I drove from Tucson to Tucumcari, but it took four days.
This morning I called my Route 66 advisor for specific locations of sights in Texas. Our discussion, and her reminder of what driving through Kansas was like, was enough to convince me to continue along what was 66, at least for another day, and skip Liberal, Kansas.
Tucumcari is a lot more attractive at night, with the well-kept neon glowing on every sign. In daylight the chipped and rusted signs aren't hidden by the pretty lights.
I didn't bring any of my Route 66 books with me, but I do have a small book self-published by someone at the Chicago AAA office. It has no directions, but it does have some town names and sights to see.
Finding 66, where it wasn't overridden by I-40, was easy in New Mexico, since it ran right beside the highway. In San Jon I looked for a collapsed gas station, pumps and all, but it seems to have been cleaned up and reopened. I did see a closed one there, with pumps, bearing a 61 cent per gallon price, but this means it's only been closed for ten years or so.
Not far east of San Jon the pavement disappeared. I didn't want to turn back, but I remembered my lost hours of a few days ago on unpaved roads and was not happy. Luckily this road was fairly level and I was about to drive between 40 and 50 miles per hour.
I completely missed Bard, but I saw a mailbox with a hand-painted Route 66 address on it, so I knew I was on the right course.
I saw something on the road and moved so it would pass between my wheels (I was driving down the middle of the road, anyway). Just before I passed over it I noticed that it seemed to be a tortoise. I backed up and saw that it was. I got out of the car and carefully picked it up by the top of the shell. This careful handling paid off, since he either took instinctive self-defense measures or was very scared.
I took him to the side of the road he had been facing and put him down. As I carried him he stuck out his head and front legs, but he again retracted them as I set him down.
I then thought that I should have taken a picture of him in the middle of the road, but he'd seemed todislike the trip to the side so much that I didn't want to move him again. Instead I just photographed him in the grass.
At the intersection with New Mexico 93 I saw the remains of an old service station. There was nothing else near, and there were no paved roads. Painted on the side of the building in very faded letters was "CLEAN RESTROOMS".
I think this was the point at which I got into a road exploration mindset. Instead of being just something to do, following Route 66 was now something that I wanted.
I am going to digress a bit about Route 66. Those that are familiar with it can skip ahead a few paragraphs.
U.S. 66 was the main highway between Chicago and Los Angeles. It was the primary driving route between the northeastern and midwestern U.S. and southern California. It has been nicknamed The Mother Road and Main Street USA. It was decommissioned in pieces as it was replaced by the interstate highway system. The last official piece disappeared in the early 1980s.
Some people take this entirely too seriously. There are Route 66 associations in every state and many towns along the way. Some people drive at least some of it every year. They hold rallies and group drives and get custom license plates and wear 66 clothing. I think this is a bit much, and I don't feel that way about the road.
Route 66 has also become a Big Thing To Do for many Americans and people from other countries, although not as big as many businesses along the road would like.
I do, however, think that the course of 66 is the best place to explore the road culture I mentioned in the introduction. All along the way are businesses, or the empty shells of former businesses, that supported the cross-country-driving American from the 1930s to the 1960s. There are service stations, motels, diners, and tourist traps, or the ruins of them, in dozens and dozens of town along the way.
In towns that I visited earlier on this trip, like Flagstaff, Holbrook, Santa Rosa, and Tucumcari, many of these businesses are still around, in one form or another. In others, no longer close to the interstate, most or all of the businesses are gone.
While I don't recommend making 66 a regular hobby, I do think that driving parts of it are an experience not to be missed.
The digression ends here.
I continued along the dirt road to the New Mexico-Texas border. In Glen Rio, New Mexico, was a small closed post office. A few feet away, in Glen Rio, Texas, were two closed cafes, one claiming, on a big decaying sign, to be the first cafe in Texas. The road then rejoined I-40.
In New Mexico the brown markers had said "Historic Route 66". In Texas they said "Old Route 66". I think I like the latter better.
Almost all the way across the Texas Panhandle 66 is an access road running within thirty feet of I-40. There are two problems with this:
Neither of these posed much of a problem. I didn't have an accident, and I didn't miss anything important. I did, however, watch a rock chip my windshield before I decided to stay off the interstate as much as possible.
(We are under a Severe Storm Warning and a Tornado Watch at the moment, and I am now hearing thunder, so I am saving often. I hope I can get this uploaded tonight. I also hope my car or the motel doesn't blow away.)
I saw many signs advertising a Stuckey's ahead. The cute thing about these signs was that parts of them were "erased" with white paint, although they were readable once I got close. My favorite one had "FT LONG" before "HOT DOGS" painted over.
In Adrian I got gas at a Phillips 66 station, which seemed appropriate, and drove past the "Route 66 Midway Cafe".
I saw a very odd looking thing south of the highway: a tall white column with bracing wires connected to the top, with two flat bowed attachments connected at the top and bottom. It looked like a giant egg beater with only two blades. Along the shaft were painted USDA and DOE. I thought that maybe it was a windmill of some kind, but the USDA part didn't match.
I saw a sign that said "United States Department of Agriculture Research Center Traffic Only", so I turned down it, parked in a visitor spot, and went inside the office.
There was no receptionist, but a woman in an office right next to the lobby area got up from her desk and asked if she could help me.
"What is that thing?" I asked, pointing in its general direction.
"The wind turbine?" she asked.
"Well, that answers my question," I answered.
She asked if I wanted information about it. When I said yes, she went into the office adjacent to hers and got me a booklet about these wind turbines in general and a flyer about theirs in particular. She appeared to be the secretary for the director of the facility.
My curiosity sated, I got back on the road.
The Cadillac Ranch, for those who want specific directions, is a bit west of exit 64. This is just west of the sprawl of Amarillo. It is on the south side of the interstate.
The Cadillac Ranch is a collection of '50s Cadillacs, buried nose down in a field. They have been vandalized over the years, covered with graffiti and missing doors, windows, and other parts.
I couldn't drive out to the cars. I had to park and walk over 100 yards into a rippling field of wheat (or some other grain). Most of the path was wet and was black, sticky, shoe-sucking mud. I got my pictures, but I had to change shoes when I got back to my car.
My only stop in Amarillo was the Big Texan Steak Ranch, the very place I'd seen so many billboards for: Free 72oz Steak!
It is impossible to miss the Big Texan. Even if I hadn't seen the giant cowboy sign, I'd have seen the huge yellow building just north of the highway.
In addition to the 72oz Steak, one must also eat the salad, shrimp cocktail, and the side dishes in an hour to get it free. Failed attempts cost $50.
If they had been required to serve me in an hour, then I'd have almost gotten the $50 myself. The service was horribly slow. On those occasions when I actually saw my waitress in the mostly empty restaurant, she apologized and said that they were very shorthanded.
I got a tiny 5oz steak. When the waitress returned and asked if I'd like dessert, I said, "that depends on how long it will take me to get it."
(The cable just went out due to the storm. Time to save.)
The Big Texan Steak Ranch is a popular and famous attraction. It doesn't really qualify as a route 66 stop, since it was opened in 1960 and moved to its I-40 location in 1970, but it is still a must. Maybe the service will be better some other time.
I saw several other steakhouses in Amarillo, including an Outback (Australian themed) and Kabuki (Japanese themed). I guess Texans like their beef.
East of Amarillo I saw a weathered sign that read
PROTECT LIBERTY
U.S. CONSTITUTION
OPPOSE UN -- NEW WORLD ORDER
There's a new attraction in the panhandle! Just before Groom I saw a sign that said "LARGEST CROSS IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE NEXT EXIT". (I was on the access road, but I could still read the signs on the interstate.)
Sure enough there was HUGE cross just west of Groom. It seems to be made of that ribbed metal used in prefabricated office construction.
In Groom I saw the 66 Courts motel. The Golden Spread was gutted, either being restored or being salvaged. East of Groom is a water tower leaning so far to one side that two of the legs are off the ground. It was built this way.
I've just edited out a bunch of the things I wrote about closed cafes and service stations. They were fascinating to me, but I don't think they make for good reading. I'll keep those notes for something else.
McLean, Texas, for a town of 800, has some interesting things to see. The first things I saw were the Cactus Inn and the Cowboy Cafe. McLean seemed to want to make westbound travelers feel they had reached The West.
66 is split into two one-way streets through McLean, so I ended up doing some looping. Next I saw a very old tiny Phillips 66 station, lovingly restored by the McLean Old Highway 66 Association.
The highlight of McLean, and one of the highlights of the Texas part of 66, is the combination Devil Wire and Route 66 museum.
The sign on the door said that the museum closed at 4pm, and it was 4:50 when I arrived. An elderly man came to the door and told me to come on in, that he wouldn't close as long as there were people there.
After making sure I signed the guest book, he pointed out the different areas of the museum. He told me that the building used to be a bra factory. I guess it lost support from the company.
Devil wire is a nickname for barbed wire, that invention that changed the west. The museum has hundreds of samples of antique barbed wire, much of it over 100 years old. It shows the different styles and how they were made. There are collections of tools for use with barbed wire, stretchers and cutters, as well as art made from barbed wire. There are other things collected here, too, like dozens of cast iron fence post tops.
The 66 portion of the museum was small but cute. It had dozens of magazines, many of them foreign, that mentioned the road. It had a mockup of a diner, complete with dummies for a waitress and a short order cook for a photo opportunity, a Phillips 66 gas pump, and the big snake head from a deceased snake farm.
I bought a wooden plaque with six short pieces of antique barbed wire on it from the gift shop for $6. This seemed only fair, since the museum was free.
The service station and the U Drop Inn in Shamrock are now closed, but the art deco building they share is still in great shape.
Once I hit the Oklahoma border I didn't drive on the interstate for the rest of the day. Most of the time the road was away from the freeway.
Texola was supposed to be a modern ghost town, but it now has an open bar, several inhabited houses, and a lot of cars.
Next was Erick, where I stopped to photograph the intersection of Roger Miller Boulevard and Sheb Wooley Avenue. (Two girls in a small pickup truck said hi to me as I was stopped, leaning out the window taking the picture. I should carry a camera around with me all the time.)
Both Miller and Wooley are from this tiny town. For those that don't know, Miller is the composer and singer of such classic songs as King of the Road, Doo Wacka Doo, and You Can't Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd. Wooley sang the Witchdoctor and played the role of scout Pete Nolan on the television western Rawhide.
Here's another digression: other regular characters on Rawhide included ramrod Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood), trail boss Gil Favor, cook Wishbone, and a young Mexican man who was something of gofer. In the credits they listed the last character as "Hey Soos", but I think we all know his name was Jesus, a fairly common name in Mexico. What I'd like to know is why they used the odd spelling in the credits. Were they afraid people would be offended by the correct spelling? Did they have to do it to get past the network censors? Did the writers do it as a joke and not tell anyone what the correct spelling was?
Roger Miller Boulevard turned into the Roger Miller Memorial Highway east of town. It was a divided four lane highway. It crossed to the north side of I-40 and then got strange.
It was a two lane road here, but to the left I could see an abandoned, occasionally blocked roadway. Every now and then there was a connector to this abandoned road. Maybe the current road was once an addition to the old one, then replaced it when traffic levels dropped.
They are building a National Route 66 Museum in Elk City. It looks pretty big. I have no idea when it will open. They still have some work to do on the building.
As I approached Clinton I saw a VW bug in a vacant lot sitting on top of tractor tires so that it looked like a miniature monster truck. There were four people sitting on the front porch of the house next door. I stopped and asked if it was theirs. It was, and I complimented them on having one of the best pieces of yard art I'd seen in awhile, then ran over to take pictures of it.
Clinton is working 66 tourism. In addition to the billboards advertising their museum, they have banners hanging from light poles on the way into town telling drivers they are on historic route 66 (it changed back from Old to Historic in Oklahoma, but the markers only appear near businesses and through towns). Oddly enough, the banners disappeared once I got into town.
I had dinner at Pop Hicks, a diner that is open 24 hours a day and has been open since the '30s. I was a bit skeptical as I looked at the place, but it was full of locals. I got the chicken fried steak, which included a salad, potato, two vegetables (I got blackeyed peas and green beans), rolls, and a square of chocolate cake for $4.25. The food was good, and the price was unbeatable.
They had calf fries on the menu. I'd seen them listed on the Big Texan menu, but I wasn't sure they were a real regional food. Calf fries are sliced, battered, and fried prairie oysters. I didn't buy any.
I talked to the couple running the restaurant through my dinner and for a while after. As I was leaving I mentioned that I was going to look for a place to stay. They directed me to the motel where Inow am. It is ok, not the best I've stayed in, but adequate. At $25 it is about midrange for Clinton.
One bit of fun info I got from the couple concerned the Trade Winds Courtyard. According to the literature, Elvis Presley stayed there four times in the 1960s, and it's got an Elvis Presley Suite, containing the bed, vanity, and bathroom that were there when the King was a visitor.
They told me that nobody else in town ever saw Elvis. The story that he stayed there is at best unconfirmed.
Tomorrow I will continue my 66 journey.