He Said, She Said: Texas- Amarillo & journey to Austin- Day 1

SHE SAID:
I was so excited to go to Amarillo. George Strait is a god in my house. I have been in love with him since I attended my first concert at 6 years old. George has a song about Amarillo that my dad has always loved. To actually go to the city, felt like being part of the song. I was a bit disappointed when we got there to see all the chain restaurants. It felt like being in the middle of an LA suburb. All I wanted was to wear my cowboy boots out to a hole in the wall restaurant/bar that might have a picture of George on the wall and of course the band would be playing his song. If you've ever seen Pure Country, I envisioned the bar shown. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

We did find a bbq joint though. It was called Country Barn BBQ. It was sooooo good. To be honest, I'm not a big bbq girl. Mario & Jim love their ribs. I've always found them too sweet for my taste. Not here though. They were AMAZING. They had this nice peppery crust and just the right amount of sauce. Soooo yummy... Mario and I have started a comparison of California, Texas, and Memphis BBQ- more on that later.

After dinner, we headed back to the motel. It was so good to have a night off. We were able to get some blogging done and just have down time. Driving really takes a lot out of you.
Speaking of driving, my favorite random sighting so far would have to be the signs for school buses. There are literally located in the middle of nowhere. There were no homes anywhere to be seen. So does this mean the kids have to be driven more than 20 miles to then be picked up for school??? Why not just drive the poor kid all the way there???

I'm hoping when we get to Austin, we'll actually be able to spend time with the people. So far it has been a lot of driving and not much interacting. It would have been nice to stop in some of the smaller towns, but when you are driving 8 hours, you don't really want to lose the time. It has been more of a priority to get where we are going. Hopefully that will all change soon.

HE SAID:
Because of the unfortunate event at the hostel in Santa Fe, we decided to take off to Amarillo, Texas. The drive times are starting to get to me. It was an 8 hour drive to Amarillo, to cut down our drive time to Austin to about 8 hours after we leave Amarillo (we were going to try to drive from Santa Fe to Austin in 1 day, ha!)

Amarillo was not quite what I was expecting. It is a very small town that is way too commercialized. It's all hotel and restaurant chains everywhere, with no real Texas bars or restaurants to eat (unless that we encountered). We went to have some BBQ at a restaurant we saw off the freeway and it was amazingly good. It's amazing what a dollar will actually get you outside of L.A. Our whole meal came to $30 and we got enough for dinner and lunch.

Nothing more to say really, since we didn't spend that much time in Amarillo. As Des said, it's funny to see the signs for schoolbuses and schools in the middle of nowhere. Texas has a completely different landscape than Santa Fe, and I was really surprised to find out that there are virtually no mountains in the whole state of Texas (maybe a few hills but nothing worth mentioning), and it's really weird/cool to me that every town has a water tower along with the name of the mascot for the local team.

That's about it for me. Stay tuned, more to come from the city I've been looking foward too this trip, Austin!
Mario

Welcome to Texas- where everything is bigger!