The Great (green greasy) Texas Dereferencing Tour of 1998 and Almost 1999

By Leonard Richardson

If you're looking for the turkey crossing graphic, it's here. Even if you're not looking for it, there it is.

Part One: The Phantom Menace

On December 19, 1998, my family and I left the relative safety of Bakersfield in order to embark on a hazardous motor tour of the southwestern states, featuring many sites of historical interest, under the cover of attending my cousin Alyson's wedding reception. Little did I know that many things which I had previously known only as pop culture references would be presented to me in their original glory^H^H^H^H^Hbanality; dereferenced, if you will. Also little did I know of the many strange things that I would see and eat. I had a vague idea that I would write about the trip on the Web, but little did I know that I would write a disassociated stream of consciousness kind of narrative, complete with silly lists and HTML replicas of billboards and big MST3K references inserted into the text whenever I suddenly grokked one which I had lacked the cultural context to understand before, or just whenever I thought about one. How could I? Have? Known. But as the trip unfolded, and the usual on-a-trip-to-somewhere-else etic (or is it emic? I forget) absurdities were made clear to me, the scribblings in my notebooks began to take on that form. And now I attempt to translate that to the web, a task at which I am doomed to fail miserably.

Here goes nothing.

Bakersfield -> Flagstaff

We ate breakfast at Denny's. I had a veggie omelette and part of Rachel's veggie omelette. Inspired by Kris' Yoda bit, I tried Tabasco on my omelette. It was okay. I can't remember what omelette means in French.

The first billboard of note on our journey said "Exit 235 Meteor Crater", with a picture of the meteor which caused the meteor crater in question. Exit 235 was still a long ways away, and would not taunt us until the following day.

In Daggett, CA, we discovered a strange and interesting phenomenon which words cannot describe. I have a picture here, but it sucks. The anomaly is circled. It was a bright point of fog between the towers in the picture and another tower; really weird, wild stuff.

Hey, a Dairy Queen! I'd eaten stuff there before, but not after my MST3K-caused reacquaintance with that Minnesota-based corporation. I ordered a small fudge sundae, which cost $2.50. As I was to discover, the sheer bulk of MST3K Dairy Queen references are a function of the chain's omnipresence, not its quality.

Drive. drive. drive. I'm not driving, because I can't drive a stick. Susanna and my mother are driving.

The first geodesic dome we saw on our trip was a complete EPCOT-style dome, someone's house. What a great house to have. Total space utilitization.

That's not it, but all geodesic domes are cool, and I'm not sure where in the travelogue this picture goes. Anyway, I figure if I load up on pictures early in the travelogue you'll keep reading.

At 4. PM, we saw a sign on something that said:

It made sense in context, but who needs that?

There are some nice road cuts along interstate 40. Road cuts are cross-sections of layered rock formed when people cut through to make a road. You'd think that there would be a generic geological term for cuts, but no. It depends on what formed them. I did not know all this, my mother told me. I pass the savings onto you.

We stopped at Murphy's Food Mart in Arizona. I talked to an old guy whose car had broken down. I looked at part of a Tom Clancy novel, in which the hero is a businessman who wrote a piece of encryption software that he refuses to sell to foreign interests, so they attempt to steal it. If THEY get this encryption software, you see, it will be easy for them to decrypt our vital business and defense information. I don't know what alternate universe Tom Clancy's novels take place in, but it's also one in which the DKL Lifeguard works as advertised. I haven't read the book, so it's possible that Clancy's informed and reasoned expose of encryption technology and politics was mangled by a hack back-of-the-book corywriter, but I doubt it.

I was right.

we're pleased to report that after the searing disappointment of his "Net Force", Tom Clancy's eminently put-downable RUTHLESS.COM (pay no more than Tesco's UKP3.99) may be *the worst tech-thriller of all time*. Not only is it turgidly written, appallingly paced, and peopled with characters who wonder in and out of chapters seemingly at will - the hero is a software CEO who opposes crypto export relaxation and supports key escrow, and doesn't change his mind when the bad guys break into a key escrow bank to steal the codes that open the doors to the Presidential submarine.

We ate at a Southwestern Mexican place. My mother (who grew up in the Southwest and would therefore know) says it was a pale imitation of real Southwestern food, but I really liked it. In addition to the inevitable bowl of appetizer salsa (NEW YORK CITY?!?!) to go with with our inevitable appetizer tortilla chips, we were given a bowl of refried beans, which I thought was mighty innovative. I had tacos al carbon (My friends, my reputation precedes me!) which I liked. I also had a sopapilla, which is a Southwestern/Mexican dessert which kicks the crap out of flan. It's like a big puffy pastry tortilla which you eat with honey. My mother says real sopapillas are much larger that the puny sopapillas we had at this restaurant.

After eating, we retired to the motel room. Amazingly, we had cable, and my dream of seeing the MST3K episode "Jack Frost" was fulfilled. It was great.

Thus ended our first day. What would the morning bring? Stop inturrupting me and I'll tell you.

Flagstaff -> Albequerque

The morning brought sleet. I had never seen sleet before, and thought it was just very large snow. But no, it's different in some way that people who have multiple words for snow care about. I made a sleetball and threw it at Susanna. There was ample sleet for her to do the same, and she may have. I don't remember.

We ate a nice generic continental breakfast at the motel and went on our way.

All the Chinese restaurants we saw on our journey also served American food. I asked my mother, repository of all knowledge about the Southwest, why this was so. It is so because the railroads were built with Chinese labor (and Irish labor and all other vaudeville ethnicity labor), and Chinese cooks stayed behind in the railroad towns and opened restaurants which were then passed down from generation to generation. Since a restaurant of this type would be the only one in a given town, the owners would engage in anticompetitive bundling practices to sell their cheap knockoff products. Wait, I'm thinking of Microsoft. Since a restaurant of this type would be the only one in a given town, they would serve all kinds of food. This tradition continues to this day, and near the end of our trip we ate at such a restaurant.

One of the many CDs we bought to listen to on the trip was a musical adaption of The Hunting of the Snark (read it now if you haven't, it's a masterpiece), with various British people and Art Garfunkel. Altough it tried to turn the Beaver/Butcher relationship into a sort of romance, it was very good. It is called "Mike Batt's The Hunting of the Snark", and when I saw that I thought "Jerry Bruckheimer's The Hunting of the Snark". I then indulged in a bit of mental playacting and created a trailer for a mindless action movie based on The Hunting of the Snark. It actually fits very well into the Jerry Bruckheimer mold, containing as it does ten characters with their own little quirks who must band together and do improbable things. (cf. The Rock, Armageddon, et al.)

Fortituitously enough, it was at about this time that we approached the meteor crater we had seen advertised the day before. We decided to go and see it in all its crateriferous glory. [NB: The following pictures are from a scanned copy of a tourist brochure]

So we drove and drove and drove. There were signs every so often to encourage us onward:

And we got there and it cost $8 a person. Goodbye, meteor crater.

Fortunately, there was a geodesic dome general store nearby.

Our plan was to buy stuff surrepitiously at all the stores so that we could fill our mother's Christmas stocking with various things purchased along the way. At the general store, Susanna bought a patch (my mother collects them), then told me to keep her [my mother] away from the patches. I couldn't figure out a good way to do that, and the whole thing fell apart.

The wind was really howling. Wind comin' atcha.

The ultimate triumph of advertising over substance, of pop art over fine art. I refer of course to the HERE IT IS petroglyph rabbit billboard. Of course we had to stop and photograph it.

(A petroglyph is an ancient Native American (the American ones are anyway) carving on a rock, discolored by its great age. It's old, I tells ya!)

There was a big painted cement rabbit near the HERE IT IS-associated Jack Rabbit trading post, which rabbit you were also supposed to take pictures of. I wasn't as excited about that, as you can see. Susanna, Rachel, and Red Doggie enjoyed it, though.

In the Jack Rabbit trading post they sell cherry cider. I recommend it. It's good. But if you want some, don't stand around expecting the attendant to fill you a cup from the soda fountain thing. You have to take the initiative and get a bottle of it from the sliding door thing. Just a tip.

We are on Historic Route 66, and everything we see endeavors to remind us of this fact. I really don't care. All my information about Route 66 cames from these billboards that tell me it's historic. There are Route 66 cookbooks for sale in the tourist gift shops full of greasy 1950s food. Recipes for it, I mean. I would probably find Route 66 history interesting, but everything I see assumes that I'm on a Route 66 vacation, that I already know what's going on.

Pale imitations of "HERE IT IS" seen on Historic Route 66

1. HERE IT IS!
2. THIS IS IT
3. THIS IS IT ---> (not seen on Route 66, but rather in Texas)

Now that we are on historic Route 66. the tourist trap places, and the billboards they use for bait, are out in force. One billboard, for a place that sold rugs, read, in part:

In advertising, as everyone knows, quotes act as <LIE> </LIE> tags, separating the merely misleading from the actually false. The the claim of 'Indian' manufacture was therefore a lie. But what could the truth be? This sparked a lively discussion in the car.

Situations in which you could say "MADE BY INDIANS" but have to put it in quotes:

1. Not made by Indians
2. Made by people dressed as Indians
3. Made by machines of Indian design
4. We pretend they were, you pretend they were, everybody's happy
5. Designed by Indians
6. Made in India

Off we go, to the dinosaur place. There's a town on Route 66 in which the major driver of the economy is the sale of rocks and fossils and petrified wood. One such place has big cheezy fiberglass dinosaurs. Signs on the fence demand payment for pictures taken with the dinosaurs and insist that such pictures be for private use only. I guess they're trying to avoid the commercialism that grew out of the giant Cabazon dinosaurs . I wouldn't worry so much. They were closed, so we took pictures with impunity. There are also Paluxian fiberboard caveperson cutouts which people can stand behind and be cavepeople.

I have "Petrified wood meteorites!" in my notebook but I don't know if that was a connection with the meteor crater, or if someone was actually crazy enough to try to pass something off as petrified wood meteorites to tourists. I suspect the latter. That takes a lot of guts, to do that.

I also have "S: In glorious color" in my notebook. It may have been something Susanna said at one point. I would have been sufficiently impressed by her saying that to have written it down.

It was around here that I started keeping track of apostrophe errors. At one point, two apostrophe errors on billboards were visible at one time, causing me to remark, "Route 66 is the Great White Way of the apostrophe error." Throughout the travelogue, I will just do lists whenever our happy road trip encountered an apostrophe error, and leave it to you, the reader, to make heads or tails of it.

• Ave. of the America's
• 50's Diner

(Some deluded people may think that there should be an apostrophe in "50s" even though it's a run-of-the-mill adjective and not a contraction or a posessive. These people are, as previously stipulated, deluded. If you must put an apostrophe in "50s", make it a {Bud Lite, contraction} and say "'50s". This is the only time I'm going to say this.)

At noon, we stopped at a Love's, which is not a pit barbecue place (well, it is, but this isn't it) but a convenience store with embedded food court. At the Subway there, they had Flintstones and Jetsons versions of the same basic kids toys, driving home the fact that the Flinstones and the Jetsons actually inhabit the same culture with only minor cosmetic differences, which coincidentally I had been expounding upon in the car earlier.

• CD's
• Sucker's

I had an A&W hamburger. It was terrible. I also got same cheap tapes ($2.99, I believe they were). A Snoopy tribute album and some old country by a fellow named Cowboy Copas. There's a great bit on the Cowboy Copas tape where the aforementioned Cowboy Copas is jamming with his pal Joe at a festival, and they start talking about all these tunes and playing them, and it's the same tune the whole time. And they do this about eight times, saying "Now let's play 'The Great Speckled Bird'" or "That was really good, how about a little of 'Dreamin' Tonight of my Blue Eyes'", and it's the same generic country tune over and over again. It cracked me up.

Much trip time was devoted to thinking up better ways of expressing the possibility of "Gusty winds may exist".

It's an interstellar Stuckey's!

I didn't know what a Stuckey's was. It's a big tourist trap store that sells touristy things and also sells interesting candy concoctions like pecan logs. In particular, they sell what is called a "Goo Goo Cluster". Rather than a cancerous growth or meteorological formation, this is some stuff (peanut butter or marshmallow) covered in chocolate and peanuts, then purchased and eaten. I had a peanut butter one, which sucked. Later in the trip I had a marshmallow one, which was pretty good. I surrepitiously purchased one for my mother's stocking.

Our destination for the day: Alberquerque. I don't know if I spelled that right. Every time the city's name came up I would say "Alberquerque!" in a sort of Curly Joe voice.

In Alberquerque, there is a strange fast-food chain called Blake's Lottaburger. Their billboards feature a distinctly disturbing burger. Alberquerque also has horizontal street lights, which is probably a good idea.

We stayed at the home of a woman my mother knows from email lists. There was craziness ensuing which I will not go into here. I will say that they had packets of ramen brand-named "Smack Ramen".

I slept on the couch.

Alberquerque->Dallas

Gas in Alberquerque was $0.89 a gallon, because of New Mexico's stringently lax environmental laws which allow the gas manufacters to "cut" their gasoline with flour, rat poison, and the like. We ate at Denny's, an experience much like the previous time we had eaten at Denny's. I held out for eating somewhere else, but was outvoted by {twelve, three} {angry, hungry} {men, women}.

As we left Alberquerque, I saw was a billboard for some wacky morning DJ duo, presumably making reference to some devilishly wacky bit they had. The bit involved paper cutout characters, named Kit and Missile, who were cussing a blue streak. I think the ancestry of this idea is fairly apparant.

On mile 239 of the highway we were on, we suddenly entered another world. A world not of sight and sound but of mind. There was a signpost up ahead. It said, "Exit 239". But what happened was that suddenly this fog came cruising in on little cat feet, and the sun was blocked out by this selfsame fog, above us. The desert flora were frosted over, making it look like World 6 of Super Mario Bros. 3, and a general principle of coldness suffused this paragraph. It was very interesting how suddenly this happened. As far as I can remember, we stayed under this cloud until we left San Antonio.

Soon we were in Texas.

Don't mess with Texas $1000 fine for littering

My mother and I thought this was funny, funny, funny. It was such an inappropriate thing to put on a billboard. It made no sense. It made the billboard look more like a warning than an advertisement.

If there was one joke created as a result of this trip, it was "The ribeyes of Texas are upon you!" I even (in San Antonio) improvised a song, delivered in the traditional Texas drawl, about the dreaded ribeyes:

Imagine our chagrin when we discovered that the phrase was not a bizarre, surreal coinage of the Big Texan Restaurant, but rather a lame pun. Hawever, by that time, too many funny connotations had been attached to the phrase to get rid of it that easily.

The Big Texan also had other Texas-themed billboards, including one of a rattlesnake that said "Stop in for a bite!" or something. I have a picture of that one somewhere. But you just can't beat "The ribeyes of Texas are upon you!".

• 18-wheeler's parking
• Bob's and Sons Taxi (probably the most ambitiously wrong apostrophe error I saw on the trip)

When we got to Amarillo, we were still laughing about the ribeyes of Texas. Susanna said, "I wish I thought it was that funny."

Best approximation to Bakersfield city motto seen on trip:

(Lacking the ambition of "Come for a visit, stay for a lifetime", but that's probably just as well.)

• Amigo's Restaurante (questionable, but probable)

We had lunch in Gloria's Cafe, a little cafe in a (terror of) tiny town called Memphis. I would like to say that it was good, but it wasn't that good. I had a hot roast beef sandwich and the beef was very tough. The salad was not very good either. However, the waitress was very nice and I hope she can get out of that town before it destroys her will to live (I speak from experience).

Oh yeah, the salsa they served at the cafe was very good. Nice and tomatoey.

We saw a Sonic (not Burger, oddly enough, just Sonic) at one point. "Happy Eating!", said the plastic-letter sign.

In Wichita Falls there was an "Uncle Lynne's Catfish".

What the? That's my catfish restaurant!

There was also a "Catfish Charlie's", but frankly I doubt Charlie's sincerity when it comes to catfish.

TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY!!!!

We finally made it to Dallas, miraculously, and checked into a hotel which under normal circumstances we would have been unable to afford, and I don't feel like going into why we were given rooms there, but it was perfectly legal.

Part 2
Part 3