rain that had been unleashed in this part of the panhandle would abate enough so that we could enjoy the Palo Duro Canyon on Thursday. We woke up to heavy skies and cool temperatures, so we decided to start with the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum on the West Texas A&M campus.

The largest museum in Texas in terms of collection, and a landmark in its own right, the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum is worth a trip north all by itself. It's interactive for kids, studious and deep for the history nuts, and has so much in the way of archives that it takes a good half day or more to see it all. I went to this museum a couple of years ago when I had a speaking engagement at the university, and had wanted to go back with Randy ever since. It was even more effecting this time around, with all we had seen so far on the trip. Artifacts from the Battle of Adobe Walls and other Red River War battles are here. So are examples of agricultural ingenuity. The oil boom is front and center, and the museum's signature piece is a real oil derrick from the panhandle.

We left the museum around 1pm, and went out in search of a place to buy tickets to "Texas!," the stage musical that is performed every summer down in the Palo Duro Canyon. Downtown Canyon is lovely and charming - all the bustling liveliness of a college town, and the charm of a historical treasure. The courthouse is undergoing renovations that will include the restoration of the clock tower. We walked into a building to buy our tickets - and that building was clearly an old bank or some other institution of prestige at one point. The floors creaked and the smell of old wood and paint lingered, and you couldn't forget for a moment that you're in a place where ghosts regularly walked.

A quick lunch back at the hotel, changing our clothes to suit the warmer weather (the sun had finally poked through the clouds), and we were off to the canyon. Now, if you aren't already familiar with it, you should know that the Palo Duro Canyon is the second largest canyon in the United States. It's wide and deep, and home to flora and fauna found nowhere else in the Panhandle, thanks to Charles Goodnight's cattle. It's been home to Native Americans and Texans, shelter for Comancheros and outlaws. And every inch is beautiful, something out of a half-remembered dream.

Hiking, unfortunately, was out. One, we didn't really go prepared to hike, and two, the rains had washed out many of the roads and trails. We were quite limited in what we could see and do while down in the canyon, but it proved a great respite anyway. Like Adobe Walls two days earlier, the canyon is the kind of place where you can close your eyes, listen carefully, and feel the history surround you. Or, you can look up, and in the stillness you might hear God speaking.

A few hours later, we were able to go down to where the "Texas!" musical shows, and line up for the dinner buffet. Provided by The Big Texan, this dinner is well worth the price (and just thinking of the freshly-cooked ribeye, mashed potatoes, and peach cobbler makes me hungry all over again!). You eat outside, among the people who are attending the play with you, and it has the feeling of a family reunion. We were then treated to live music from a group called Young Country - and we Austinites do crave live music!

The play? Spectacular. If you have a chance to see, I highly recommend it.

The sky was cloudy, but it didn't rain, and we got back to the hotel kind of late. Satisfied with what we had experienced that day, we had a bit of trouble deciding upon our next course, but as you'll see, the last couple of days on our trip were just as great as the first four.

Mapping our Panhandle Perambulations

Facebook readers, make sure to go to http://texas-traveler.blogspot.com to get the full post! Randy created maps of our route on the Panhandle trip, so you can see for yourself where we went. I've put them here mostly to help me as I back-blog the trip! You'll notice there is no map for Day 4 - we spent that entire day in Canyon, and at Palo Duro, so no map is really necessary.

You'll notice a couple of important things here. One, we never use "main" highways or roads on these kinds of trips. As much as we can, we like back roads! Almost no trucks, and very few fellow travelers, and it's the best way to see the scenery! Two, point A to point B usually includes a few detours for us. Notice on the first map, the loop outside of Lubbock. We had dinner in Lubbock and then traveled out of the city to Slaton, and chased a small storm on our way. It was one of the most pleasantly surprising parts of the trip - and just think, we would have missed it completely if we'd stayed on the main drag in Lubbock!

DAY ONE: Austin to Lubbock

DAY TWO: Lubbock to Perryton

DAY THREE: Perryton to Canyon

DAY FIVE: Canyon to Wichita Falls

DAY SIX: Wichita Falls to Austin

Panhandle Perambulations, Day 3

I know I promised to live-blog the whole trip, but by the evening on Day 3 (Wednesday), we were beat and not up to fighting with motel wireless. Well, that, and the weather took a turn for the worse and kept us kind of busy.

We woke up to a beautifully cool and misty morning in Perryton, which is damn near the top of Texas. We were, no joke, maybe a 45 minute drive from Liberal, Kansas. We were further north than Tulsa, OK! The weather certainly help convince us of all of this. The sky sat heavy on the prairie as we traveled south along the Texas/Oklahoma border. First stop, Lipscomb! There are three towns in Lipscomb County, and the smallest one happens to be the county seat - it doesn't even have a gas station! Usually, when the railroad ended up bypassing a town in the panhandle, the town became a ghost town. Lipscomb managed to survive because the citizens didn't vote to make any other town the county seat. We were definitely charmed - the courthouse was more or less the only place where anything was happening, and we ran across wild turkeys that were ticking off the roosters in someone's yard. The best part of the town:

Of course, it's now a novelty store, and if you want to shop, you have to call the owner and have him come open it up for you.

Next up was Canadian. As we traveled south, the fog lifted and the heavy skies lightened, though the temperature remained low. The wide, flat prairie gave way to rolling hills, as oil country rose up in front of us.

The Canadian river is not named for Canada, but apparently comes from an Indian word meaning "boxed in." The terrain does give that impression, of walls keeping things in. The town is one of the prettiest in the panhandle (for that matter, so is the wilderness surrounding it). We stopped for lunch at the Cattle Exchange, a great steak-and-more place located inside the historic Moody Hotel.

From Canadian, we headed to Shamrock, on old Route 66.

From Shamrock, we went to Wellington, and from there, we hunted down the tiny town of Goodnight, Texas. Three guesses who is buried here, first two don't count.

We took a short drive through the Palo Duro Canyon, with a goal of driving past Happy, where some old friends of ours used to have a ranch. And from there it was a very short shot into Canyon, Texas, home of West Texas A&M University and our base of operations for the next two evenings.

We had dinner with our good friend Cassie and her mom at a restaurant in Canyon - and we finally got caught in one of the torrential downpours that we had been circling around for days!

We crashed late that night, knowing we wouldn't have to be up early to drive in the morning.

More on Days 4, 5, and 6 later!

Panhandle Perambulations, Day 2

We took our time getting up and out of the hotel this morning in Lubbock, because the Buddy Holly Center didn't open until 10 and we wanted to make that our first stop. Let me warn you ahead of time: if you are ever in Lubbock and decide to go to the Buddy Holly Center, beware that while it's amazing to see so much about this American music icon, it's also very sad. We left feeling a bit down. I've always been a Buddy Holly fan, and it was very affecting to think on his life like that.

To continue our perambulations, we headed north out of Lubbock, popped in a newly purchased copy of a Buddy Holly and the Crickets CD, and made a quick stop in Littlefield. This town is really not much to speak of - there is almost no infrastructure working or open - but it does have the distinction of being the hometown of Waylon Jennings. We snapped a picture of the water tower with that boast, and also of the replica of the XIT Ranch Windmill, which was once the tallest wooden windmill in Texas. The replica is made of steel and is, we think, a bit shorter than the real one was. But it was still really cool.

Back in the Buddy Holly Center, there was a quote on the wall from a Bob Wills album's liner notes, which mused that so many minstrels and musicians had emerged from West Texas because they needed to sing out loud and penetrate the vast silence of the region. As we continued our travels here today, that quote stayed with me, and it became very clear as we went on that there is truth in it. Seeing the places that birthed Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore (and so many more) kind of sent a shock of realization. When you're up here, you have dueling reactions. To close your eyes and see if you can hear God speaking, or to tip your head back and sing as loud as you can in praise of Him and in awe of His creation. I don't know if all these musicians viewed what they did as worship. It doesn't matter. They were out to break the silence and shake awake the world.

From Littlefield, we went through Amarillo (to be tackled later in the trip) and up to Lake Meredith and the Alabites Flint Quarry National Monument. The weather service predicted storms so we didn't linger, though we had clear blue skies for several more hours. The quarries were beautiful, seemingly untouched by time or man.

Up we went to Borger and Stinnett. It took us awhile, and two trips over the Canadian River, but we found the Hutchinson County Museum, which was a real treasure. Like with the winery yesterday, we stumbled in not long before closing, and we had to savor as much as we could without getting the full effect. There was a quilt show going on, and some amazing pieces were on display in addition to the usual displays. What was so cool about Borger was the story - an oil boomtown that literally sprung up overnight in 1926, and has a violent history not unlike that of older and more well-known places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone.

Stinnett is the county seat, and the courthouse is a beautiful one, but the city was just a bump in the road on our way out to Adobe Walls.

Storms had begun to seriously encroach on the area, though they remained distant enough that we could watch and enjoy them for their terrible beauty without getting very wet. This was a real blessing, because Adobe Walls was one of our planned destinations for this trip, and it was quite the haul to get there. About 26.7 miles away from Stinnett, 15.6 miles of that are on little county roads, a good portion of which are gravel inside the Turkey Track Ranch. The gentleman at the Hutchinson County Museum acted as though he was quite surprised we would want to make the trek. Sure enough, while we did pass some Virginia visitors on their way out of the area, we were clearly some of the very few visitors to this historic battlefield site. Randy's a big Elmer Kelton fan, so this was special for him, and for me, visiting places like this always makes me feel somewhat haunted. This is sacred ground, in some ways. The Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874 was a showdown between a band of Quanah Parker's men and U.S. Cavalry, a payback for an earlier battle not far from here in 1864 (Kit Carson's "last battle") and a way of acting out over illegal poaching of buffalo south of the Arkansas River. Some of the soldiers are buried here, and there are monuments dedicated to the Native Americans who fought here.

The storm headed south, and we headed north, ending our evening in Perryton, the northernmost county seat in the state of Texas. The next "big" town on the northern route is Liberal, Kansas, on the other side of the Oklahoma panhandle ("No Man's Land"). But we are probably not venturing in that direction tomorrow, opting instead to see more of this glorious Texas soil.

Funny side note. We were flipping around to find a radio station here, to follow weather updates. We thought we'd found one - until the weather news indicated a storm near "Rolla" outside of "Texas County." While there is a Texas County in Oklahoma, there is not a "Rolla." There is, however, this exact layout in central Missouri. We went through it last summer! Somehow, we were picking up a radio station out of Missouri. Last night, we found one that was broadcasting about 30 miles south of Oakland, California. Wacky - esp. as these were FM stations!

Okay, this post is really really long. Time to crawl into bed!

Panhandle Perambulations, Day 1

We left Austin this morning at 8:30, stopping for breakfast in Burnet. That was our only Hill Country stop on this trip - rather unusual, since it's become such a haunt for us - but we were anxious to enjoy points beyond!

The trip took us up Hwy. 71 from Llano to Brady, and in Brady we picked up Hwy 87. From that point onward, civilization was almost non-existant until Big Spring - which is exactly what we wanted! In fact, there was a point where the only living things we saw were mesquite trees and grasshoppers the size of small rodents (no, really - one ended up dead and stuck under the windshield wiper).

We stopped and got pictures at four county courthouses: Irion County, Sterling County, Dawson County, and Lynn County. We also got one here in Lubbock County - but as it was the least interesting, we are choosing not to count it ;-) Okay, that, and Randy already had a picture. We hope to get several more on this trip, knocking out most of the Panhandle and leaving just deep south Texas and deep east Texas for courthouse pics we need.

We made it to the Llano Estacado winery at about 4:25. They were getting ready to close, but sped us through a tasting of six wines in fifteen minutes flat. CRAZY. We got a couple bottle of wine to enjoy this week in the evenings.

After checking into a hotel and getting dinner, we went driving around Lubbock and the immediate surrounding area. This led to the discovery of the Texas Windmill Museum, Ransom Canyon, and a chance to enjoy a spectacular rainstorm that came through the county. What I love most about being up here is the sky - and what a sky it was tonight!

We have limited internet service here, so pictures have to wait. But they'll be coming!

Gearing up for a Panhandle adventure!

Next week, Randy and I are headed out to the Texas Panhandle, for a week's worth of plains, big skies, lots of stars, and very little cell phone reception.

We plan on hitting the Llano Estacado Winery in Lubbock, the Panhandle Plains Museum at West Texas A&M University, at least half a dozen courthouses, the site of the Battle of Adobe Walls, Cadillac Ranch, the "Texas" play at Palo Duro Canyon, and just about anything we find along the way. Our lofty goal is to "liveblog" the trip - that is, download our pictures at each day's end and share bits of the story here at Texas Traveler.

In anticipation of the trip, check out this prickly pear! Randy took this picture probably in 2003 or 2004, near Silver, Texas (Facebook readers, you need to go to http://texas-traveler.blogspot.com to see the picture!):