Travelogue: Amarillo, Texas

For the last week of June and first week of July, my family and I decided to do an old-school road trip, something we hadn't done in years. The major destinations: The Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Pacific Northwest. Some were revisits, and some were places we'd never been before. 

Like any road trip though, there are smaller stops along the way. One of our first ones was Amarillo, Texas. 

One thing marked the first leg of our Journey through Southern Missouri and Oklahoma: rain. It pummeled the route we opted to take for miles. It came down in sheets, torrents, drizzles, cascades, and deluges--and not necessarily in that order. A massive storm system apparently was passing over that section of the country  and working its way towards St. Louis, where it would linger nearly the whole time we were gone (lucky us).

However, it did do us one favor: it gave us a view of the roadsides of Texas that most people don't get to see.

Normally, even in the panhandle of Texas, all you see on the sides of the road are wide stretches of dried up grass—just streaks of beige, sandalwood, and sepia as far as the eye could see. Not for us. The second we got into Texas, we started seeing fields of green grass, along with ravines and little canyon cliff-edges. And, of course, plenty of cattle grazing.

As someone who'd never seen much of Texas, even in passing, because I've had little reason to go there (except to the airport in Huston), this struck me as gorgeous. Having grown up in Missouri, I was used to either crop fields, livestock fields on rolling hills, or even vast expanses of forest flanking the highways. So, seeing such a dramatic change in landscape like that was amazing.

Great-Tailed Grackle

We finally stopped at a rest area/tourist information site just outside Amarillo. It was drizzling on and off at this point, so compared to the humid heat we'd left in St. Louis, this was quite pleasant. The area had a few small nature reserves full of native plants from the region and signs indicating native species of birds we might see. 

For the first time, I got to see a great-tailed crackle up-close. Compared to the common grackles you see in St. Louis, these birds were much louder and a lot bigger. Sadly, despite signs indicating that we were now in rattlesnake country, we never saw one in the wild. (That said, it was probably far too cool for them to be active and out in the open.)

Once we finished up there and determined the rest of our route, we decided to stop somewhere for some famous Texas BBQ. It was at the restaurant that we all learned one important fact about Texas.

No matter where we eat, one thing my father always asks for is a bottle of hot sauce. The hotter, the better. Usually, all the kitchen staff has on hand is Tapatio, which for my father's palette is about the same as sprinkling pepper on your eggs in the morning. This is a man who, on multiple occasions has made hot sauce so strong, my mother forced him to make it in the garage with the aid of a hotplate, blender, and extension cords. The smell was so pungent that if you walked into the kitchen while he made it, you'd feel as if you got maced. But, it was better than nothing.

While eating at this BBQ joint, as per usual, Dad asked the waitperson if they had any hot sauce to go with his rack of ribs. She said they did, and she'd bring it right over. In the meantime the rest of us chowed down on our food. Finally, our waitperson returned with, easily, the smallest bottle of hot sauce I've ever seen in my life. I've bought bottles of white-out larger than this bottle. 

It was so small, it almost look like one of those shot-sized bottles of alcohol you can buy right near the cash registers of some grocery stores. 

Once the waitperson was well out of earshot, I looked at the bottle and then looked at my dad and said, "Guess not everything's bigger in Texas, after all."