Day 12 -- Tucumcari, New Mexico to Dalhart, Texas -- 94 Miles

Rain, rain go away, come again another day. And I'll let you know when. Yes, it rained last night in Tucumcari, New Mexico. It didn't just sprinkle, it rained hard enough to turn our camp on Route 54 into a squishy mess. But hey, we're pretty used to it by now since we've had rain pretty much since day one. You'd think the rain would keep the rig sparking clean, but most of the time it does the opposite. There's so much mud splashed up from the water rolling off the roof, down the sides, and bouncing off the saturated ground that it looks like we've been four-wheeling in a Tennessee backwoods bog most of the time.

We had planned on getting the rig washed this morning, you may remember, but the TV weather girl was predicting intense rain for the Oklahoma panhandle along our intended route of travel, so we passed on having a clean RV. Instead we decided to look for dinosaurs since our camp host told us Tucumcari had a pretty nice museum on the subject. But when we got to the museum it wasn't quite open yet, so off we went in search of the local history museum a couple of blocks away. In that quest we were more successful since the history museum opened an hour earlier.

Concetta and I have visited museums from the California coast to the Southern Carolinas, and from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. So we are usually able to tell in the first five minutes whether a museum's operators know what they're doing or not. The Tucumcari museum turned out to be one of those where a group of citizen docents have volunteered to try and integrate each and every donated item from the local townsfolk into a comprehensive and logical set of displays. The great danger in a policy like that is the docents don't have a mechanism to rotate displays or otherwise reject anything for inclusion. They simply display EVERYTHING! This results in a jumble of items so closely packed that it's very difficult to pick out any one item to study. Some items are museum quality and some are definitely not. Fortunately, the outdoor displays were better, though the farm tool area was also much too crowded with almost no individual tool being labeled.

Still, by the time we reached the Tucumcari museum the sun had broken free of the cloud banks and it felt good to get out in the sunshine and fresh air, at least while we were touring the outdoor exhibits. Once we left the museum I wanted to find the Tucumcari train depot that we had noticed initially as we drove into town yesterday. I found the following web info on the depot:

"Tucumcari is a town created by the presence of the railroad, with the founding in 1901 solely the result of railroad activity in the area. In that year, a connection was completed between the Southern Pacific at El Paso and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific at Liberal, Kan. This put Tucumcari on a major transcontinental line.

In 1926, a new depot building was constructed in Tucumcari and the depot became the symbol of the railroad as the economic driver of the community. This building was a source of great civic pride, and every resident could connect their life in some way to the railroad. Train watching was a popular pastime and many residents today recall with fondness the hours spent watching the activity in the rail yard.

In 2002, the Union Pacific gave the depot to the City of Tucumcari. In the years that have since passed, the City, in partnership with Tucumcari MainStreet Corp., has invested $1.8 million in restoration of the building, and plans are being made to use the venerable structure to house a railroad museum.

As New Mexico prepared to celebrate 100 years of statehood, Union Pacific brought the steam locomotive No. 844 to the state, and Tucumcari planned a festival event to coincide with the train's arrival. More than 200 citizens took advantage of the opportunity to ride the train."

Shooting the restored mission-style depot this morning was pure joy! The sky was so blue and the clouds so white and fluffy in the background, that the cream-colored depot walls just "popped" in the foreground. The only thing that perhaps takes away from the depot experience is the sad state of repair in which most of the surrounding buildings can be found. Of course the buildings are largely commercial and probably never received very good care. But in order to make the expenditure of $1.8 million on the depot pay off the town certainly will have an uphill battle in refurbishing the surrounding neighborhood so as to provide a quality environment for tourists to visit.

It wasn't until around 11:00 a.m. that we began to think about leaving town. We had decided to take Route 54 that leaves the historic Route 66 near the east edge of town and trends in a northeastern direction toward the tiniest northwest corner of Texas and the tip of the Oklahoma Panhandle. Since much of Texas is being pummeled by torrential rain, my hope was that staying well to the north and west of the rain clouds we might just stay dry today. So, we set off along Route 66 to find a gas station. After many minutes, and pulling a u-turn in the middle of a four-lane highway on the west side of town, we finally found one to the south of Tucumcari near Interstate 40. If you want gasoline on Route 66 you are just wasting your time. Even though we must have driven by at least two dozen former gas stations from one end of town to the other, we saw only one place dispensing gasoline. And that one, which came in concert with a mini-mart, could not have accommodated a 31 foot RV.

I remember when the American public demanded four different gasoline stations on each intersection in any given town. Union 76, Shell, Texaco, Flying A, Chevron, Atlantic, and many more vied for our attention on any given corner. And that most delightful of American inventions, the "Gas War," made comparison shopping for gasoline a must. And if one company irritated you for some reason, you could just cut them out of your life without any repercussions at all.

Back in 1973 I took a class at the University of California Santa Barbara on the Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969. The whole class was designed to study that one event. The class even got to don hard hats and take a boat out to a real drilling rig in the channel to see the process up close and personal.

The company that spilled the oil in the channel was Union 76. So it was that never again did I purchase a gallon of gas from Union 76.

Well, Tucumcari must have had every conceivable brand of gas being sold on main street at one time. Now each and every station is something else. Mechanics shops proliferate in the old derelict stations. Antique shops, flower shops, and fast food joints abound. Some stations even appear to be someone's personal junk collection site or ersatz residence. Sadly, many more are just abandoned, probably because they have pollution issues with the underground tanks and no one dare purchase the property.

Once we did manage to score some gasoline for the rig we found our way to Route 54 and headed for Texas. I had expected that on the rural, two-lane Route 54 we wouldn't see any 18-wheelers, but in that we were disappointed. The route, though decidedly rural, must be the commercial route of choice for the big boys as most of the day they tended to pile up behind us as we tooled along at our usual 60mph. Of course, the speed limit was only 55mph part of the time and they still wanted to pass us. The rest of the time it was 65mph and they were often desperate to get by. Meanwhile whole "convoys" of the heavy-haulers boomed by us going toward Tucumcari.

The most incredible thing we saw today on Route 54 were cows. Yes, cows! But these cows are not peacefully grazing the tall grass as we've seen them in all the rural areas from Nevada on. No, these cows were in V-A-S-T white-fenced enclosures that stretched to the far horizon on both sides of the highway. We rolled past them for several minutes before I decided that I just had to stop and at least try and capture the enormity of our future dinners on the hoof. Once out of the truck I decided I just couldn't do any justice to the tens of thousands of accumulated beef, so I climbed on the RV roof and shot from there.

We encountered no more excitement after that photo op and before long we had reached the Texas town of Dalhart. Though it was early in the day and we had lost yet another time-zone hour, we determined that there were no more RV camps in reasonable driving distance, so Dalhart became our afternoon destination of choice. Once we had set up the rig we found that it was still early enough to work on our daily 10,000 steps so off we went for a walk. At some point we voted for circling the block, not realizing exactly what that entailed, and it was not before we had accumulated three miles that we once again found ourselves at the park entrance. For some reason we still only got 9,300 steps, but it felt like twice that, let me tell you.

Once back in the RV, Concetta began work on dinner while I set about penning this account. Outside, the sunlight was afternoon-soft and inviting, the sight of which made us happy that we had indeed dodged a bullet. NO rain had fallen on us since last night. Then, suddenly, the sunlight was extinguished like someone had flipped a switch somewhere and almost immediately we heard rumbling off in the distance. Then, in the time it took for Concetta and I to exchange glances, it began to pour. It rained so hard that we couldn't see out the windows for several minutes. This went on for perhaps half and hour, and then, miraculously, the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. We joked about the motor home that pulled up next to us just at that moment because before the owner could get out and begin to set up his rig the rain had stopped and the sunlight returned as if it returned just for him.

So, tomorrow we have another museum to visit, this one on the famous (if you're a cow person) XIT ranch which, as the web puts it, "...was the largest range in the world in the 1880s under fence and it all laid in the Texas Panhandle. Its three million acres sprawled from Lubbock, Texas, northward to the Oklahoma Panhandle, in an irregular strip that was roughly 30 miles wide." This museum should be something pretty new for us as neither Concetta nor I have ever paid much attention to cattle ranching. So perhaps we'll learn something totally new. Stay tuned tomorrow to see what that might be. Until then, we wish you Happy Traveling!