Safely home

Miss D., Old NFO and myself arrived home safely this afternoon, after a very enjoyable few days in Amarillo.  We learned a lot, ate a lot (my, does that town have a lot of good restaurants!), and had a great time.

We spent a couple of hours this morning deep in the basements of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, examining a number of their firearms, swords and other weapons that aren’t on public display.  It’s a fascinating collection, and we found some real historical gems.  I’ll do a separate blog post about some of them later, when I’ve had a chance to get the pictures organized.  Suffice it to say that a number of the guns I mention in my Western novels were gleefully played with examined.  To cap it all, Old NFO and I identified several guns in the public collection that were wrongly or incompletely labeled, plus what looks like a fascinatingly mismatched Zulu assegai, of which more later.  We also found two uniforms in the current World War I anniversary exhibition that were wrongly described.  Alma Boykin and the museum curator took notes, so I think the errors will be fixed in short order.

(Edited to add:  You can read Alma’s take on the proceedings here.)

To our great interest, we learned that the museum is the curator of the battlefield sites of the First and Second Battles of Adobe Walls, iconic moments in Western history.  They do an annual bus tour of the sites, with narration.  We’re going to try to get onto this year’s trip.  I wonder if they’d let NFO and myself fire a salute, in honor of the participants?  (Yeah, right!)

We tried a different route on the journey home.  The GPS navigation system insisted that it would be faster to drive along I-40 through western Oklahoma, then head south into Texas, rather than stay in Texas all the way.  Well, it wasn’t, and the route was a lot more boring than the one we’re used to;  but at least we’ve tried it now.  In future, we’ll stick to the old reliable route.

We’re all tired tonight, but it was a good research trip.  Normal blogging will resume tomorrow.

Peter