Route 66, the Canadian River Breaks and Palo Duro in 5 Days

Leave Amarillo by 8 on I-40 east, which carries Route 66 here, about an hour and a quarter to McLean. Take the business loop into town for the Devil's Rope and Old Route 66 Museum, open from 9 on Kingsley Street in what was a brassiere factory. One side follows barbed wire from the men who first sold it to doubtful Texas ranchers in the 1870s to the big Panhandle outfits it fenced, and the other keeps the old road's signs and a mock-up diner. Walk a couple of blocks to First Street and the 1929 Phillips 66 station, built to look like a cottage. McLean fought the interstate and was the last Texas town on the road that I-40 went around, and since so little was built after that, much of its downtown still stands. Shamrock is about twenty minutes east. Where the old road meets US-83 is the Tower Station and U-Drop Inn, the Conoco station and cafe of 1936, now the town's visitor center; call for its hours. Have lunch in town, then take US-83 north through Wheeler, about an hour, to Canadian. Before dinner walk the Canadian River Wagon Bridge, 3,255 feet of pin-connected trusses from 1916 and 1923, given a plank deck as a footpath in 2000; the round trip is a little over a mile.

Canadian was laid out by the railroad in 1887 on the river's south bank, and the River Valley Pioneer Museum covers its railroad, ranching and oil years; its hours are not posted, so call first. At 11 the Citadelle opens. It was the town's 1910 Baptist church, bought in 1977 by Malouf and Therese Abraham when it was about to be torn down; they lived in it with their collection for more than thirty years and gave it all to Canadian, which opened it as a museum in 2009. Leave by 1 on US-60, the Canadian River breaks drive, to Miami, where the old Santa Fe depot holds the Roberts County Museum and part of the Mead collection, mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig; call ahead here too. Pampa is twenty-five minutes on. On South Cuyler Street, the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center fills the drugstore where Guthrie worked the soda fountain from 1930 to 1935, and the White Deer Land Museum keeps the land company's 1916 offices and, in its annex, a large Red River War collection. TX-152 crosses the oil field to Borger, where more than 45,000 people arrived within ninety days of the 1926 strike. The Hutchinson County Museum on Main Street is open until 5 and runs from fossils and the first peoples here through the ranches to the oil boom. End the day twenty minutes west at Lake Meredith, for evening light on the breaks.

Be at the visitor center of Alibates Flint Quarries by 9:40 for the 10 o'clock ranger tour, about forty-five minutes from Borger by TX-136, Cas Johnson Road and Alibates Road; in summer the tour starts at 9. The tour is the only way to see the quarries, and it must be reserved. It covers two miles, climbs about 170 feet and takes roughly two hours, up to the pits where the banded flint was dug for thousands of years. The Plains Village people who lived along the river from about 1150 to 1450, probably forebears of the Caddo, Pawnee and Wichita, made blades of it and traded it far beyond the Plains. Wear long trousers and sturdy shoes. Leave by 12:30 on TX-136 and Loop 335, a little over an hour, to Cadillac Ranch, the ten Cadillacs Ant Farm buried nose first in 1974. It stands on private land that its owners leave open: leave the car on the frontage road south of I-40 and go in by the gate. Then follow Route 66 west on I-40, here on the line of the old Ozark Trail, to Vega and its restored Magnolia station on Main Street, and on to Adrian, where the midpoint sign puts Chicago 1,139 miles one way and Los Angeles as far the other. Glenrio is about twenty-five minutes beyond, on the New Mexico line; its buildings are empty and private, so look from the road. Amarillo is an hour and a quarter back. Have dinner on Sixth Street, thirteen blocks of the old road's stations, cafes and storefronts.

Be at the gate of Palo Duro Canyon State Park when it opens at 7:30, about thirty-five minutes from Amarillo by I-27 and TX-217, with a day pass reserved. Park Road 5, which Civilian Conservation Corps crews built in the 1930s, drops from the rim to the floor. On September 28, 1874, Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry came down on the winter camps of Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne families here. Few people were killed, but the soldiers set fire to the lodges and the food put by for winter and captured over 1,400 horses, then shot most of them. With nothing left to winter on, the families went in to the reservations. Start early on the Lighthouse Trail, a walk of 2.8 miles each way over the canyon floor to the sandstone hoodoo. The park puts it at about two hours each way and closes it in heat and after rain, so carry plenty of water. Drive out by 12:30 and take Loop 335 and US-287 east through Claude, about an hour and a half, to the Goodnight Ranch for the 3 o'clock house tour. The Goodnights, Charles and Mary Ann, came to live in the two-story house beside the new railroad in December 1887, and bison from the herd that began with the orphaned calves she had him save in 1878 still graze below the porch. Clarendon is twenty minutes east. On its square stands the Donley County Courthouse, built in 1891 and the oldest courthouse still in use in the Panhandle, with no two sides alike.

At 10 the Saints' Roost Museum opens in the old Adair Hospital, which Cornelia Adair, co-owner of the JA, opened in 1910 for JA hands and their families. Clarendon began in 1878 as a Methodist colony without saloons, and the cowhands gave it the name. The museum has a Red River War exhibit and letters between Quanah Parker and Charles Goodnight, and the one-room house on its grounds is where the hospital kept its segregated waiting room. It closes from 12:30 to 1:30, so leave by 12:15 on TX-70, the canyon drive south, a little over an hour, to Turkey. The Bob Wills Museum is in the old school. Wills cut hair in Turkey between ranch dances before moving to Fort Worth in 1929, and the museum keeps his father's fiddle and the tools from that barbershop; its hours are not posted, so call ahead. TX-86 west and FM 1065 bring you, thirteen miles on, to Caprock Canyons State Park, where the High Plains break off in red canyons. The state's bison herd, which comes down from the Goodnight calves and was brought here in 1997, roams some 10,000 acres and shares the park roads with cars. Walk a short trail in the afternoon, then drive the twenty-five minutes back to Turkey for the night at the 1927 Hotel Turkey.