Day Three: Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
The Cadillac Ranch is a whimsical creation of one crazy Texan named Stanley Marsh 3. Ten Caddies are poised nose first in the Panhandle earth, at the same angle as the sides of the Cheops Pyramid. It’s the kind of thing about which no one asks why. So we rose early to get to Wally World for some spray paint. I also found a dandy calendar which will grace my cubicle in 2008. I bought the paint so there would be no questions about what this Yankee pup intended with it and we found our way back onto I-40. The exit is just past the Ranch so you can see it as you prepare to get off the highway. The frontage is so close it almost looked like people were walking in from the emergency lane. After wheeling around we pulled in behind a tour bus that had just loaded up, and we had the monument to ourselves for a few minutes. Out came the spray cans and a few minutes later our Route 66 Road Trip shield graced the deck lid of the 1959 Cadillac. I asked NOS, “Have you done this before?” in reference to the ease with which he worked the spray cans; he assured me he had not.
As he finished his masterpiece, three men on bicycles arrived. They spoke to one another in German, taking in the absurdities of the site, then one approached me. Guten Tag, I said, then ventured that I didn’t know any more German. He asked me if I would take a photo of them with his camera and I gladly complied. Even handed the camera back to him. It turns out that they were riding their bicycles along the same route, headed west for L.A. They had left Chicago some two weeks earlier. We wished them safe travels and watched them ride off. Odd that with all the time they were taking, they didn’t stay long to soak in the Cadillac Ranch experience. But I guess that they had plenty more along the road to take in.
