Peace! (On Route 66)

So we were about half-hour outside of Amarillo, Texas, on Interstate 40, driving parallel to the famous Route 66, headed to our next stop in Oklahoma when it caught my eye.

A Peace Sign rising up from the dusty brown grass.

“What the heck?”

Driving in our peace-sign covered Tinker Tour minivan, it didn’t seem like we had a choice. We had to check it out. And boy are we glad we did.

Hard to describe. Cool. Weird. Inspired. Fun(ky). Thought-provoking. Sacred.

The work of one Richard Daniel Baker, born June 19, 1951, there’s apparently not much known about the place.

Pablo Shapiro’s photo of the Peace Sign Park on Route 66.

Pablo Shapiro, the self-described “guerilla poet, high plains drifter with camera, urban archeologist, dreamer, epistemologist, seeker of symmetry in an imperfect world and documentarian of things arcane,” put together about the only piece I could find about the place — and a fine one at that — for his Hobo’s Travelogue, and I’ll leave you to check it out if you’d like to know as much about the place as is apparently known for now.

In the meantime, until you find yourself on Route 66, 24 1/2 miles east of Amarillo, here’s our take.