It seems like my younger years were spent almost entirely looking out a car window. Our family was constantly traveling from California to Texas, then Texas to California, and then New Mexico to Texas and California. If you were able to follow any of that you probably deduced that my family spent a lot of time traveling from our home to visit relatives in other states. No matter our locale we were traveling twice a year to visit our relatives in Vernon, Texas.
Except for the four years we lived in Vernon then we were traveling twice a year to visit our family in California.
Are we lost yet?
Okay, enough of me talking in circles. The story here is that a decade ago my wife and I took a cross country trip from North Carolina to California and we went off course to travel through my old stomping grounds in northern Texas. We spent a day in Vernon where we were treated to one hellacious thunder storm (ah, the memories - I honestly wouldn't have wanted anything less) and a memory filled walk around downtown.
I loved every minute of it.
Our journey up highway 287 towards Amarillo included locations that I remember fondly from my youth. We hit Chillicothe, Quanah, Childress, Memphis, Clarendon and then Claude. Upon entering the town of Claude my wife spotted a Dairy Queen and that meant it was time for an ice cream break. I have to admit that walking into that Dairy Queen was like taking a time machine back to my days in Vernon in the 1970s. The world outside of northern Texas may have changed as the decades passed but this place was just I remembered a Dairy Queen should look. It was so period that I was looking around for the Star Wars collector glasses or a Saturday Night Fever poster or something.
I loved every minute of that.
My lovely lady got here ice cream cone and now our dog Zeus needed to do his business. That provided an opportunity to walk out to the railroad tracks and I took a couple of photos. As was the case inside the Dairy Queen the visuals out by the tracks were just as I remembered all of these northern Texas towns. They all had structures near the tracks for the storage of farm goods and produce along with old rusting cars and other stuff that had to do with either the railroad or farming.
These pictures were taken a decade a go but I could have taken eerily similar photos of the same area in 1977.
And for that I will be forever grateful.
Here are my photos.
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