Day two still held a lot of promise even though I wasn’t feeling it. We were going to two states I hadn’t been to yet, Texas and New Mexico, making me so much closer to my all 50 states by 40 goal. I’ll talk about that later. Plus, camping at the Grand Canyon.

Cadillac Ranch, right outside Amarillo, Texas, was our first sight seeing stop. A place I’ve wanted to see for forever and thanks to George Straight, near a town I’ve wanted to visit for forever. Also, it picked up on the Cars theme for the kids and a place they could use some spray paint!

It’s really cool, from an artist’s perspective and for a weird roadside attraction. An art group called Ant Farm masterminded the idea based on a love for the car and the evolution of the cars, mostly the detail of the tail fin . It was installed in 1974 and moved in 1997 to it’s current location. The ten Cadillacs are deteriorating and covered in many layers of paint that make it eerily beautiful. Which I feel makes the commentary of the artists’ stronger. I’m not sure when graffiti started to be encouraged because each Cadillac was painted a certain color at one time but I love this level of interaction. Plus, it’s super fun to watch everyone make their mark on the cars.

The hard part about the stop, there are a lot of people and they are all trying to make their mark and they all want a cool picture. When we walked up I just wanted to take it all in but our boys were beyond excited to get to spray paint something.

So, we let them paint and we stood back watching. All of a sudden I feel cool, wet drops hit my face and arms and as I look to the sky and around trying to figure out what was going on, I see some kid spraying a car with the nozzle about two feet from the car creating a cloud of paint particles that the very tiniest of breezes picked up and put on me, Elle and Eric.

I got the worst of it. My hair, sun glasses, face, camera, clothes, arms, legs and shoes had too many to count red spray paint dots of various sizes. The whole couple of minutes that this happened it caused me to freeze in my tracks, wanting to yell stop and thinking how is this happening to me! Finally, I could move again and looked around to see if anyone else was experiencing this. No one, not a single person was inspecting their body for spray paint splatters. I could feel my anxiety creeping in and hurrying to be done was all I wanted to do.

All of us took turns spraying our names on the cars and trying to get an awesome family picture, that didn’t happen. After using only about a forth of our can of paint we passed it off to the next person coming in and headed down the road to New Mexico.