The 6th Street Massacre is a haunted house built into a 1930’s movie theater. Appropriately enough, the theme of the haunted house is “Stuck in a Horror Movie.” The Haunted House is said to be one of the best in the country and is really popular in October.

Cadillac Ranch is just one of several eccentric road side attractions in Amarillo that have been put together by local oil and media millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 (he prefers the Arabic over the Roman numeral). The “ranch” is actually ten graffiti-covered cars upended and half-buried in dusty field along the I-40. Visitors are encouraged to leave their mark on the ranch by spray painting graffiti of their own on the cars.

Another one of Stanley Marsh 3’s eccentric roadside art projects is the Dynamite Museum, which consists of hundreds of mock traffic signs scattered throughout the city. Some display non-sequiturs or pictures or bizarre messages like “Road Does Not End.”

Yet another of Stanley Marsh 3’s roadside artworks is the Ozymandias on the Plains, a bizarre takeoff on a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It’s a statue of two legs, broken halfway up, standing atop a plaque with a fraudulent account of the origins of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” and a false explanation of how the statue was destroyed (a prank by a rival football team from Lubbock, naturally). In the spirit of Marsh 3’s works, the legs are frequently vandalized by locals who paint athletic socks on them.

South of Amarillo you’ll find the Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the US. Palo Duro stretches 190 kilometers/120 miles long, with an average width of 9.6 kilometers/6 miles, and a maximum depth of 245 meters/800 feet. If you’d like to stay overnight, the park has cabins for rent, or you can bring in an RV or pitch a tent. Hiking and mountain bike trails are clear and well-maintained. For a real cowboy experience, you can rent horses on-site.