St. Louis or Bust: Road Trip Day 4 (Are we there yet?, day 4 of 5)

Day 4 (April 29) of this road trip!

We headed out from Tucumcari toward Texas. Bye bye New Mexico!

We had our spray paint ready and stopped by Cadillac Ranch. There’s so many feet of spray paint that you can’t tell what anyone adds but the aspect of legally defacing property is worth the fun stop for some reason.

From there, we headed for lunch at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo. It was big and absurd and ridiculous and a total tourist trap. This is one of the places that is always on the food channel – if you eat the 75oz steak dinner or whatever in under an hour, you get it free. This place screams ‘Merica like it’s perceived on television. This place was full of laughs for us. The hostess had some physical characteristics that I, at first, thought were part of the “country girl” costume until I realized it was legit. Then the woman who came over to take our drink order was VERY much older than anyone I’ve ever seen working. I had to ask her to come back in a few minutes because I was giggling too much. It was all just. So. Much. The food was actually pretty good for a tourist trap.

Also on the way to OKC was one of the stops that I had found on Roadside America, the Groom Cross in Groom, Texas. I was not sure it was worth the stop so we drove by and I saw this huge cross from the side of the road. Immediately, I regretted not stopping so we turned around and headed back. I'm so glad we did. It was beautiful. There was the large cross (which is like 14 stories high or something). BUT there were also life-sized replicas depicting the stations of the cross. Here are a few of them:

The rest of the trip was dedicated to just getting to Oklahoma City. We had planned for dinner at a nice steakhouse until we realized that one of us did not bring proper attire…..so we opted to stop by a diner that was on Man vs. Food – Sid’s Diner in El Reno, OK. It was good, maybe not worth the stop, and it stuck with me for the rest of the night. Blech.

 Finally, a “fancy” hotel!!! Yes for fast wifi! Yes for a huge bed with crisp sheets! Yay for no “66” anywhere! Yay for modern clean showers! Yay for new anything! We stayed at the Aloft.

Can you tell I’m over Route 66 at this point?

We are soooooo close to St. Louis at this point!

Love, Danielle