Maddie, Gracie and I took a road trip last month to Oklahoma City for a gymnastics meet; I like to tack on a few extra sightseeing adventures whenever possible when we travel for gymnastics, and one of the places we stopped on this trip was Cadillac Ranch. Are you familiar with Cadillac Ranch?
Located just outside Amarillo, TX (actually two miles further west than it used to be because it was moved in 1997, trash and all) it's an art installation that was created in 1974 by Ant Farm, a collective of hippie artists/architects/eccentric millionaires. It's a collection of ten Cadillacs ranging from model years 1948-1963, most purchased at junkyards and buried tailfins up at the angle of the Great Pyramids of Giza. It's never the same, because the whole point is to participate by spray painting them when you pass through on I-40. It's been repainted many times over the years—occasionally back to the original car colors, once all black when a member of Ant Farm died, all pink in honor of Stanley Marsh's (the eccentric millionaire) wife's birthday—WHOO BOY, if only Bridget could have seen that. If you look closely in Pixar's Cars, the mountains above Radiator Springs are shaped to mimic the Cadillac line of Cadillac Ranch.
I totally forgot to buy spray paint before we left (but please note I had an enormous gymnastics "hair kit" packed and didn't forget a single thing for that) but I decided we still had to stop to see it; a nice family leaving as we were walking up donated their half-empty cans of spray paint to the girls so they got the full experience. With some bonus Amarillo wind. It is super windy in the middle of west Texas.
Gracie made sure that Bridget was included, even though Bridget wasn't technically included since this was the first weekend the Dillows were split between gymnastics meets in the same weekend (Matt did gymnastics hair successfully, too).
I was quite content to take 8000 pictures.
We didn't see this sign (symbolic? tongue-in-cheek?) until we left our donated spray paint by the fence for some other gymnastics mama with a well-stocked hair kit and no spray paint. Well-played, state of Texas. Well-played.
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