Day 19 - Texas and New Mexico

As per usual we were up early the next morning trying to catch up on the day we were behind, and we still had a long way to drive before we were at the starting point of our second detour off Route 66.. We performed the usual morning ritual by stopping in at McDonalds and grabbing a feed before out long drive into Texas. We had planned to make it to a restaurant in Texas called "The Big Texan", the home of the man vs. food 72 oz. steak! It doesn't sound that big, but once you see it, it looks like they have put half a cow on your plate!! We decided that the challenge was a little too ambitious for us all haha (you had to eat a 72 oz steak, baked potato, steak fries, salad and a prawn cocktail all in under 60 minutes!) so we just ordered a slightly smaller steak each haha! The also had something called a beer tower, it contained 116 oz of beer, or about 8 or 9 pints of beer! So being the only Aussies in the big Texan, we thought why the hell not! Yes, we did manage to finish it, but it was an effort and a half after the meal we had!

After everyone finishing their meals, there was only one thing left on our plates... A giant chilli! So using our superior logic and common sense, Danny, Adam and myself decided that it would be a good idea to see who could eat the most... BAD IDEA! I ended up having to scull almost a litre of milk just to make breathing bearable! It did provide good entertainment though haha! We then left The Big Texan, and proceeded to quickly get into our morph suits and show all our avid readers that we really did go there haha! We then continued along the road towards the next attraction, the ten Cadillacs. The story behind the ten Cadillacs is, a Texan land owner decided to half bury ten Cadillacs to create a sort of modern age stone henge, and then provides spray cans for visitors to put their "tag" on the cars and every couple of years he comes and gives them a fresh coat of paint and starts all over again. We spent nearly thirty minutes playing around on the cars, spraying everywhere and Craig even left behind an NT number plate on one of the cadillacs but it wasn't visible unless you climbed to the top...

After enjoying ourselves a little too much, we moved on to our next destination, the halfway point of Route 66! We exactly 1139 miles from the start of Route 66 in Chicago and still had another 1139 miles before we reached the Santa Monica pier in Las Angeles. It was a little surreal to think we had travelled halfway across the US in what seemed like such a short amount of time, but we still had a long way to go yet..

We then continued on to our final resting stop, Santa Rosa, before our second detour of the journey. It was a nice little caravan site in New Mexico. We had a massive storm rolling in though which was pretty daunting, because the radio was broadcasting warnings for flash flooding... It turned out the storm was pretty harmless and we didn't get swept away by any flash flooding...

Next stop... The road to Mt. Rushmore!

Mark