#59 Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas

I think I had heard of something about where cars are sticking up out of the ground. In our travel guide it mentioned the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas. I knew we had to stop and so that was one of our destinations. Very near the Cadillacs was an RV park that had a very cool 1950s type look with the big tall Cowboy about forty feet high or something. `

I just really enjoyed the whole visit and the Cadillac Ranch speaks for itself. I'll put a story here on how it happened as an art project.

An aristocracy of roadside attractions has been raised over the years: glorified in photo essays, calendars, blogs, and social media fiefdoms; spotlighted in video and film; instantly recognizable as icons. These Great Monuments, we are told, represent America's hopes and dreams, art and commerce, materialism and spiritualism, folly and fame.

Cadillac Ranch is one of them. Professional authors and screenwriters know a pre-baked, easy-to-get symbol when they see it. Who are we to buck the trend?

Standing along Route 66 west of Amarillo, Texas, Cadillac Ranch was invented and built by a group of art-hippies imported from San Francisco. They called themselves The Ant Farm, and their silent partner was Amarillo billionaire Stanley Marsh 3. He wanted a piece of public art that would baffle the locals, and the hippies came up with a tribute to the evolution of the Cadillac tail fin. Ten Caddies were driven into one of Stanley Marsh 3's fields, then half-buried, nose-down, in the dirt (supposedly at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza). They faced west in a line, from the 1949 Club Sedan to the 1963 Sedan de Ville, their tail fins held high for all to see on the empty Texas panhandle.

Another photo op fatality. (Darren Collins, victim)

That was in 1974. People would stop along the highway, walk out to view the cars -- then deface them or rip off pieces as souvenirs. Stanley Marsh 3 and The Ant Farm were tolerant of this public deconstruction of their art -- although it doomed the tail fins -- and eventually came to encourage it.

Decades have passed. The Cadillacs have now been in the ground as art longer than they were on the road as cars. They are stripped to their battered frames, splattered in Day-Glo paint barely recognizable as automobiles.

Yet Cadillac Ranch is more popular than ever. It's become a ritual site for those who travel The Mother Road. The smell of spray paint hits you from a hundred yards away; the sound of voices chattering in French, German, and UK English makes this one of the most polyglot places between the UN and Las Vegas. We last visited just after a Texas-size downpour, and yet a steady procession of acolytes trudged through the ankle-deep mud to make their oblations. Many were barefoot, cheerfully slogging through the muck of livestock pee and poo (and parasites) and spray can trash, happy to be there.

Despite its exposed location in an empty field, Cadillac Ranch seems to give its art-anarchists a sense of privacy and anonymity, like a urinal stall in a men's room. Individual painters take a stance facing one of the cars, then let it fly. Surrounding visitors keep their distance, perhaps less out of courtesy than from a desire to stay clear of the spray cloud. The Europeans really seemed to enjoy attacking the cars during our visit, maybe because they've lacked a good graffiti canvas since the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

Tourists are always welcome at Cadillac Ranch. If you bring spray paint, make sure to snap some photos. Because whatever you create at Cadillac Ranch will probably only last a few hours before it's created over by someone else.

One thing I wasn't very impressed with is after people got done spray painting their two cents on the display, they just leave their empty paint cans are on the ground as litter.

While at the Cadillac Ranch Motel and I was sitting in the laundry area because that's where the Wi-Fi was.

I had the laptop on my knee’s kind of like a laptop and it fell and hit the ground as it was on and it never recovered from that.

About a week prior to that I had tried a big stick recovery method where I just took and hit copy everything on the C drive and pasted it to a terabyte.

Later when I was talking to Ben, he said there's a much more streamlined way to do it but I got to take it was about the only way that things were saved.

Again, Ben is my IT guy, he is my son and he said most likely the hard drive was spinning at a high rate when it hit the ground and it just caused the disc to come off its rails if you will.

I mailed him my hard drive and the terabyte.

I said do the best you can and he proceeded to try to save my data.

It is all quite important to me because what I have on that computer is all of my notes that I have created so far for my journal and all the pictures I've taken those far well to some people it doesn't matter but it matters to me so I had hoped he could do something with it in the next week or two I would ask him to try to find new laptop candidate and I bought one for me and one for him he was a Hewlett-Packard with a solid state drive that if it were dropped it wouldn't matter.

The way I remember this at the time he was sort of unemployed and barely getting by so buying him a laptop was sort of like payment for helping me recover all of my data. I think he always had always intended to pay me back but I never made a thing out of it. That's the way it is with Fathers and Sons.

He was able to save all my data and had everything ready for me when we saw him at thanksgiving in Winston Salem.