November 30: Amarillo, Texas, to Shawnee, Oklahoma

There is a LOT of flat rangeland between Amarillo and Oklahoma City. Interestingly there are a couple of places where they are still drilling for oil and nearby are large wind farms. I must have passed 4 or 5 large wind farms, each with 10-50 huge wind turbines. Texas is the leading wind energy state with over 7,000 Mw of installed capacity. Below are photos I took along a small road outside of Sweetwater, Texas. The problem  with my photos is they don't make the size of these towers clear. So I've added a photo I did not take, one from a New York Times article on the same wind farm in Sweetwater. Each tower is twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and the "wingspan" of the blades is greater than that of the largest jumbo jet. Those men are working on the generator to which the blades are attached.

Again today I got off I-40 to take some of the remaining pieces of Route 66, but found each such side trip to be more depressing. These little towns that boomed from the 1920s through the 70s as they sat astride the old road, are now in bad shape. The ranching that had preceded the road is still alive, but the commercial enterprises like motels, restaurants, souvenir shops, and gas stations that had supplemented that economy no longer do so. These photos are from the two small towns of Maclean and Shamrock Texas.

On the bright side, Shamrock's Chamber of Commerce has saved and restored a classic Art Deco Conoco station. It is an architectural gem.

I stopped at the so-called National Highway 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma. It was disappointing, just a collection of old autos and miscellaneous items from the time period. But included in the admission price of $4 was entry to the farm museum on the same grounds. That had some neat stuff. For one thing, I had wondered about the old windmill water pumps and where they had been made. This museum had the answer. It included an outdoor collection of different windmills that had been salvaged from Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma farms. Each was marked with its manufacturer, farm where it had been installed, and years it had been in use. Did you know that some of them were manufactured in Argentina and imported into the US through Mexico?

Inside there was an eclectic mix of old farm equipment, farm tools, and lifesize dioramas. Included was someone's private collection of barbed wire.  This reminded me of the Spur Museum in Gatesville, Texas. There was also a nicely mounted collection of iron tractor seats!  Now what kind of person would have thought of collecting and exhibiting these? In fact, the way they were exhibited was itself a piece of art.

I knew that I would reach Oklahoma City today. To be honest, the only thing I though might be interesting would be to visit the stockyards where cattle are brought from the ranches throughout the state to be auctioned daily. I had read that the stockyards were open to visitors "Monday-Wednesday from 9:00am until the last cow is sold." I arrived about 3:30. Evidently the last cow had been sold. The stockyards were empty with the exception of one cowhand moving a dozen cows into his truck. He was taking them back to his ranch and he wasn't too pleased. He wasn't sure why, but no buyer wanted them. Of the thousands of head that had been auctioned off, mostly to meat packing plants, these few got to go back home