I thought this little video was worth a little more comment than just for personal use.  We were at The Big Texan in Amarillo, Texas which was a place I really wanted to visit while we were in that part of the world.  I would have liked to have said that I enjoyed it more than I did.  In truth, it was a tough day.  We had come into town with our RV just one day after the second major snowstorm had ravaged the area and I had our rig wedged into our campsite in a way that I wasn’t sure I would ever get it out of until the snow melted.  We had picked the RV park next to The Big Texan because they offered free limo rides to the restaurant and they had a nice indoor heated pool.  I was hoping to get really refreshed during our stay there but as it turned out the pool was broken, the limos were all snowed in, and I spent most of the day digging a path for our RV to park in 6 inches of snow.  By the time we arrived at The Big Texan to eat I had just had an important oversea call that went on for nearly 2 hours and with everything else, I was pretty stressed out, worried that we might end up stuck in Amarillo for several days.  The food was great, the atmosphere was wonderful, and these guys came to our table to sing whatever song we wanted.  My wife picked Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” and for a moment, we were really touched by these guys.  It was a tough day but during that song, I was reminded of several good things that are worth a mention. 

I’ll never be the one who will say that vacations are meant for relaxing.  For me, they are opportunities to push yourself and to come out of our comfort zone a bit.  And we certainly did that during an RV trip through the American Southwest.  We are new to the RV life so when my wife wanted to go to the desert for this particular trip, we had no idea that it was going to be zero degrees every day we were traveling and that we would only see temperatures above freezing a few times.  But we survived and figured things out as we went along.  Our RV did really well in the snow and extreme cold and I was proud of our trip as we headed north back toward Texas.  But we were also very tired by that point and the snowstorm that had just hit there was a bit too much.  We had no choice but to have a good attitude about it, because we had a long way to get home and letting down our vigilance just wasn’t an option.  But to say the least, I was on pins and needles.  Coming into that campground we were literally driving on a sheet of ice.  Nobody in Amarillo was doing much of anything so leaving our campground for The Big Texan was tough.  It would have been easier to just stay at the RV and cook some dinner, go to bed and get up early hoping to get out of our site.  Getting into the site was tough, getting out would be worse.  But I’m glad we did end up going to The Big Texan.  If for no other reason but to hear that song played at our table. 

My wife has always liked that Dolly Parton song, but given all that has been going on, it had more meaning this time for me.  It was cool to see so many cowboy hats moving around in the background.  It was such a great American atmosphere and the content of the song reminded me how resilient Americans are.  With all the victimhood that is behind progressive politics, the real solution to our future was in the contents of that song, where if you have a good family and some love in the people around you, then you are one of the richest people in the world.  With progressives being so anti-family this song was a reminder that no matter what they tried to do in order to change the nature of America, people would always be people.  People would always love a coat of many colors just because their mamma made it.  Hearing that song in such a cool place after such a terribly hard day, it just rang home.  It reminded me that was precisely why were traveled so far, was to change our perspective in such a way that a treasured old song like that would take on new meaning.  Over the years, some of my best ideas have come from such pressure extremes, which is why I’m always so eager to do things out of the box so often.  But they don’t often come out so positively.  

We went home from The Big Texan that night feeling pretty good about things.  We went to bed at a reasonable hour, even though it was -2 below outside we had the temp inside the RV at 80 degrees.  We had our TV running to help us sleep and once 5 AM came around I watched The Weather Channel to see how our day’s drive would be and started working to hook up the rig to leave.  It took quite a lot of work to get out of that spot, but after a while, we eventually made it out to the sheet of ice and were able to spin our wheels enough to inch our way to some decent traction.  We checked out before daybreak and were headed back down the highway within a few minutes, never to look back.  For the next 500 miles travel was rough, the water lines were burst everywhere, especially around Oklahoma City.  There was nowhere to use the restroom.  We were at least able to get fuel, but our trip all the way to Springfield Missouri as I have said in a previous post was pretty rough.  That was the second day in a row where we had white knuckled the driving and we needed a decent night’s sleep.  That is why our trip to Bass Pro Shops in Missouri was so wonderful. 

However, the difficulty under which we heard that song at The Big Texan is an evening I will never forget.  It was far from the best night of my life, but under the tenuous conditions, that song sounded like a little bit of heaven with some fresh perspective that I found very useful.   My wife of course loved hearing the song, but even beyond that, it had an otherworldly kind of feel to it, as if everything we had done during the trip culminated into that little message.  It wouldn’t have felt that way if we just heard the song on the radio.  I think we needed all the trouble to go with it.  And I’m glad we did.  Days later after we were home and back to our normal comforts, I think we both reflected on that night with some reverence that we otherwise wouldn’t have had.  Certainly, we were much richer from the experience, just like that Coat of Many Colors. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior
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