You know the song? 🎶 Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam.🎶 Well, just east of Amarillo, there are homes on Route 66, but not a buffalo in sight.

There are windmills everywhere, but this is high plains, as flat as a pancake. You can see for two days.

As I get farther from the city, once again, I’m driving next to the interstate. It is a pleasant day. I woke up and it was 51° but it warmed up to a dry 65 degrees by the time I left my hotel. We are already in the 90s in Florida, and it is a steam bath there, so this Texas weather is nice!

At the exit to Groom, Texas, I got off the interstate because I could not miss the giant cross in the distance.

It is really worth a visit.

Not only is there a cross, but there are life-size statues of the stations of the cross.

I have seen the stations of the cross depicted most of my life on paper or on the walls of churches or in stained glass, but nothing touched me like this. I’m 71 years old, and I got emotional seeing these life-sized sculptures.

About 10 miles from Groom, TX and the cross, I was on Route 66 and realized that I was almost out of gas. I broke my number one rule when following old trails, I always buy gas before leaving each morning, because the areas I go into have long stretches with no gas stations. It has been so long since I’ve followed a trail on my own, like this, that I forgot my rule.

I was between Alanrede and McLean, Texas and trying to get to McLean where Google says there are some gas stations. There was one in Alanrede and Google said it was open, but it looked like the picture below. Obviously, it has been closed for a long time. Oh well! It’s something I would’ve stopped to take a picture of anyway.

So I kept driving east on Route 66 with the interstate right beside me until horror of horrors I ran into a dead end with road construction. My gas indicator says below empty. I cannot continue and I can see McLean, Texas in the distance. So what was a girl to do?

I guess I broke the law. I backtracked and drove through a shallow, wide ditch to get onto the interstate. I’m lucky because Texas does not have fences that run down the sides of their interstate like we do in Florida.

Then I got off the interstate a quarter-mile later at the McLean exit and got my gas. Cattle operations built McLean.

Hungry, I found a restaurant (the interior shot could be in Florida). It was in McLean, TX on Route 66. At the table next to me was a man and his mother, who were from Florida. He was moving her to his sister’s home in Arizona.

When I got back on the interstate, I realized I was running low on time, so I quit getting off the interstate and I drove like a bat out of hell to my destination for the evening, a former state park near Hinton, OK.

Oklahoma has done a better job of repairing the old Mother Road and keeping it open. I got off the interstate one more time at Shamrock to see a few things and then I got to Hinton, Oklahoma, home of Red Rock Canyon, where I stayed the night.

I guess the rest of Britten is gone.

By the way, I camped at Red Rock Canyon south of Hinton for two days. My stop here was nostalgic. The last time I was here with in the 1960s as a child with my parents. I’ll share more in my next Route 66 blog post!