Dinosaurs at Tucumcari - Friday, 5th June

I’ve always wanted to visit Tucumcari, New Mexico, because I love the name. Apparently it’s loosely named after the Comanche word for “lookout”, which is highly possible considering the large mesa of the same name which overlooks the town.  Not that I knew anything about it and it’s fairly small but home to the only Dinosaur Museum that we’ve ever visited.

We found a well-kept, low cost campground called “Cactus RV Park”

en route to Kansas and are sure that we had the best site - 90’ long grassed pull-through with trees on either side.  Most sites were mostly gravel without shade but the owner and his son had planted more young trees and tended them carefully.  They like overnighters and don’t have showers or bathrooms, unusual for many RV Parks, but they also don’t have permanent or seasonal homes there, as many campgrounds do.  We also liked the location within walking distance of Del’s Family Restaurant (tasty home-cooking).

The Park is also home to the old Cactus Motor Lodge, once very attractive in its heyday and probably one of the first Motels along the old “Mother Road”, aka Route 66. The Lodge is listed on America’s National Register of Historic Buildings rather like the Listed Buildings in the UK, which means that it can be restored but not pulled down or altered and is unfortunately deteriorating slowly due to lack of funds. 

 

Affiliated with the Mesalands Community College is the Dinosaur Museum.  Many of the fossils and dinosaur bones have been found within 28 miles of Tucumcari.  Within the museum the laboratory has a glass frontage for us to peer at the students or for them to check out the visitors. Bronze skeletons of the prehistoric creatures were created in the College foundry and are major works that took thousands of hours to complete. Poor Howard, looks as though he almost got chomped by one! We were very impressed with the whole display of replica dinosaurs, fossilized dinosaur eggs found in China and artwork. With less funding than many museums in large cities

it had very professional exhibits; neatly organized with a digging pit for kids and a well-stocked shop for all ages. 

It also displays one of the world’s only “Torvosaurus” skeletons, a huge creature, this one about 40’ long with sharp, savage looking teeth and is somewhat related to the well known Tyrannosaurus rex. It was too big for me to photograph but just look at the height of another dinosaur leg in the photo. This certainly brought back memories of “Jurassic Park” and glad they’re not roaming around now.

Before we left Tucumcari, we stopped to talk to an old man who sat, would you believe, in a rolling office chair  near the front yard (garden) gate.  He  had worked in large scale construction and was in charge of all the hot crushed mix that was used to lay many of the roads and much of newest Albuquerque Airport terminal. Around the yard roamed 7 small, yappy dogs (one laying across his shoulder) three old cats and rabbits, he said, in the back.  Many years ago he owned cows and a 900 lb hog that he butchered and then had to use a “come along” to haul it up for gutting.  I had to ask Howard what this was and he explained that it was a pulley used for raising large objects.  He would have talked a lot longer but was due to leave for an annual reunion with his family;  how many, I asked “oh, about 75 altogether”, unsure whether that was small or large for the USA.

Then, the next morning as we were due to leave we met a Charles McCollum, who also wanted to stay and chat.  He had a home in Tennessee and a ranch in Colorado and bred Arabian horses.  He was proud to tell us that he owned a business employing 24 women - presumably because his customers preferred the sound of women’s voices over the phone but I thought it was because he thought of himself as a bit of a stud.  An hour later, we managed to hitch up and head diagonally east, passing as quickly as possible through the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. We reached the border of Kansas in late afternoon, reaching Liberal, 213 miles later, crossing yet another time zone into central time, now only 2 hours away from the east coast.