2014XC: Day 30, July 11 – Albuquerque, New Mexico to Amarillo, Texas
Enjoyed the rest of the drive through New Mexico and into the Texas panhandle. Hot outside but not like Nevada-hot. Pretty flat land but still interesting to look at. I think I like New Mexico, from what we saw as we drove through and wherever we stopped. The hills and plateus were pretty, and they were sprinkled with old and new “pueblo”-type houses.
Pretty much all of the trip in the truck, we let Morgan and Tyler have the middle bench seat and Gabriel and Christian the back seats since the middle seats have more leg room. We switched for a little while. Yes, Gabriel and Christian were loving it and Tyler was sulking, but no, Gabriel doesn’t suck his thumb, he was just being silly.
We arrived in Texas…
Steve had been promising all of us an awesome steak dinner in Texas pretty much since the beginning of the trip. We were psyched, and we found a campground just around the block from the steakhouse Steve had been promising our dinners at, “Big Texas Ranch Steak”. The kids hit the pool and we all got showers and were off to get our dinner.
Boy, this place is something else… it’s just like you expect in Texas – BIG. Big, oversized things perfect for picture-taking tourists like us while we waited to be seated..
Things you hope to see when you are in Texas like caddy’s with steer-horns on the hood (this was actually the shuttle service you could take from the campground to the restaurant!)…
They also had their own hotel right across the parking lot from the restaurant, a “pet walk” area with a 2-person swing, and a pool in the shape of…yup, you guessed it – Texas!
We didn’t mind the wait too much – we checked out the gift shop and saw the live rattlesnake, and we let the kids do a little shooting at the gallery…
Dinner was pretty awesome. They run a contest there all the time – if you can eat their 72-ounce steak in 60 minutes, it’s free. I think someone did it while we were there – they have a special table with some digital time clocks above it, and we heard a lot of cheering at one point, but we were eating dinner in the upstairs dining area so we couldn’t see it. We did have two musicians upstairs though – two fiddle players that went to random tables, playing something that sounded old western. And Christian couldn’t do the 72 ounce, he LOVES steak and was able to eat all of his 4 oz. and left a clean plate!
We had a great time, and we left there with cowboy hats on and really full tummies! 🙂