No Country for Fake Dinosaurs

We woke up early complete with The Big Texan’s complimentary meat sweats to explore “old Amarillo” before making the long haul through New Mexico to Flagstaff, Arizona. Lonley planet described “old Amarillo” in the following way: “The old route 66 in Amarillo is most-character filled along W. 6th Avenue, also known as the San Jacinto District. Shop fronts from the 1920’s have everything from burgers and beer to books, hardware and antiques for sale.” In actuality it is more reminiscent of the storefronts outside of the Secaucus train station, “advertising everything from pawn shops to porn”. We locked the doors and headed out of town.

The plains turned quite suddenly into desert and we stopped in Santa Fe for a delicious Mexican lunch, to check out the “country’s oldest house” and some shopping. Inspired by the ol’Western themed shoppes, Jihan, Cragin and Jen purchased cowboy hats for our foray into Arizona and Colorado. BB resisted the urge but after her arm was twisted, jumped on the bandwagon. Her hat turned out to be 3 times more expensive than everyone elses, a perennial problem for BB in life. BB’s cowboy hat quickly devolved into her dunce cap as she broke a few of her rules, namely NO SINGING and NO YODELING. When these rules are broken BB must wear the cowboy hat for 1 minute. It is most reminiscent of a physiological experiment in learned helplessness.

We departed Santa Fe for Flagstaff and played some rousing games of 20 questions (with some choice subjects including a part of BB’s anatomy and JIhan’s dream man, Toy Story’s Woody). Pulling off to refuel and relieve ourselves, we entered “No Country for Old Men” where a lone cowboy smoked a personally-rolled cigarette looking surly and brooding as our huge NJ-plated Lexus pulled in. Our cowboy
stood up, stomped out his cigarette and stated, “You girls sure are a long ways from home” before riding off into the sunset. Thanks Clint Eastwood, we sure are.

The ride through New Mexico and Arizona is colored with useless tourist sh*t. Signs for 50 miles advertised a “Dinosaur Park” prompting BB to call her sister to check if it was the park from “The Wizard” (a 1987 film starring Fred Savage). Sadly, that park is located in California but this one surely didn’t disappoint. The “park” consisted of approximately 3 Paper Mache Dinosaurs presumably created by the owner’s daughter in 1995. The mechanical feat of the park was that the T-Rex’s head moved but since this was the same engineering employed to make those bobble-headed dogs on people’s dashboards move, we didn’t feel compelled to pull over.

We entered Arizona and were immediately introduced to the states penchant for firework and knife outlet billboards, the most clever of these being, “SHARP DEALS ON KNIVES AND SWORDS.” 9 hours into the drive and hopped up on Sudafed to combat the cold we are passing each other, Cragin made the mistake of commenting that the sunset had gone from looking red to looking yellow in a matter of minutes. BB astutely asked, “Did you just take your sunglasses off?” Cragin sheepishly admitted that BB was right and vowed to stop talking for the duration of the trip to Flagstaff. After ordering from the “best Chinese place in Flagstaff” (not a complement) we went to sleep to the sweet sounds of Whoopi Goldberg singing 1960’s hits in “Sister Act.” We may not be movie stars, but when it comes to being happy, we are.