ok, yeah, we took a little while getting these posted...

this batch is from the trip we took in the middle of april, going from albuquerque to alamogordo to visit my parents, then through el paso to d/fw (to go to her dentist, which was the reason for all of this), then back via amarillo... also, a few pics of the apt...

(btw, if you just want to see the pics and skip the story, they are in the usual place... though, this is an interesting one...)


as i said, there are a few pics of the apt, so, let's get those out of the way first...

the drawings and pics of us over the fireplace...




and three pics of the bar as it is now...
(having had a fairly respectable bar when we lived in vegas, it hardly seems accurate to call this a bar, but, it will have to do until we think of a better name for it...)




ok, so, the trip...

as i said, first was alamo...
and i had miss mary take a couple pics of me and my father in "the pit", his corner of the house... too bad they came out so dark... we are in the market for a proper digital camera so these things won't be a problem anymore...




while we were there, we went up to the space hall of fame thingy... pretty much the same as when i was growing up there, but, they had this fascinating new thing called a "whisper dish"...



two dishes, like 10, 15 yards or so apart, facing each other, with a pole standing in front of each, with a ring on top of the pole... the first pic is the dish i stood at, the second, the dish she was at, taken from where i was standing (wish i had had her stand in front of it for scale)...
the instructions say to have one person stand in front of one and whisper into the ring while the other holds their ear to their ring...
amazing is not too strong a word for it...
she sounded like she was right next to me, or rather, like her mouth was at the ring i had my ear to...

trippy...


ok, no pics of d/fw, plenty of those in the previous directories, so, we now skip straight to amarillo...

firstly, there was the hotel she found...
i basically laugh at little tourist coupon books, maybe that is why i don't get cool deals like this...
she found this one that, with the coupon, was only going to be like $23... i did not expect much... boy was i wrong...
i cannot remember the name of it, since it was over a month ago, but, this place was huge and had this massive courtyard with a translucent ceiling over it, with a pool, jacuzzi, a whole convention space sort of thing, and even a raised platform with video games and a pool table... this was all surrounded by the rooms on three floors... and the rooms were huge, too... we have stayed at a nice hotel or two and i liked this one better... front door of our room went to the courtyard, back door went to parking...
anyway, here are the pics...



then, get this... talk about modern amenities... they had this by-the-minute internet station that had a keyboard and all, or you could just connect wirelessly and it had some nifty software onboard...
alas, memory also fails me on the pricing for it...




ok, now the weird story...

we were going down what i think was 2nd street when i noticed an odd sign... like a diamond-shaped traffic sign... odder still, it was in someone's yard... what was odd about the sign was what it said...


"his movements are dull and graceless
he reminds me of a factory machine"


huh?

then a bit later, i saw another in someone else's yard...
and then another...

i have a note in my psion that we saw most of them in the mcmasters/amarillo road area...

enough talk, here are some pics of a few of them...



is that weird or what?

ok, then, we were going down amarillo road, headed out of town, satisfied we had gotten pics of some of the more interesting ones (once we started driving around and looking, we found there were dozens of them, no two exactly alike, yet only in this one part of the town), when we saw one on the side of the road, so we stopped and got this pic of it...



as i am standing there, i happened to see something off in the distance...
on sort of a hill quite a ways out, among quite a few trees on the hill, i noticed that what i at first thought were more trees were actually black letters that must have been at least six feet tall...
i took a pic, you may see what i mean and perhaps get an idea of the scale, but, you will not be able to read them... (again, we need a real cam, one with ZOOM!)



the letters say "ACTUAL SIZE"...

curiouser and curiouser, as alice was wont to say...


we were very tempted to hang out a while and maybe ask around to see what the deal with all these bizarre signs was, but, we were already running late, with a ways to drive still, and figured it was probably nowhere near as interesting as it appeared, so, we figured we would just take our pics and look it up on the web when we got home...
of course, we found no info...

if anyone knows anything about this or has any theories, we are all ears... click on the comment link below or use the chatterbox on the left menu... (dk/dp users need the "new window" bookmarklet for the chatterbox post button to work...)


ok, anyway, we have lived in texas for four or five years and hated most of it (except for the amazing laserdisc market the metroplex has going), and we knew this was the last trip into texas we will probably ever have to take, so, we marked the exact time we could say we left texas the last time (2:30pm, local time, april 15th 2004) and took pics of "the crossing", as it were...




and that is pretty much it...


oh, except one more pic...

i used to love travel, but, i don't anymore, it seems... too long and boring, not to mention my little motion sickness issues... so, for this trip, i interrupted my day-counting and success record and acquired the one and only thing that has ever worked for me to alleviate those issues...

which required a "pacifier", as i called it in the last couple years of my full-time indulgence, which ended two years previous to this trip, almost to the day...

this particular pacifier even sort of looks like a pacifier, and it is exactly like the one i had back in the road trip with my brother many years ago...




and if you don't know what i mean, it doesn't matter anyway...


well, that is it... there are no may pics yet, but, when there are, i think i will do another entry like this... and i am going to link to this entry from the ALLPICS.html page that i always make up for the batches of pics...