Our time in Texas with the Killer B's is going to be brief but if you're in Texas you have to do the cowboy thing so our first stop was a horse ranch. The pace was decidedly methodical but these weren't trail horses so you could easily wander off on your own and channel your inner Clint Eastwood. We were also fortunate to be skirting the second-largest canyon in the United States, the Palo Duro Canyon. It is roughly 70 mi (110 km) long and reaches a width of 20 mi (32 km) at places. The owner of the ranch was part Comanche so she filled us in on the tragic history of the canyon. The land had remained under American Indian control until a military expedition was sent in 1874 to remove the Indians to reservations in Oklahoma. The Mackenzie expedition captured about 1,200 of the Indians' horses and slaughtered them in nearby Tule Canyon. Without horses the Comanche and Kiowa conceded and left the area.

The horse ride was a must do but the primary mission during our short foray into The Lone Star State was to ensure that Dave B had a Texas birthday dinner that would stop just short of completely blocking his arteries (after years of fish and chip dinners we're not sure what we have to work with). For most of his 65 years this unabashed carnivore has been tearing his way through all kinds of meat challenges but everything in Texas is bigger and the feature item on the menu at The Big Texan Steak Ranch was a 72 oz steak (for the weight lifters in the crowd, that's 4.5 lbs or 2 kilograms of fatty meat) plus all of the extras that, if eaten within 60 minutes, was free of charge. There's a Meat Eater Hall of Fame near the entrance, and in one of those 'are you kidding me moments', at the very top of the list is a 126 lb woman who finished the meal in just over 4 minutes (she ate over 3.5% of her body weight in meat alone). Mark D, who views a large pizza as an appetizer, might be the only person I know who could make this illustrious Hall, but on the night we were there, two challengers were tearfully crying "no mas" well before the clock expired.

DH and I suspended our animal agriculture protest (watch Cowspiracy on Netflix if you get a chance) since the menu at The Big Texan Steak Ranch was effectively big steak, bigger steak, and biggest steak. The environmental damage that the burgeoning cattle industry is wreaking on the planet is both incredible and, despite being our top environmental problem, little understood. It would seem to be reasonable sacrifice to ask people to cut back but when we tried to recruit Dave to the cause, he couldn't hear us through the meat chewing sounds that Deb B was making (and to be fair we have persuaded exactly 0 people to join us in our no-red-meat crusade so far). We had started off the night by draining a bottle of something called Kentucky Fire that we had picked up earlier in our trip, so we made a number of bad/unhealthy dining decisions and, through the haze, thought that tequila shots for dessert was a really good idea. DH was there to successfully herd us all back to the hotel and, after a laugh-filled birthday party, we faced the morning after reminder of why we don't drink like twenty year olds anymore.

Hangovers in tow and suitably armed with spray paint cans, we made our way over to the last big Route 66 site that we were going to visit for some time- the iconic Cadillac Ranch. Carol C, who spends her free time spraying outlandish graffiti all over her neighbours garage doors in Australia, would love this place. You are actually encouraged to leave your very temporary mark on this 'art' installation- when originally installed in 1974 it was supposed to represent a number of evolutions of the Cadillac (particularly the tail fins) from 1949 to 1963, half-buried nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The cars were briefly "restored" to their original colors by the Hampton Inn folks in a sponsored series of Route 66 landmark restoration projects. The new paint jobs and even the plaque commemorating the project lasted less than 24 hours without fresh graffiti (coincidently just after a tour bus of Aussie visitors from Melbourne passed by??). It's a great piece of participatory art but we were put off by the garbage left by previous morons- paint cans everywhere despite a bin right at the entrance way. Expect a fence around this landmark if that keeps up.