Palo Duro Canyon, Part 1 and Cadillac Ranch Oct 22 - 25

We decided to leave Colorado Springs a day earlier than our reservation as there is a storm coming in Sunday night into Monday that may bring high winds and scattered snow. SNOW! you say, we are outta here!

Saturday morning we hit the road shortly after 9 am and after fueling up got on the I-25 and headed south to connect up with Highway 84 going southeast into New Mexico. It was pretty windy with gusts to 40 mph along the I-25 corridor, the beginnings of the change in weather we are avoiding. We went over the Raton Pass into Raton then a left onto 84. Gorgeous fall colours. The pass is 7800 feet and only the last bit is steeper.

Coming down out of the pass and onto the grasslands the wind came back, but fortunately behind us so not as bad for Ray driving.

Further down Hwy 84 we drove by the Capulin Volcano National Monument. You can apparently drive round and round up to the crater. We did see a car on it's way down.

Our planned stop today is in Clayton, New Mexico, which is only about 10 miles from the Texas border. I'd heard about the "Grand Canyon" of Texas so that is where we are headed.

Palo Duro Canyon is the second largest canyon system in the United States. The canyon is about 120 miles long and 20 miles wide, and is up to 800 feet deep. It extends from Canyon to Silverton.

You can see the beautiful colors of the four geologic layers as you descend 500 feet to the floor of the canyon. The canyon began forming a million years ago. But the walls of the canyon tell a much older geologic story - about 250 million years old!

We pulled into Coyote Keeth's RV Park at 1:30 pm.  Nothing special here, but it's handy and huge pull in sites. $35 for 30 amp and $50 amp. Here is a picture from google.

It's still incredibly windy, almost knocking you over when you opened up the car door. After parking we took the car off and went into town looking for lunch. Not too promising, so we ended up with some Chester's Chicken from the Love's gas station. lol

Back at camp we opted to keep the driver side slides in for a few hours until the wind died down. By 5:30 pm things calmed down to be able to "open up" the rig and put up the satellite dish.  A quiet evening. Tomorrow we push on to Amarillo before the possible showers start tomorrow night. We enjoyed an incredible sunset with the clouds coming in. Looked like a mountain is on fire, except there are no mountains for miles.

Ray wants the rig parked before any rain begins after washing it in Colorado Springs. :)

It was a very windy night. We put the dish down before going to bed too. Fortunately I'm able to open my bedroom window and put a pillow over most of it to keep the breeze down to a dull roar. The temperature did not drop much overnight. There was one power bump, so I did not want to leave anything electric (A/C) on, in case of power failure and toast our new batteries.

Still breezy when we got up at 5:30 am. Lights out at 9 last night so we were more than ready to get up. We hit the road at 8 am to continue on to Amarillo, Texas. Definitely a lot of clouds in the sky today.

Pretty flat driving across the prairie and very windy as you could see all the wind turbines turning. Ray fought a cross wind for most of the way. Good thing it was only a 2.75 hour drive today.

Another time change, going ahead an hour so we did a minimal set up at 12:30 and then headed out to find some lunch. It is supposed to start raining tonight and all of tomorrow so we are prepared to hunker down. Ray walked to the Zip Line course to get a first look at the Canyon from the campsite. Not bad considering it's totally cloudy outside.

Monday morning we woke to rain on the roof, a sound we've not heard for some time. It only lasted for a short while so Ray headed into town to pick up a few things at Walmart for me. He managed to take a slight detour to a little park called Southeast Canyon Park. Ray said the birds were used to being fed as when he got there they all made a beeline for him. lol

By noon the rain arrived and basically poured all day and night and of course the dirt around our coach became very muddy. Good choice to stay inside for the rest of the day.

Tuesday a cold and clear morning at 34F. We were out the door at 8:30 am and headed into Palo Dura State Park just up the road from the RV Park. It definitely is pretty, however I think the advertising saying it is the "Grand Canyon" of Texas  is definitely exaggerated. We enjoyed ourselves anyways.

The park trails are all closed today due to the rain, but we drove the 16 mile park road for views anyways. The red rock is even more brilliant due to being wet.

The big cave.

There apparently is a herd of longhorn cattle here in the park. I thought this part of the valley they would be in but did not see any sign of them.

From Google

The Visitor's Centre has great views of the Canyon.

After stopping at the Visitor Centre on our way out of the park, we decided to head into Amarillo for a bit of shopping and of course a pub lunch. On the way back we stopped at the Cadillac Ranch.

Cadillac Ranch was created in an old cow pasture by an art group from San Francisco known as the Ant Farm artists, made up of Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels. But they had help from millionaire Stanley Marsh 3, an eccentric millionaire and Texas businessman who reveled in rattling the Amarillo population.Jul 7, 2019

You can see from all the water around the cars, how much rain we had in 24 hours. We stopped first at the Cadillac Ranch RV Park to take a picture of this. 

A mile away from the RV Park you can see this in the distance. They let you spray paint them so they change their looks almost hourly. lol

The road next to the field is liberally tagged as well.

On October 19th, a week ago, these guys repainted them all and within hours they were all painted over from tagging. This is on the Cadillac Ranch Facebook page.

Back home at 3 pm to relax for the rest of the afternoon and give Ray time to "play" with his pictures.