Road Trip 2012 {Texas}

At the end of July we took our annual summer road trip and this year's destination was New Mexico.  Road Trip 2012 {New Mexico} isn't the title to this post because it takes a long time to drive across Texas so I thought I'd give our Texas photos their own blog post.  It's possible to drive to New Mexico in one day, and we probably would have if we didn't have small children.  Since we have two little ones we knew the trip would be more enjoyable for everyone if we broke the trip up into two days.  We spent the night in Amarillo, which was a little over half-way there.  We left really early in the morning and got to Amarillo in the afternoon.  We had some time to kill so we went to Cadillac Ranch.  My instagram photos are here.  I've seen photos from lots of friends at Cadillac Ranch, but I'd never been.

Cadillac Ranch is in the middle of a dusty field off of I-40 west of Amarillo.  There are 10 Cadillacs buried in the ground.  We didn't take any spray paint for the cars.  I can only imagine how messy that would have been with Will and Ben!  I had to remind them to not touch the cars because of the wet paint.  They talked about the cars and spray paint for a while.  We didn't stay long because of the smell and the heat.  It was blistering hot!  I was surprised at how crowded it was.

Mark's parents, Jerry and Carol, made the trip with us. 

Ben says, "That's a lot of paint." 

View from the road 

The next morning we were up and ready to hit the road.

We had one more stop before we left Texas.

West of Amarillo just off of I-40 is a the small town of Adrian, Texas.  It's the midpoint of Route 66.  My boys LOVE the Disney Pixar Cars movies so we had to stop here.  There's not a lot to see in Adrian, but it was still a good stop.

Here are Mark's parents with Ben and Will.

I had no idea until we started planning for this trip that in the middle of the Texas Panhandle you'd find the midpoint for Route 66.  Pretty cool!

 Old gas station with so much character. 

We had the boys change into their Cars t-shirts. They thought the old gas pumps were really neat,  I like the turquoise/aqua one the most.

One family photo before we headed to New Mexico

The last photos are from our first day.  Just wanted to throw them in here at the end of the blog post.

I liked see the W on the compass knowing that we were headed west.  So many of our road trips take us east to visit family and friends, which we love--don't get me wrong.  It was a nice change of pace going to the mountains and to cooler weather.

When I grew up traveling with my family we always packed a picnic lunch.  We do that with our boys too.  Texas has some nice rest areas located on US HWY 82. 

They are nice but they come with plenty of warnings signs.  I'm glad that it was too hot to play on the playground.  Quite frankly the snake warning signs scared me to death. 

You don't have to warn me twice to watch for rattlesnakes.  Venomous snakes aren't at the top of my list of favorites.   

My goal is to share more photos of our road trip this week.  I'm glad I've waited a few weeks to post them.  It's been fun reliving our adventure.  Makes me wish we could go back and enjoy it all over again!

Road Trip 2012 theme :)


"Well, the road didn't cut through the land like that interstate. It moved with the land, it rose, it fell, it curved. Cars didn't drive on it to make great time. They drove on it to have a great time."
Sally, Cars