Day Fifteen: Live from the Home State of Sandy Cheeks

Hello!

Today we spent the ENTIRE day in Amarillo! What a nice change of pace. But even though we were in one place today, it didn’t stop us from jam packing the day with activities.

We started this morning off at Los Cedros Ranch where we had a two hour horse back riding excursion! Joey had only ridden a horse one time, so he was ~nervous~. Fun fact: I took horseback riding lesson as a youth so I was ~not nervous~. The ride was so nice! There was a small group of us, three workers, six adults, and one child. The workers assigned each of us a horse, here I am with Apache:

And Joey was assigned Scout:

And then we were off! They brought us all around the property and to a HUGE canyon. They actually told us that it is the second largest canyon in the country, the only bigger one is the Grand Canyon! Two big canyons on this trip!! We are living. The workers would also stop us at points to tell us about the history of the land and the Native American tribes that used to live in the canyon. It was AWESOME, and we got some free history lessons out of it.

There was also a point where they stopped us and took pictures of everyone, our horses were friends, look how cute:

BUT ANYWAY, eventually our lovely time with the horses ended, and we said goodbye to our pals and moved onto our next adventure: a shower. Imagine two hours on a horse in Texas in July while wearing a long sleeve shirt and jeans. Yeah.

Following the shower, we had some good ole’ authentic Texas BBQ. There really is a charm about Texas, because we walked in and I went up to order my food and they said (imagine thick accent) “have y’all ever eaten here before???” And we were like no, but here’s our order. AND THEN THEY JUST STARTED CUTTING US SAMPLES TO TRY. BIG SLICES OF DIFFERENT MEATS. It was, delicious.

After lunch, we went for a quick stop to Cadillac Ranch. The ranch is an art installation that has literally planted ten Cadillac cars into the ground, and the artists then painted all over them. It seemed like a cool thing to go see, so we took the quick drive over there. As we were walking up, we kept passing people who were like “do you want this can of spray paint??” And being from the NJ/NYC area I was like “no plz don’t talk to me.” But as we approached the cars, I realized that this is an ON GOING art installation!!! Everyone who came to the ranch was adding their own artwork!! What the heck!! How did I miss this!!! People can be genuinely nice and offer you things for free that will enhance your experience at the destination?? What a concept! So eventually we got our hands on some paint and made our own contribution:

I know, we’ve packed a lot into today already and it was only about 3 pm. We knew what we had to do next. Take a super long, and well deserved nap. It was glorious.

After we awoke, we went to find some dinner! Both of the Tex-mex places we wanted to visit were CLOSED, so we were struggling a bit to find somewhere. But don’t worry, we still had a way to keep ourselves entertained. We’re really getting into the song writing thing, here’s the latest:

It’s about horses. Anyway, we finally found a place for dinner and it was AMAZING. And stay in character, Joey ate too much food because he ordered dessert.

To end the night, we made a special trip to the DRIVE-IN! Amarillo has a great drive-in, and they happened to be showing Toy Story 4 tonight, a must watch in my opinion. So we arrived when the gates opened at 8 pm, and hung out until the movie started (which wasn’t until about 9:40!). Drive-in: super cool, Toy Story 4: we both cried, all in all, a good night.