On the Road to Texas

Extra early start because the hotel alarm clock went off at 6am when we didn’t set it. Bummer. This Days Inn in Albuquerque was not a good one. Very noisy, mostly from the fridge and the bathroom.

We hit the road around 9am and followed the I40 to Santa Rosa, the GPS wanted us to go on to Amarillo and then turn south for Lubbock but this was over 100 miles longer so we looked for the Clovis turnoff. It didn’t seem to come and so we changed the GPS to Clovis and found we had to go back nearly 20 miles to the turnoff. Bummer.

We eventually turned on to 84 and followed that through Fort Sumner where it became the 84/60. We continued on through Clovis which has quite some history in the roots of rock and roll. Soon after we entered Texas and around 4:30pm we arrived in Lubbock. It was just too late to go to the Buddy Holly Center so we went to the Buddy Holly Statue which was interesting and we took some photos, sadly that late afternoon sun caused some problems.

Then it was on to the City of Lubbock Cemetery where we paid our respects at Buddy Holly’s gravesite – we didn’t have a guitar pick to leave behind but we did leave an Aussie 20 cent piece. After the cemetery we were going through a rather bleak neighbourhood where we saw hundreds of what we later found were prairie dogs – they were just on this vacant lot right in the middle of a residential area.

We checked into our hotel around 6pm and after settling in we headed for an Outback Restaurant. We had to wait for an hour for a table – annoying but it was a good meal. Outback is anything but Australian but the Americans love it. Nathan served us and did a great job and we chatted about Buddy Holly for a bit.

A quick visit to Wal-Mart and back to the hotel around 10pm. Chat with Ryan and off to bed.

Tomorrow we will go to the Buddy Holly Center and are tempted to make a quick trip to the statue and gravesite for better photos before we head for Dallas.

By the way, the Wal-Mart truck count is at 33 – I guessed 264 for the entire trip and Rayls guessed 287. Anyone else wanting a guess, let us know, the prize is the honour of winning. The swear word count, which on the last trip was 0, is already at 4 – this is for swear words using the F word or worse. Me going to the passenger side of the car when I intend to drive is at 11 but slowing down and the number of times I use put the windscreen wipers on when I want to use the indicators is at 5.