When you find yourself with one night in Amarillo, Texas, at a campground right next door to Cadillac Ranch, with a nasty looking storm headed your way, there’s really only one thing to do: make a very quick trip to Cadillac Ranch and take a million pictures with the dramatic lighting, then spend a couple of hours huddled with your family in the campground bathroom/storm shelter. So that is what we did.
We stayed at the Oasis Amarillo RV Resort, but here is the only picture I have from there:
But it was nice! Very manicured and tidy grid of concrete pull-throughs. We weren’t there long and didn’t get to explore much because of the weather, but would recommend based on what we did see. Which was mostly the bathroom. They have very nice bathrooms, with separate private rooms with a tub, sink, and shower in each. Also they’re storm shelters! So the storm didn’t really end up being that dangerous, but it was VERY windy with a lot of lightning for awhile, and Abe really wanted to be in the storm shelter. I think we were the only people in the campground who went there. Dave really wanted to pull in our slide while the storm was going on, as this was the first place where we discovered that maybe paying a lot of money for a slide topper last winter wasn’t such a great idea: slide toppers don’t like wind! And we encountered a lot of wind over the course of the trip. The slide topper survived, but there were plenty of times where it sure didn’t sound like it would. Anyway. Before the storm! Cadillacs!
Cadillac Ranch is a 1974 art installation from the San Francisco-based Ant Farm group. It consists of ten Cadillacs buried (at the same angle as the pyramid at Giza! Says Wikipedia) partway in the ground in the middle of a field next to I-40 in Amarillo, TX. And you can see Oasis RV Resort from it!
We first went to Walmart that evening because we needed groceries and also because we wanted to pick up some spray paint, as adding one’s own personal touch to the Cadillacs is allowed/encouraged. And then we drove over while I fretted about the storm that was headed toward us. Parking is along an access road parallel to I-40. The cars are on private land, but it’s fine to walk right up to them.
The kids painted while I took lots of pictures and periodically said that we really ought to hurry and get out before the storm (it’s a decent walk from the parking to the Cadillacs, so getting caught was a distinct possibility).
Incidentally, if you don’t have time to pick up spray paint, you’re quite likely to find an abandoned but not empty can lying around somewhere.
So! Definitely a thing to do at least once in your life. And if you can time it so that you have awesome stormy skies in your picture but you get out of there before you get poured on and/or hit by lightning…all the better!
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