Volume 5: Pete in the USA Part 5. A young balding mans journey through 20 something states and back

Big Texan Steak Ranch, Amarillo - hartofoz

Day 9 – Albuquerque to Amarillo

Today’s stop for lunch was Santa Fe. They love to build their houses using the Adobe method, which is great providing you’re willing to lose a wall or 2 whenever you get more than 1mm of rain. I noticed they also had a church in honour of St Francis, so the people of the region had to be big fans of anyone who’s had a vision from god. To confuse things, well for me at least, I noticed we were passing highway signs that said we were heading for Las Vegas. Turns out there’s more than 1 Las Vegas in the US, so we were heading in the correct direction. Although given Bob’s unique way of avoiding a bale of grass, I wasn’t entirely confident until we reached Santa Fe.

On our way to Amarillo we stopped off at the Cadillac Ranch, which is essentially a row of old battered Cadillac’s that have been stood on end and in which it’s a tradition to write graffiti on (that did explain why JP had purchased so many spray cans at the last Walmart stop. I was hoping he was a “chromer” and was going to be spraying them into a plastic bag and inhaling, it would have given him better vision of the places we visited on the tour). The Cadillac Ranch was paid for by an “eccentric” rich bloke named Stanley Marsh III. Turns out he used to do a lot of weird sh*t, with one of his hobbies being that he liked to put up his own unique road signs throughout Amarillo. Apparently he was quite fond of his road signs, and allegedly was known to have locked up an 18 year old kid in a chicken coop when he caught the young scallywag in the act of taking one of his beloved signs. It’s interesting doing weird sh*t; if you’re rich you’re considered eccentric, if you’re poor you’re considered crazy.

We eventually got to our hotel in the evening, the somewhat famous Big Texan Inn. Every thing’s big in Texas, except for the bath towels, which seemed unusually small in this hotel. The Big Texan Inn has different themes in every room, Gav and I were fortunate to be in the room decked out in cattle skin bed spreads with saloon doors at the entrance to the bathroom. Unfortunately we never did take a dip in the Texas shaped pool. But the thing the Big Texan is famous for is the free 72-ounce steak you can get in their restaurant. In metric, that loosely converts to half a cow. Just to make getting half a cow digested challenging, you have to eat the thing inside of an hour to get it for free. To add to the atmosphere they put the participants of this great challenge up on stage with a large digital clock behind them counting down the minutes. Dave was the only person that night to accept the challenge, a feat that seemed all the more unrealistic when they bought the steak out (with a forklift) and it was bigger than Dave’s belly. Dave wasn’t a huge man, I’d say about 80kg, which loosely translates into about half the size of the steak he was now attempting to eat inside of 60 minutes, so I didn’t give him much hope. Dave put in a gallant fight that night, but was still left with what would equate to probably the size of a cow’s butt cheek when time expired.

Tonight’s entertainment was spent at a true red neck bar called the “Midnight Rodeo” or as the locals called it “Midnight Rope a ho”. The bar had a huge oval shaped pine dance floor, purpose built for 2-steppin’. It was probably the most memorable night of the tour as I 2-stepped the night away with many of the ladies on the bus, enjoying the local beer Shiner Bock, and the occasional $1 shot served by what I suppose you’d call a “shot bitch”, a female who walked around the bar all night selling shots out of test tubes. The most memorable moment of the night came when our tour group had formed a casual dance circle, which was then penetrated by 2 break dancing cowboys. Things move a bit slower in the south, which apparently extends to mainstream culture, as it was the only way I could explain why these flannelette, cowboy hat wearing blokes were now executing moves I hadn’t seen since the movie “Breakdance” back in the early ‘80s. In a more awkward moment, some disabled bloke who didn’t have full use of his limbs joined in. He had as much rhythm as most white males, but given he was disabled you had to persevere through the moment without laughing or heckling, which was as hard to do as it was for this poor bloke to find the beat.

I got to bed sometime around 3am, but before that I had the pleasure of taking some amusing photos of Aaron who had enjoyed the $1 shots too much. Turns out Aaron, a big fat gay nurse, must have spent his first 30 years of his life locked in an attic. He had no idea about his drinking limits all tour and had clearly missed out on the all important teenage years where you gain important life lessons, like drinking an entire bottle of $3 vodka is a bad idea. To confirm my locked in an attic theory, he also got a huge tattoo on his back later on in the tour and spent the entire day after it in pain. I’m all for getting tattoo’s in foreign countries to help you remember your time away when you’re stuck back home at work, but they’ve got to be relevant. From memory, I think he got a large gay tiger or something that had nothing to do with the US or the tour.

I went to sleep content, hoping this lame tour was finally gaining some momentum.

Day 10 – Amarillo to Dallas

Today was a looooonng day on the bus. It was made to seem all the more longer as it was the only day on tour I wore pants, and it was the only day on the tour the air conditioner broke down on the bus. Sure, this was one of the cooler days of the US summer, only about 30 degrees, but I was sweating on my sweat I was that hot on that bus. I also had another confusing moment when I saw a sign that said he were heading to Memphis, which while being somewhat true, it would have meant we were bypassing Dallas and driving through another 2 states for a few hundred miles. As the sweat built on my sweat started to have another layer of sweat built on it, I hoped like hell crazy Bob had not missed a turn off which left us on a highway whose next exit was at Memphis.

In the cooler part of the day, probably sometime before 8:30am, the aussie Victoria had chosen to sit next to me on the bus. Which was somewhat unusual as she had always sat next to Kate, so I put it down to the fact we’d been dirty dancing and letting our pelvic regions get better acquainted on the dance floor the night before. I’d describe aussie Victoria as quite ditzy, not that that’s a bad thing as I find that what ditzy women lack in intelligence they more than make up for with a good heart. However, a long term relationship between me and a ditzy woman would never work as it would deteriorate into me taking the piss out of anything stupid she said, which would be somewhere between 70-90% of everything that came out her mouth. So alarm bells begun to ring very loud in my head when she started talking about relationships and how no man had ever wanted a long-term relationship with her. I thanked god that we were no longer in Vegas so there was no fear of us getting married, and then did what I thought was the right thing and informed her of my tour philosophy; “what happens on tour stays on tour”. Which, as I subtlety pointed out to her, loosely translates into I wasn’t on the bus to find a woman for a long term relationship, but if we happened to wake up naked next to each other that would be acceptable behaviour. Or, as she pointed out to me a few days later in a more blunt fashion “You’re just hear to fuck aren’t you?”. As she was only 21, I was just trying to do the right thing and not become some piece of emotional luggage she would drag around until she was my age and dropped off on some poor unsuspecting bastard who genuinely wanted to have a long term relationship.

To get us in the mood for the rodeo we were going to see that night, JP put on the movie “8 seconds”, starring Luke Perry. Which, coincidentally, was the length it held my attention and the length of Luke Perry’s career.

We checked into the hotel sometime in the afternoon, and after dinner we hopped on an old bus, which thankfully was air conditioned, and headed for the Mesquite Championship Rodeo at the Resistol Arena. The Reisitol Arena was like a temple for red necks with its giant roof covering the dirt-playing surface. According to the back of my admission ticket Resistol make cowboy hats, according to their slogan “the best all-round”. I thought that was a pretty poor slogan, surely they could have done some sort of lame play on words using the word “resist”, something like “Like you’re momma tol’ you, you can’t resist a Resistol”. As we got off the bus there was a Fox sports TV crew who were covering the event and they wanted to get some pictures of us as we got off the bus. I’m sure I did my country proud that night as I got off the bus in my “Nice beaver” t-shirt and greeted the camera with a nod and “G’day ladies”.

The rodeo started off a touch uneasy. The first bloke riding a bull was absolutely pommelled. There was a delay of about 10 minutes as a medical crew saw to his injuries. In the religious heartlands that are the rodeo it is standard to name the bulls after biblical characters. I think the bull in this case was named “Judas”. It just sets such a great tone for the night when it looks like the first rider is dead. I almost felt uncomfortable when I was taking pictures as they dragged him off on a stretcher.

Later in the night in attempt to avoid what was now becoming incredibly repetitive (there’s a limit to the number of times you can watch a bloke try to hang onto a large dangerous animal for 8 seconds, that limit is about 8 seconds) I went to get a beer in hope that this rodeo would seem all the more interesting if I was drunk. The girl serving me, whom I seriously doubt was of a legal age (but we were in the south where things like marrying your 13 year old cousin is acceptable so you just embrace the culture difference and shut your eyes and think of something else), caught sight of my Nice beaver t-shirt. She had an initial look of disgust that then turned to a smile, like she was getting away with something bad, and as if to accept the t-shirt as being the true genius it was. She was so impressed she nudged the other girl serving beer to get a look at it.

I think the highlight of the rodeo is when they set 3 calves out onto the arena, and then let every kid under 12 in the stadium chase them around. In other parts of the world they would have seen the act of an 11 year old getting a calf in a head lock as cruelty to animals, instead of what of what it really was, amusing.

After the rodeo JP was going to take us to this awesome nightclub with at least 4 dance floors and karaoke. When we got to the nightclub and it was closed, I don’t know why I was surprised. JP was having yet another moment that we called on tour as a “John Denver moment”. Earlier on the tour when we were going to Colorado JP had shown the movie “Dumb and Dumber”. In that movie Jim Carrey’s character makes a wrong turn and they end up heading in the opposite direction to Colorado. As they’re passing through flat farmlands he turns to his mate and says “That John Denver’s full of shit” (in reference to the John Denver song where he bangs on about “rocky mountain high”). Anyway, in short, JP was full of shit. We got talking to some locals and they said the club had been shut down for at least 3 months. It was great to see JP was putting in the hard yards to earn his $2 a day tip.

Pissed off, we all just went to the nearest bar, “Tiki Bob”, enjoyed one drink, then left due to the fact the air temperature inside Tiki Bob’s was so hot you couldn’t order drinks with ice because it melted before it hit the bottom of the glass. As it turned out, the gods guided us to the Hooters restaurant in the West end. Which according to the t-shirt I purchased there, just happens to be the biggest Hooters on this great planet. We spent a few hours there, I got a great picture with one of the Hooters girls, and then succumbed to the fact this night was not destined for us to party, which was becoming an all too common occurrence on this tour, and we headed back to the hotel to sleep.