Santa Fe where art rules and cuisine doesn't

We’ve arrived in Santa Fe in early autumn. The town is a-glow with golden cottonwood trees simply blazing in their coats of yellow leaves.

Santa Fe is a softness of New Mexican adobe architecture with its pleasing ochre colours and rounded contours. It is a low-rise town, nothing taller than our elegant old 5-storey

Eldorado hotel. From our rustic adobe balcony we look across a sprawl of settlement, Spanish-style churches and trees to a blue horizon of low mountains which surround Santa Fe. It’s a big sky westwards view which delivers a glorious spread of sunset colours.

Pity the hotel's Internet service is abysmal. It is really a disgrace in

2016. When I call to ask if perhaps there is a problem, the desk says their techs don’t come in to work until about midday. Huh?

This is not the first time blogging and communications generally have been hamstrung by hotels with inadequate wireless but this is absolutely the worst. Dialup would be more effective.There will be no blog posting from here.

We’ve paused for a few days here because Bruce thought it might be nice. It is. If you like to be surrounded, nay, drenched in art.

Er, yes, please.

For starters, the whole darling town is a jewellery shop.

Truly.

It is one after another after another Native American jewellery store, windows alive with the brilliant blues of turquoise and shimmers of silver.

There are so many of them, not just stretched along the main San Francisco Street shopping drag but down arcades, along the plaza

cloisters where Native American craftspeople sit on stools with their creations spread out on mats in front of them. There are really classy fashion stores, too. Very expensive designer and leather fashions. Hand-tooled and lavishly decorated fashion cowboy boots. Oh, they are spectacular, some of them with calf-high fine leather etched out like lace, some with vivid with dense Dia de los Muertos-style designs. I covet them. But, of course, I slink into the stores with folksy Santa Fe style, which emphasise a fusion between Native American and upmarket gypsy. This is the local look and one spots lots of handsome Santa Fe matrons with long grey

hair, long flowing skirts, and and a mass of stunning jewellery.

Since the nights are getting cool up here 7200ft, I tiptoe into Santa Fe chic.

I’ve been imagining the turquoise on sale in Santa Fe taken out of the silver settings and piled up. There must be a mountain of it out there - some in strands, some in fancy belts and huge rings, brooches, earrings, pendants, inlays, and carvings.

The intensity of artistry.

If it’s not jewellery shops, it’s galleries. Streets of galleries. An entire gallery district. And these are not showing banal or amateurish artists. Many of them, very many of them are breathtaking.

It is arty heaven.

Even Bruce, for whom there is a cut-off point for art indulgence, finds himself arrested and impressed and even agog at some of the brilliance, originality and technical finesse of some of the art we are

encountering.

Canyon Road is in suburban Santa Fe.

It is a colony of galleries stretched the length of a winding adobe-lined road. It is not a broad road and the pavements

are dodgy. The galleries are cheek to jowl.

One might think it is wildly competitive but the art is so diverse. There is no comparison.

Oh, if I had a spare $30,000, I’d be walking away with one of John Taraheeff’s works in the Nuart Gallery. His precise, sharp-edged super-realist figurative acrylic technique depicts strange and wondrous

surreal images of human and animals in strange, often pensive scenes.

We are both profoundly attracted to his work and delight in his show, and also the gallery which goes from room to round-edged room in an old adobe house, complete with kitchen-in-use.

Across the road I meet Joy Campbell, an Altered Books artist who deconstructs surplus books and with immense patience and hours of precision cutting and folding, creates sculptural whorls and whirls and wheels which she layers and tiers either vertically or horizontally. Incredible.

Also in the same two-storey gallery with her work is the teabag artist, Ann Laser, whole sheets of design made by used tea-bag skins and other ingenious lightly decorative works made from the tags and end cuts of tea bags.

Out there along Canyon Road are massive stone sculptures, goldsmiths, landscapists and bold contemporary artists showing works.

One reels from gallery to gallery until one succumbs to overload.

Oh, didn’t I mention Georgia O’Keeffe?

Of course we visit her gallery. It is conveniently behind the hotel.

We watch the documentary on her life

and particularly her life in New Mexico and it immediately breathes fresh air into her art, particularly that which reflects the things we are seeing around us. She captures the beauty of the cottonwood trees beautifully. It is a sleek gallery covering her work from around 1916 until her death in 1986. it includes photos of her life in New Mexico, outings with packs of friends, and work in her precious garden. Interestingly, there is a live webcam depicting that garden today. They are trying to recreate it as she had it. One can see the gardener working on and cars driving past the property.

While the arts are the strength of Santa Fe, food and hospitality is a weakness. Starving artists, perhaps, stunt the delicious excesses of the foodie revolution. It has not come here.

I don’t know where or when we have had worse food.

Oddly, the lousy food has been presented in a charm of good nature,

generosity, and best intentions.

Our hotel is very grand. It has a swimming pool on the roof, a lovely pool surrounded by adobe walling and, like our little balcony, presenting a wonderful view of the town. Vents from the kitchen send foody aromas up there, too, and one can have light meals poolside. We do. Salad and fruit in the sun.

Downstairs is a swish restaurant with very formal wait staff. It has a good wine list and a snazzy Agave Bar. But the food, rather on the expensive side, is rather on the drab side.

We have been keen to try good Mexican fusion here but epic fail is the phrase which now comes to mind. We do our research on Yelp and Google and chose The Casa Chimayo restaurant. We visit and check out its menu. So, we phone to book. They said yes, come on down. We come on down and and are very rudely told they are busy and we will have to wait for a table. Whaat?

Hunting along the main street, we find a friendly Mexican place for brunch.

The service is a bit scatty and there is a massive Mexican family in with kids ordering everything on the menu but we are hopeful of its huevos rancheros. My massive plate of food is a sort of melty-cheese slodge. The over-easy eggs are almost raw sunnyside when I dig them out. There is a tortilla underneath. The green salsa is lovely and the black beans are beaut. I try to avoid the raw egg but it has turned into a slush with the tortilla. Oh well, I have my Vegemite with me and a nice piece of toast. Aaah.

We find a half decent quesadilla at a little lunch cafe. I am not sure I would count this as cuisine. It was nice enough but needed chili.

We discover Dinner For Two, a charming little restaurant we discover by chance.

We have no reservation but are welcomed in and discover that we have found the in place for the Santa Fe establishment. And, unlike us, they are all very well dressed. We feel a bit self-conscious but are settled at a nice table in a long, thin alcove area and quickly served margaritas in fancy glasses. A classical guitarist is performing. It is charming. The menu surprises us with a $19.99 special three-course dinner menu. Wow. Soup - French onion for Bruce and truffle mushroom for me. The soups are lovely albeit mine is very rich and creamy. The bread is stunning. My main is one of my favourite dishes, veal piccate, so I am a bit surprised to find this should-be lemony, caper, zesty dish is very smooth and mild with a cream sauce. Despite lots of baby capers, it is bland. I squeeze the lime from my margarita over it, and it helps. Bruce has a mad bean compote dish, a solid vegetarian dinner. I am over-creamed by dessert time so I choose the prickly pear sorbet which is very sweet. Bruce has an espresso icecream which makes him swoon. Dinner For Two is a family restaurant with a baker dad and chef son, I gather. It is really lovely and I felt so sad that I could not rave about it.

Monday night in Santa Fe is a pretty much a complete zero. It is chef’s night off and a lot of places are closed, so the few places that are open are full and there are waiting times. We walk the town trying one after another and decide to come back to our own hotel only to find that the restaurant is closed. This is a big hotel. But it does have room service and food at the bar. Flustered guests are the ones who tell us this. They are leaving and looking for other places. Luckily, the concierge, Alda, is still on duty and she offers to find us a place to eat. She books us in to Terra Cotta just down the road and shows us the way.

Terra Cotta is charming.

It is a wine bar restaurant and it has the most astounding wine list. We are welcomed and given a lovely table, iced water and good wine. It, too, has a $20 three-course dinner menu. We choose salad for a starter. I choose paprika chicken with ribbon noodles and veg for a main and Bruce chooses panko dusted pork schnitzel on red cabbage. His dish is better than mine. My chicken is tough, gnarly, overcooked and on some sort of mess of pasta and al dente vegetables, adorned with a scatter of parsley and a trail of pink paprika sauce. It is as flavourless as it was ugly. Bruce shares some of his pork. Dessert. His pecan pie with salted caramel ice cream was nice. My frangiapani pear cake is dry and stodgy. So it is a low cal night for me.

The Santa Fe diet by default.

Next day we find the Plaza Cafe on the square. It is crowded with what looks like locals. It is staffed by Mexicans. The menu is Mexican. I plump for cashew mole chicken, pronounced Mollay. Winner. At last. A deep chocolately spicy sauce over beans, rice and shredded chicken. Oh yes. And it comes with sopapillas which are like

puffy fried dough. Have them plain with the mole and then squeeze them sweet with honey, which is there in a large bottle on the table, and one has dessert. Just like that. No extra charge. It is a bit of a breakthrough moment for me. I resolve to cook mole dishes in Australia.

The town is very quiet. By night it is just stray tourists wandering and wondering. A busking jazzgroup is playing in the town square when we wander up. Few cars. Nah, it is a sleepy homebody town by night.

And, it eventuates, it is preparing to go into hibernation. On November 1 every year, it pretty much shuts up shop until Thanksgiving.

The high altitude town which uses chillies as its symbol, is about to get cold.

We have just made it.

Route 66 and all that.

Amarillo, Texas. It’s a musical name and Neil Sedaka’s old Amarillo song swirls through the mind, an agreeable brain worm.

Amarillo is a pit stop for us on the way to Santa Fe.

We don’t do massive drives. That is not what a road trip is about. It is

not a race. It is an adventure. We drive one day in three. We visit and explore for two days out of three. So here we are in Amarillo, very comfortable indeed in an airy big room at the Residence Inn by Marriott, looking out across the highway to a pleasant park. The hotel has an excellent pool, good breakfasts, good Internet, and good laundry facilities.

It is here I can do laundry, write, swim, and rationalise the luggage. Bruce can wipe the white lines from his eyes by reading the NY TImes and the Economist. We can take the olive green Rogue to the carwash. We can shop for sundries, post things home, and cook for ourselves.

We use the business centre for some tax documents. We shop so Bruce can cook our favourite spag bol with the green vegetable pasta I hope has become available in Australia.

There’s a tortilleria in the big Amigo supermarket - a big kitchen area where women in hygiene caps are rolling, spreading, kneading and packing tortillas hot from the oven. One of the cooks sees me watching and starts calling out something in Spanish. Me? Are you talking to me? It takes a while to get the message. She’s calling me over to sample a hot tortilla. She provides honey to put on it. Oh, my. Oh, my. This is heaven. Mexican food. Mmm.

On our first night we go to a local steak house. I want to eat a really good Texas steak in Texas. This we do in the family-owned Hoffbrau Steak House - and it is a fine steak. But the most interesting element of the evening emerges in the form of our fleet-footed and cheerful waiter. He gives his name as Sway. Truly? How do I spell it, I ask. Sway sways.

When I inquire as to his background, he says he has an interesting surname, too. It is High, His name is Sway High. True story. Ironically, he has no great interest in music.

And that is what we do in Amarillo.

We’d been warned of the smell of the stockyards in Amarillo but don’t get a whiff until we are packing the car and then it is just a faint pong on the wind.

So off we drive, down Helium Road and out along what is fondly remembered and celebrated as Route 66 and into the flat, flat landscape.

And there is none other than a Firearms Superstore. It is massive. How many guns must be in there? Thousands upon thousands. Shudder.

And here comes a vast expanse of mini storage sheds. The phenomenon of mini storage, the incredible scale of it right across the USA, long has had me intrigued. It is the ultimate symptom of the consumer society, the shopper with nowhere to put everything and an inability to part with things. Excess of material objects. The grand national overflow. Outsourcing the clutter. It is not cheap to maintain mini storage so people are paying to keep the things they don’t need.

Here on the plains out of Amarillo is one of the world’s glorious follies of surplus - the buried Cadillacs.

Our there in a clearing in the sea of sorghum crops is a line of Cadillacs sticking up out of the ground.

Over the years, the graffiti artists have gone to town on them decorating them in their own styles and strident colours. But taggers like tagging art. Talentless little creeps that taggers are.

Now they are the power of the Cadillac art, layering the cars with coat after coat. They were at it when we drove up. Lots of them with their spray cans hissing frothy colours over the top of the last colours.

The car metal is quite fat with the layers of paint. Spray cans lie all over the place. Lazy, messy taggers. But the cars look fabulous. I’ll give them that. They have emerged as a lasting and gloriously eccentric piece of interactive public art.

Some of the painters have added their touches to the sorghum crops

around the cars, so one comes upon very happy-looking painted plants into the bargain.

It’s quite a sight.

Back on the road,we hum along the plain which is as flat as a flat plain can be.

We see huge silos, cotton crops, sorghum crops, wind farms, cattle.

Oh, here’s another of those endless wind turbine forests stretching to the horizon on a treeless plain.

Ugh. What’s that smell? Oh, gawd, it is bad.

It’s the stockyards of which we have been warned. The poor doomed cattle are hanging around in a mass of huge pens eating grain and hay and, er, shitting. It’s the stench of shit and fear. Bad smells don’t get more putrid. It is nauseating. Long after we’ve passed the stockyards, the ghastly odour lingers in the car and clings to the nostril. I bring out the boronia oil.

Meanwhile cotton crops are rushing by, and a little town called Vega which is still on Historic Route 66. But Historic Route 66 is a small, old road. Route 40 has replaced it

and it bypasses little towns like Vega.

The original Route 66 runs alongside interstate Route 40. Sometimes it us under Route 40. Often it is commemorated with signposts. It is one of the great legends of mobile USA, the wonderful route which went right across the land and was sometimes known as The Mother Road. We all remember the TV show and the song: Get your kicks on Route 66.

Bruce remembers travelling it a number of times in the family car as a boy as the family moved across country to different military bases where his Colonel father was posted. He tells of five-day 2500-mile trips, bickering in the back seat with his sister, crammed in the car complete with family cats, goldfish, and turtles.

The wide open spaces continue. We’re actually on a Rocky

Mountain plateau, part of a great geological uplift which created the Grand Canyon, says Bruce.

The windmills go on and on. At

some perspectives, they align in a row, their combined blades looking like dandelion heads. We study the various aspect of them. We have plenty of opportunity. They are the landscape for very many miles.

They go right into the town of Adrian. Turning, turning, turning.

Cattle share the prairie with the turbines.

So do lines of huge power pylons, standing in the landscape like exuberant ladies, arms outstretched with their electric bounty. Finally, the landscape changes to low mesas and open valleys. The real look of the old American west, says Bruce.

Now we are seeing buttes and mesquite bushes on the plains. Old fashioned windmills are out in landscape. It’s dry, not unlike Australian countryside.

Mesas are neatly edged on the skyline like stair steps. There’s an isolated farm in the distance. Jaris Ranch says a sign hanging over a gateway. Big property.

We hit the Deaf Smith County Line. Odd name.

There’s Route 66, Exit 0.

Hah, it is the New Mexico border.

I was last in New Mexico when I was 14, says Bruce wistfully.

Cattle on the landscape. Some of them lounging around beside an old-fashioned farm windmill. But there’s another wind farm on the horizon. More giant turbines. A range of hills over there.

Bruce reflects that many of the atomic bomb scientists would have come this way en route to their secret laboratories at Los Alamos.

The first big hoarding turns up. So far the road has been OK but not great.

The traffic has been more trucks and caravans than cars. Now it seems to be lots of trucks. One carries Idaho potatoes. One carries logistics supplies. We assume they may be computer things. Many of the trucks are white or silver and unmarked. We start imaging their contents. Furniture. Lingerie. Kitchen sinks. Potato crisps. We pass one with no mystery cargo. It is loaded with Mercedes cars.

There are mesas to the left of us, buttes to the right. It is dry. The landscape is sprinkled with mesquite.

The road dips into a valley with a bridge. There’s a thin line of water underneath. Vultures wheel overhead.

Pinto ponies are out there on the landscape, grazing on the saltbush-like ground cover. There’s a small ranch. Now farmland.

Sorghum Crops. Cotton fields.

Our petrol is low. Only 34 miles of range left, according to the Rogue’s mileage calculator.

Ack.

Suddenly there seems no sign of urbanisation. But Bruce knows Tucumcari is near.

Cattle, horses…

Finally a sign for Tucumcari brags it has 24 restaurants. It must also have petrol.

In we go. It’s a sad little town. Scruffy. Lots of portable homes. Empty ruins of an old motel.

It is one of the casualties of old Route 66. Even the old out-of-town service station is a ruin. Clearly petrol and Tucumcari’s life is back on the new highway. We swing back on the new road and find a very grand and fancy petrol station. It has swaggering men in cowboy boots and hats. Hell, they are actually cowboys. One of them tips his hat and calls me young lady. I am in love. The cowboy looks like Brad Pitt in the film Thelma and Louise.

The McDonalds seems the only option for lunch. We grab a quick coffee and a Southwest salad. It is as good as it always is.

But, look, in joyful incongruity, there's a new motel with a Statue of Liberty holding aloft a triumphant Route 66 sign. Hope lives in Tucumcari.

Back on the road among the trucks and trucks and trucks - with red-sided mesas out the window.

We’re eating up road in the great American west, says Bruce. Indeed we are.

A little town called Newkirk is tucked between two mesas.

Dry creek bed. Bruce says they are called arroyos.

Mesas with cascades of shale.

Grief, cyclists way out here.

Black cattle dotted on the landscape.

Rusty junkyard. Dead cars. What an odd place to put them.

We’re picking up Santa Rosa radio. It is half in Spanish. It plays us Mexican music. Seems apt.

Over a hill, Santa Rosa glints into sight. It seems to be a sedate desert town, sprawled around a lake and the Pecos River. More houses out of town. Proud structures in a rocky landscape.

Rows of wooden telegraph poles look like crucifixes.

And we’re back in the flatlands.

Livestock. Wind farm on the horizon.

Vast saltbush-like landscape. Desert junipers. Mesas appearing in the distance.

A failed Phillips 66 petrol station, wan and derelict and, oh, here come more hoardings. A barrage of them.

Mexican imports, toys, beautiful crosses, snake stuff, Mother Road souvenirs, guy stuff, girl stuff… They are all for the same business - Cline’s Corner. It’s coffee has been worth stopping for since 1934, says one.

This is now Villanova State Park. Cattle on the landscape. Blue ranges on the horizon suddenly seem close.

We can see the old Route 66 running right beside us. It is a small road compared to the Route 40 it became.

It would never have borne the heart-stopping truck jockeying we are now experiencing. These big blokes who are on the road for a living can get grumpy and impatient. Who knows what set them off but these drivers seem to be in a dangerous competition. Their manoeuvres at high speed are just hair-raising. We grit our teeth and go for it when we find a moment to overtake them. Phew.

Here comes the famous Cline’s Corner of all the hoardings. It is a bit underwhelming after all the advertising.

We don’t check it out. We take the north 285 turnoff to Santa Fe, which brings us on to a two-lane highway just like the old Route 66 and straight away we’re stuck behind a grey nomad’s huge caravan. It’s the only other car on the road but there's no passing on this narrow, windy, undulating road.

Oh, well.

Dry pastures are all around us. Cattle. A red lake. Ruins. We chug along patiently for miles. Then, with a roar of her powerful engine, the Rogue overtakes and we have the road and the view ahead to ourselves.

Blue hills, red mesas and the emergence of strands of gorgeous golden trees.

They’re cottonwoods in early autumn colours. To think we saw cottonwoods in their bright spring greens in Wyoming. Now, months later as our trip brings us in a circle around the country, we see them in another hue. It reminds us that we

are on the homeward-bound leg.

The time, like the olive green Rogue, has gone fast. Sometimes we have felt that there is no other life than this transit world on the road, from place to place and hotel to hotel. The contrasts, the beauty, the fun, the oddities, the glory of landscape, the roads, the roads, the roads.

Now we are seeing handsome adobe houses tucked in the landscape. More and more. These are lovely. The ochre hues, the rounded forms, the integrity with the rocky environment. The sense of space.

This is another world. It’s called El Dorado.

We turn south on 25 and there is more adobe, more adobe, commerce and our destination.

Santa Fe. We have arrived.

This is the way to Amarillo

You won’t find Heavy Traffic Way on a conventional map, but it is the road on which Siri Google instructs us to drive as we exit Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Heavy Traffic Way is, of course, a recommendation for trucks and overflow and it indicates a sort of service road parallel to the highway.

Post rush hour, the Tulsa roads are fairly quiet so far as traffic is concerned on this cool Thursday morning. But for wheels, they’re noisy. We rattle forth past mini storage facilities, lawyer’s advertisements, casino signs and the usual run of commerce and out into the countryside.

Oh, look, oil wells. Three in one field. Aren’t they little things.

Vultures are circling in the sky. We’re passing low woodlands and pastures now. The trees have assumed the soft hues of autumn - luscious limes, soft glows of orange and beams of yellow. It is just lovely.

The traffic is pretty solid in both directions, moving with the determination of the long-haul traveller. Trucks and grey nomad caravans. Serene cattle graze in the fields, oblivious to the steady rumble of passing humans.

Oh, another oil well chugging up and down. This one painted bright orange and black. They don’t want us to miss it.

The other sort of drilling is out there, too. Water wells. And wooden telegraph poles stretch out over the landscape. It is really quite busy out there.

Uh-oh. Here comes a toll booth. $4 please. Beside the tool booth a huge sign bids us to Remember Our Troops.

We are entering the Sac and Fox Indian Reservation.

Another sign: What is Killing Our Soldiers?

Skimming along the highway now, past exits to Stroud and Drumright.

And signs announcing the Infant Jesus of Prague National Shrine.

Prague. Next right.

What? My head spins. My mother adored the Infant Jesus of Prague and I have her treasured, time-battered statue. What on earth is the connection with Oklahoma?

I summon Professor Google and discover that Prague is a place is Oklahoma. Since 1949 it has had a shrine to the Infant Jesus of Prague. A Carmelite sanctuary where special services are held and people come to pray in peace. It has a fantastic gift shop, says Google.

I’d love to go and investigate but we are already way down the road and Bruce does not share my sentiments.

He is more interested in the sudden change in vegetation.

The landscape has become drier, the vegetation twiggier.

There goes Walkingstick Ranch. Wonderful name. It is a registered breeder of Angus Bulls.

A huge, huge, huge sign. Gross, really. It advertises Kickapoo Casino coming up at Exit 158. Oh, the irony of the next sign: Don’t Trash Oklahoma. Yeah, with big casino signs.

The landscape continues quite bucolic. Grazing cattle. Fields dotted with hay bales. Oh, and a dairy factory.

We are now entering Kickapoo Nation.

We scoot under a large overpass which is strikingly, nay, beautifully and very surprisingly adorned with colourful Native American motifs.

Lowland lakes and green pastures whiz past beside us. Another oil well out there pumping away - and a sign saying God Bless America.

We overtake a husband and wife moving-house convoy. Two big rental trucks, one towing a sports car loaded to the brim with what obviously couldn’t fit in the trucks. We wonder where they are coming from, where they are going and why. People do a lot of moving in this vast and varied country. Labor mobility has always been one of America’s strengths.

Another change in the landscape. Shrublands.

It is a low, lovely mixed forest of pinion pines, junipers, ponderosa pines, elms, cedars… The colours and textures of the different trees is very pleasing. The hints of autumn colours soft and pretty.

Exits point to Wichita and Oklahoma city. We go straight on, suddenly amid overpasses in all directions. Phew. Daunting. Busy.

And another toll station. Exact Change! $1.15 this one.

Refreshment signs prompt us to turn off for a caffeine and loo break.

We’re in the outskirt burbs of Oklahoma City.

A beautiful big Barnes & Noble beckons.

Ooh, it is all scented with pumpkin spice. We order what they called Doppio Macchiatos, Starbucks answer to macchiato. The children’s book section is en route to the nice clean loo.

It is so vivid and busy and inviting. As for the loo, America is brilliant for high standard rest rooms, so very many of them equipped with seat covers. Yes, paper covers for reassuring hygiene. I love it. I wish to hell Australia could pick up on it. I wish Australia was more civilized about loos generally.

Back on Route 40, which is still much recalled and celebrated as Route 66, we pass more dormitory suburbs of Oklahoma city, expanses of grey rooftops, fields, oil wells, scruffy crops.

Exits to Yukon and Bethany.

More grey rooftops.

Speed limit: maximim 70 mph. minimum 50 mph.

The biggest mini storage facility ever. Mega mini. Racks of storage units large and small. Even ones for RVs.

Oklahoma City lies ahead. It is a flat, broad city.

We don’t go in. We swing off on a wide, rough highway to Amarillo.

Amarillo is our destination for tonight. I sing the Neil Sedaka song Is This The Way to Amarillo. Bruce does not know it. I am a dreadful singer. He still does not know it.

There’s a sparkling strip of accommodation and food. The usual suspects.

A sign says Yukon.

A wooden fort structure looking like something from a rustic theme park advertises it self as The Dental Depot - Get Braces Here Saturday.

We’re in Cheyenne and Arapaho country now. These two tribes are unified. Much of Oklahoma is Indian-owned, explains Bruce.

The landscape now is flattening out - way, way, way out.

This is the wide open plains. And it is not oil wells we are seeing. It is wind farms. Vast wind farms.

There are green crops out there. A shallow lake. Cattle. And huge, slowly spinning windmills.

Roadside ads bellow the imminence of a Cherokee products Trading Station. One after another. Beads, baskets, caps, blankets, pipes they promise in one huge sign after another.

We go on past Calumet, past motor homes, past groves of fat pines…

A gusty wind buffets the car. The temperature outside is only 66degF

Here is Roman Nose State Park. We smile. With Bruce’s little pug nose, they’d never let him in.

The landscape of sparse trees and green fields turns back into lovely broad flat plains. Big sky.

Let’s Go to Clinton, says a sign.

We pass Weatherford. There’s an Air and Space Museum out there. Wow. Who would have thought it.

It is more wind farms we see.

More and more wind farms!

In both directions. As far as the eye can see. Great big arms steadily rolling.

Who would believe that this used to be oil country, remarks Bruce incredulously. Who would believe the transformation. Who knew the scale of the wind industry in Oklahoma?

The prairie continues, undulating grass.

And exit to Custer City.

Oh, and here is the Cherokee Trading Post of all those signs. We don’t stop.

The signs are now inviting us to Clinton. Let’s Go to Clinton they say. Clinton: Unique Destination. Picture of little happy family in a car. We’re here, says another sign. And so we are.

We pull in for late lunch at a Braum’s. I have a bowl of chili and a green salad and then we do the naughty thing we have craved at this fabulous family diary business. We buy ice cream. I have cherry amaretto which has huge, succulent chunks of cherry and a cherry almond flavour, oh smooth and rich and wicked. Seriously, seriously good. Bruce goes for the healthy alternative. His peanut butter and chocolate ice cream has no sugar. Hmm.

And off we go, back among the trucks and heavy transports which cross the USA day and night in vast numbers

. Oh, and the grey nomads. Mobile homes towing cars or boats are the truckers; nightmare. Ours, too, sometimes.

We pass Canute. We also pass a huge truck whence a Sikh driver beams down upon us with glinting white teeth. His truck is carrying Punjabi goods.

Ah, and just to think this road most famously was The Great Western Cattle Trail.

Another massive empire of wind farms appears. Beautiful. I love the aesthetic of them. They adorn the great prairie with wheeling white grace. Right over the horizon.

The prairie itself is prettying up with yellow wildflowers.

Amarillo is Spanish for yellow, says Bruce. The town was named for the yellow flowers. And it used to pronounced in the Spanish style, Amariyo.

Natural gas wells turn up in the prairie roadside.

This is helium country, announced Bruce. It is mixed in the natural gas.

Once this was the only source of helium in the world, he says. It shouldn’t be wasted on balloons. It is rare. It is a finite resource. The national helium reserve is around here somewhere. Helium is very important for many things - for scientific and technological things like medical imaging and super-conducting magnets. It should not be wasted in toy balloons. Bruce frowns.

Good farmland out there. A huge snack-food factory out there in the fields. Hmm. Mini storage. A big, colourful derrick. Groups of cheap housing. Sports fields. Sheds. Open land. Prairie grass.

The city of Magnum comes - and goes. Magnum looks mini.

Farmland and cultivated red soil.

More natural gas.

There is enough natural gas here to last 500 years, says Bruce.

Sayre appears with its university campus. Out of town a huge sewage plant.

Speed limit: maximum 70mph, minimum 40mph

Washita Battlefield. More of Sayre. It’s quite a spread-out town.

Now a town called Erick.

Small farms. Cotton crop.

The sky is big and light and bright with tufts of cloud.

The yellow wildflowers are appearing again. Prettiness.

And amid the landscape a vast chunk of heavy land clearance. Heavens, about 30 people are wandering about out there in the ploughed field.They look as if they are looking for something.

Oh, look. There’s a road runner on the verge. I saw a road runner! I saw a road runner!

Fields of cattle. Now cotton crops. Big cotton crops.

And the Texas State line.

We are entering the panhandle of north Texas.

Only 104 more miles to Amarillo.

We pass a redneck truck with a sign Hillary For Prisoner 2016 on the side window.

Black Angus cattle, stockyards, cattle…

Shamrock municipal airport…dry, sparse lands

George Bush country, this, says Bruce.

Turnoffs to Wheeler and Wellington.

This is the Texas that looks like Australia, reflects Bruce.

Cattle.

Bluegreen ground cover that looks like saltbush now covers the land. There are horses in pens.

A town called McLean - out on the plain. Does the rain in McLean fall mainly on the plain? An oil well, grey rolls of neglected hay, cotton fields, cotton fields, big cotton fields. Town of Alanreed, sadly over there, bypassed by the road.

Route 66 signs. The glory days of Route 66 were destroyed by the building of 1-40. Many towns lost their traffic.

There’s a State Wind Farm. It is huge. And stationary.

But a fantastic vista of rock-pitted landscape opens up. A rest stop beside a rise in the road offers a spectacular overlook of it all. It is packed with parked trucks, the truckies all resting with the view. Nice.

Those dry steam beds are called arroyos here, says Bruce, of the twisted gullies snaking over the landscape.

And onwards we forge - an array of dead turbines, eerie to see all those still windmills, like a forest of spiky statues.

But there are moving ones on the horizon.

Here we go again. Vast, vast wind farms. Renewable energy is the new oil of Texas and Oklahoma, eh? Who knew?

Fields of sorghum. Cotton. Silos.

Wind farms. Cattle sprinkled out among the turbines.

Hay fields. Cotton. Irrigation sprinklers spread across the land.

It is really quite spectacular.

The linear shapes, the sharp white lines of the turbines, the sprinklers, the bright blue sky…

Turbines to the edge of

the world and miles of cotton beneath them.

Miles and miles.

Farms come and go. Turbines. Cotton.

Prairie.

Horsemen riding along out there. Oh, Texas. Picturebook.

Traffic intensifies as we head toward Amarillo. Silos. Trains. Cement median strip.

Sign: 2752 deaths on Texan roads this year.

The Route 66 Saloon.

And here comes Amarillo. At last. Hello Marriott Residence Inn. Phew. Good to stretch the legs.

Surprises of Tulsa

You can’t judge a book by its cover and you can’t judge a town from first impressions.

Tulsa belies its appearance.

On initially driving around the town in search of a wine store, we found ourselves in rather down-at-heel and grim environments. Crumby neighbourhoods, a bit

threatening in that decayed urban way.

We wondered why on earth our friend Miriam would live in such a place, let alone seem so happy about it.

Visting Miriam is our mission to Tulsa.

We find her house in a very socio-economically mixed street near the downtown area.

Miriam is a paediatrician, who teaches medicine as well as practising it. Osteopathy is one of her specialties. She is an old Yale buddy of Bruce’s.

So we find her address a bit odd. But not her house, where we staying. It is an eclectica of art and slightly hippie aesthetic. It has an

above ground pool on an expansive deck out the back and a view of the river with petro-chemical plants on the other side. We sit in the sun on the deck, meet the dog and cat and listen to the birdlife. We sit in the kitchen drinking wine and nibbling Amish cheeses and we talk and talk and talk. Miriam has been diagnosed with rectal cancer. There is much to talk about as well as the good old days.

For our first night we decide to take Miriam

out for dinner so we can keep on talking and not be interrupted by the practicalities of cooking. We have a short time and we have our priorities. We are old and wise. So, as we cruise the streets, the car becomes a bubble of babble - new sights and old memories. And also news of new people Miriam would like us to meet. How to juggle the time?

We decide to have a dinner party the next night with Bruce cooking his special smothered pork.

But first, Miriam, who has taken the day off work to be with us, takes us on her official tour of her city - of her downtown area and the uptown area, the theatres, the handsome CBD streets, the river, her hospital and her

medical practice.

We have a glorious lunch in a modern cafe overlooking the river, the Octoberfest fun park, and the petrochemical plants which are very much a part of the city aesthetic - twinkling lights and beautiful by night, says Miriam.

We get to appreciate that industrial prettiness later from her back deck

- the oil refinery against the setting sun.

It is a divine, sunny day in Tulsa. The people are hospitable. The food is fresh, healthy, tasty. I purr over a seafood jambalaya and salad. It is all very civilised.

And we visit the most sublime formal gardens, the Philbrook Estate and Museum, Philbrook being a mighty Tulsa oil

magnate who created for himself a magnificent reproduction Italian villa which is now a Tulsa treasure. There is a splendid exhibition of contemporary native American-designed formal evening dress which takes the breath away. Well, not Bruce’s. He is antsy to get to the garden. And what a garden. It provides an utterly lovely walk. It must be one of the most exquisite formal gardens in the world.

It is a joyful treat, a feast for the senses. We talk to gardeners about the butterfly plants and the population of monarchs, about the future of bees in the garden and the world, about herbaceous borders.

We marvel at the perfect reflection of the villa in the great pond.

We go to a fabulous Reasor’s supermarket to buy up supplies for dinner and, while Bruce is cooking, Miriam sneaks me out to a chic fashion shopping mall looking for, and finding, black slacks I long have been fruitlessly pursuing.

Friends Diane and husband Boodi join us for dinner. They are warm and interesting Tulsa establishment. Boodi’s blood runs strong with Native American on one side and blueblood Mayflower American heritage on the other. We talk of blood and history. Bruce offers up that he is the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son back to an officer in the Continental Army of George Washington during the Revolutionary War, a line of descent which makes him eligible as one of the Sons of

Cincinnatti, one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. Very small. Of course, he never joined up.

Our dinner party- convivial and delicious. Bravo Bruce. And we all pile into cars with chocolates and pecan brittle to see the third US Presidential Debate.

No, incredibly, our friend Miriam does not have television.

For the last debate, we were staying with our friends in Fayetteville,

Georgia - and they did not have a television. Dan took us to his grandmother’s to watch on her telly.

Here in Tulsa, Miriam also does not watch television so is taking us to her partner Dan’s place to watch this piece of history on his telly. Dan is out of town but due back later tonight.

Dan’s place is something else. He is a collector. His large and handsome house is a magnificent and extensive museum of ethnographica, art, and collector eclectica. Wonderful touches of whimsy and originality are all over the place, including arraying his extensive tie collection as an embellishment to window curtains and amassing marbles in glass-fronted cabinets. He has a lot of marbles.

Oddly, Dan does not have the Internet. Bruce sets up his phone as a hotspot. Miriam hooks in to work on some medical notes and I hook in to participate in the Twitter discussion on the debate.

We all hate Trump and are pleased that Hillary shows an edge over him in the debate. After Diane and Boodi have gone, Dan arrives home

and takes us to a wonderful old city entre hotel, gracious in its fastidious period preservation. The foyer is most imposing. It's fashion drawcard for the millenials, however, is its swish rooftop bar where we get to see the city of Tulsa spread out and sparkling.

And so it is that we see Tulsa in the light of our friends - a place rich in theatre life, in emancipated politics and vibrant arts, excellent shopping, and historic districts going hand-in-hand with gentrification and renewal.

We give Tulsa a loving tick as we hug our host goodbye the next day, and hit the road again.