Oct 4, from Santa Fe (New Mexico) to Amarillo/Trade Winds (Texas)

After breakfast at the Santa Fe hotel, we do some sight seeing downtown, and admire the Mexican style houses, churches and ambiance.

Soon we head back to the airport, to prepare for our flight of today.

Air Center is a very professional FBO with all the possible support we can think of.

Plenty of old planes parked on the tarmac.

There is lots of construction going on all over the airport, limiting our movements as we taxi out to the active Rwy.

After take off, we climb to FL 95 and head East towards Texas, with a very strong tailwind. We cruise at almost 150 kts/hr for over one hour.

We feed again the bird in Vega (Texas), our entry point to our departure State more than 2 weeks ago. We have now covered 20 States in this first part of our Project.

 We cross again very large areas of desert or semi desert areas, with a couple of water dams spread out, which seem to be on a very low level of water

We also see for the first time some clouds…
...an incredible view after 2 weeks of a totally clear sky, except for a few moments in MN and fog in CA.

We also see huge cow feeding farms

We proceed to Amarillo (Texas) where before landing on a peripherical airport (Tradewinds Field), we can see below us downtown Amarillo with its high rise buildings. We stop for the day.

Lisa, the airport manager, borrows us the courtesy car so we can go to the world famous “The Big Texan Steak Ranch”, which since 1960, serves steaks of all types and sizes. 

This restaurant is along Interstate 40, which overlaps in part Route 66

On the way to the steak house...

The specialty at “The Big Texan Steak Ranch” is a 72 oz steak (= 2.08 kgs), without any bone or fat.

If you are able to eat it with all the sides (potato, salad, bread) within one hour, then the meal is free.

If not, it costs you 100 USD.

We happen to walk into the place as 2 candidates just started on their incredible food poisoning experience….

To make it more dramatic, the candidates are seated on an elevated portion of the restaurant for better viewing by the other patrons of the restaurant, and their performance is filmed.

And believe it or not, one of them managed to eat all of the food in less than 1 hour.

 I spoke to the big man in the red shirt while he was working on his “half cow” (the clock on the back is a countdown from 60 minutes to ZERO, he has just started) and spoke to him again after he finished with his meal, at which point he said he was considering having a desert. The limits are unlimited…

(For the record, the fastest ever person to eat the whole meal managed to do it in less than 10 minutes, but we don t know if he ended up at the hospital).

There are more "normal" steaks on the menu, and our early dinner meal is much more reasonable than the 72 oz steak.

And although there is a special Sam's place on the way, we decide to leave it as another "clin d'oeil" for today.

We drop the courtesy car back at the airport, and the hotel shuttle lady driver picks us up just before sunset, for a well deserved night rest. No more beers tonight.