The Big Texan

Free 72 oz. Steak proclaims billboards for hundreds of miles on every road leading to Amarillo, Texas.  The Big Texan is an old style tourist trap-a place with a gimmick and a ton of odds and ends for sale.  In addition to a large dinning room reminiscence of Gunsmoke’s Long Branch, there is a pretty large gift shop filled with all manner of western themed items.  Among the more interesting things was a series of mugs in the shape of rattlesnakes, one of them just like the one Craig Ferguson has on his desk on the Late, Late Show. The…

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James Coney Island

I like hotdog places.  They all have that kind of carnival feel to them.  Bright colors and outgoing people working beind the counter. And then they sell hotdogs, so what’s not to like? The James Coney Island is a Houston hotdog place that started doing business 1923.  For some reason a couple of Greeks opened a New York style hotdog joint in Texas and I’m glad that they did. I had a couple of Sonora Dogs and those were pretty sweet.  This is a hot dog that is pretty popular in Mexico, hence the whole Sonora thing.  It’s a hotdog…

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Pops in Arcadia, Oklahoma

Pops reminds me of the gas station from the first Toy Story. A kind of futurist place with tall white gas pumps and a very high slanted roof.  Of course, the most distinctive feature of Pops is the giant Coke bottle sculpture out front, which is lite with bright colors at night. Pops is on Route 66 just a few miles north of Oklahoma City.  It’s easy to look out at the tiny road out front and image that going one way you would end up in Chicago and going the other was you’d end up in Los Angeles.  Of…

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