Quanah Parker Trail Arrow

On The Road To Loiusiana, Day One

In my never-ending quest to find a different path between Santa Fe, NM, and Hammond, LA, that includes minimal Interstate travel, this one is number five. It is actually the route that was our return on the Thanksgiving trip but was abandoned for weather reasons and includes Big Spring and Crockett in Texas.

While driving thru the town of Plains, I spotted a Quanah Parker
Arrow, so I pulled into the Yokum County Building’s parking lot and took a picture. Longtime readers might remember that I have taken photos of these before. I went back through my photos and found 6 more, five of which came from Donna and my Oregon to Mississippi and back trip in 2023. The last one came from our 2018 South Carolina to Tahoe and back, but I didn’t note that one’s town. There are approximately 80 of the arrows, all in Texas, but as far as I can tell there is no list of the cities they are in. There is a list of all 51 counties that have one or more on the website, Quanah Parker Trail, but it hasn’t been updated since 2011 so your mileage may vary.

Santa Fe, NM

World’s Largest Mule Shoe?


Leg 3 on the return trip to Santa Fe.

I got to check off a Roadside America thing today that I missed back in May of this year, the World’s Largest Mule Shoe. I’m not so sure it is even a mule shoe; it is more of a horizontal McDonald’s logo made of cement with mule shoes imbedded in it. The Roadside America write-up’s location led straight to a mule statue, not the big shoe, which is located at the town’s Heritage Center. The center looked like a very interesting place to visit, but because it’s a short hop (comparatively) from Lubbock to Santa Fe, we were there before they opened.

Quanah Parker Arrow, Muleshoe

As a bonus, there was a Quanah Parker Arrow there. Donna and I had taken pictures of a half dozen or so of them on our travels through Texas, but not this particular one.

Road Trip Day 5 – Paris to Amarillo

A 400-mile, 7 hour driving day that included an actual Dunkin’ store, a Cracker Barrel lunch, a mildly disappointing Buc-ees visit, an almost hotel mix-up and four bits of Roadside America.

Back in May of 2023 on Donna’s and my trip to the Napier’s Hometown we were in the Holiday Inn Express across the street from the Dunkin’ in the travel center. When I went in, I walked back out, because there was only one person behind the counter and too many people in line. This time it was me and Sally staying across the street in a Home2 Suites and I stayed because there were two employees behind the counter and no one in there but me. Turns out I probably should have left, they didn’t get the order right, regular means 3 cream – 3 sugar and all I got was 1 of each.

Cracker Barrel didn’t disappoint even though they didn’t have the Pot Roast dinner I wanted; the Sunday Special was chicken pot pie that put Swanson’s to shame. Sally’s trout was also excellent, but I had to take her word for it because she refused to share, (truth be told, she did offer and I declined.)

Turns out this Buc-ees did not have a car wash (aww..) and there were none of the free circle stickers either (crap!), but the rest was terribly weird as advertised.

I almost did the same thing I did once before on a previous trip with an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn property. While trying to follow the somewhat confusing frontage road situations in Texas I pulled into a Holiday Inn, and before I would have embarrassed myself, I checked the reservation on my phone and realized I was in the Holiday Inn lot and I needed to be on the other side of I-40 Business in the Holiday Inn Express.

We stopped at the Texas Best Smokehouse Travel Center in Henrietta, TX to photograph the Dinosaur Parade there. Next was a Quanah Parker Trail Arrow in the town of Quanah, TX. I was here before with Donna and even though I can find no reference to it the blog, I can say with all assurance that we were here on a previous trip because I remember visiting the museum that is in the same parking lot.

After checking in to the hotel, taking an hour to settle in, we went for a semi-long walk around the hotel area, we hopped in the car and grabbed a couple more Roadside America sites near Amarillo that I had never been to before, the giant Tex Randall Statue in Canyon, TX 20 miles south and the Giant Legs of Amarillo on the way back to the hotel.

33,000 Giant Arrows

Today was one of our shorter driving days, only 219 miles, but we had 8 objectives to find on our Roadside America list. We found and photographed five: Flying Fortress of the Plains in Hobbs, NM, Missile Water Towers in Seminole TX, Yard Art & 1935 Triangle-Shaped Gas Station in Snyder, TX and finally the National WASP Museum and Site in Sweetwater, TX. We saw one other, the Uniroyal Gal – Tornadoes Cheerleader in Lamesa, TX, but there were a bunch of folks out front of the tire store so we just drove by.

We didn’t see the Quanah Parker Arrow that was in downtown Seminole because the traffic was pretty busy. When we got to the second one in Snyder, I saw the arrow and its location, I just knew we had seen it before and taken a picture of it already on a previous trip this way. Even though we didn’t get those two, between those two cities, we stumbled on one in the really small town of Gail, which is where the picture above was taken.

There are not 33,000 Quanah Parker Arrows piercing the Texas Plains, just eighty-eight and each denotes a particular site of Comanche and Quanah Parker’s history. Here is an article telling about how they came to be. About halfway along today’s route the Mini crossed over the 33,000 mile mark.