I slept very late this morning, but it took me until almostone to get yesterday's report written. It was close to eleven when I finally made it onto the road. I might have slept longer, if not for what sounded like a hammer in the parking lot. It turn out to be someone loading a Coke machine.
Weatherford is the hometown of the commander of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, and they celebrate this fact with a statue of him (in spacesuit, of course, which I saw) and a space museum (which I skipped).
Weatherford's Owl Photo's sign asks the question "Whoo! Whoo! Processes Memories?"
Just up the road and south of Hydro is Lucille's General Store, one of the Famous Route 66 Stops. She's been living and working right there for fifty years, and, if given a chance, she'll tell you about every one of them. Twice. She's got candy bars, cold soft drinks, and cigarettes, but her biggest items seem to be Route 66 paraphernalia. She's got all the usual stuff, as well as her own photos, postcards, and T-shirts. She's got guestbooks that go back years, and she made me sign one when I came in. She showed me photo albums of pictures people have sent her. She has posed on many motor cycles and with hundreds of foreign tourists. She gets postcards, Christmas cards, and phone calls from all over the world.
Her daughter has set up a web page for her at http://www.geocities.com/~vegas-okie/index.html and made business cards with an inkjet printer. Lucille doesn't have an internet account yet, but her daughter is talking about getting her WebTV.
Lucille has a book coming out soon. She complained that all those Route 66 books are written by people who never lived on the road. She's going to change that.
My favorite stretch of 66 (so far) came up east of Lucille's. It left the interstate and took off on its own. Here it was poured cement, sometimes with curbs. It was a narrow two lane road that rolled up and down hills and was, for the most part, shaded by trees that hung over from either side.
It was very overcast, but it didn't rain all day. It had the night before, and that was enough to make parts of this road a bit tricky. While there were ditches to either side, the road just didn't want to drain properly. At one point there was enough standing water over a hundred foot stretch that I had to turn on my windshield wipers and close my sunroof.
There were no speed limit signs along the road here. When it passed a few houses there was just a yellow sign that said "SLOW".
I passed through what I guess was Bridgeport. If it was, then I finally did see a ghost town. There was a close service station with some adjacent buildings of similar construction but unknown purpose.
Then the road passed over a long trestle bridge and picked up more traffic on the way into El Reno. I saw a bird of prey of some sort slowly fly off the shoulder carrying something fuzzy in its talons.
The Big 8 Motel in El Reno has "Amarillo's Finest" on its neon sign. This is not a mistake; its an addition made when the motel was used in the movie Rainman.
From El Reno the state of Oklahoma made it much easier to follow 66, since it became state highway 66, and remained that way, pretty much, until just south of where I am now.
Yukon is the hometown of Garth Brooks, and Oklahoma 92 has been named Garth Brooks Boulevard. That's nice, but it doesn't match the intersection in Erick.
East of Yukon 66 became a four lane road leading into Oklahoma City. Proving that I am not a Route 66 purist, and because of how slow andtedious driving through big cities can be, I hopped on the interstate (which 66 became, anyway), and zipped across Oklahoma City.
This was my second connection, if a bit weak, with that trial going on in Colorado.
State route 66 dropped off I-35 (that sounds familiar) at Arcadia. This is home of the Round Barn.
There are many other round barns, the gentleman running the gift shop told me. He has part of the wall covered with photos people have sent him of round barns all over the U.S.
He was watching some science fiction movie on TV when I came in, but he stopped the VCR and refused to tell me what it was, deflecting my questions.
We talked about round barns and 66 tourism. He told me about the history of this barn, how it had fallen into disrepair before being restored.
"A man killed himself in this barn," he told me.
"Did he hang himself from the rafters?" I asked.
"No, he ran himself to death looking for a corner."
Upstairs the barn is very impressive. They rent it out for weddings and other parties. The only problem is parking, he explained, of which there is very little in Arcadia.
I attempted to photograph the inside by putting the camera back-down on the floor in the middle and shooting self-timer-delayed 1-2 second exposures. We'll see how it goes.
Between Arcadia and Luther are the remains of a very old stone service station, mainly just the walls, the pillars for the awning, and a few remaining boards.
There is a piece of paper in a protective plastic sheath hung on the front telling the history of the station. It never had electric power. Fuel was dispensed from drums on stands. Cold drinks were available when the ice man had come by.
The owners got into a bit of counterfeiting in the back and got caught. The station was closed and never reopened.
The road along here is named the Route 66 Memorial Highway. Traffic was higher than I'd seen it before, possibly because I-44, the parallel expressway, was now a toll road, the Will Rogers Memorial Turnpike.
In Chandler I saw an office for the Oklahoma Route 66 Association.
Chandler has a Skyliner Motel. In Oklahoma City I'd seen a Starlight Motel. What has happened to great motel names like these?
Just past Chandler I saw my first Meramec Caverns barn. I'll probably see more once I get into Missouri. I probably won't stop there, since I did that a year ago next week.
The first barbecue placed I passed I'd written off as a foreign restaurant, like the one in New Mexico. After d passed a few more, smelling the heavenly hickory smoke aroma rising from the pits, I decided that barbecue must be an indigenous food in Oklahoma, or at least in this part of it. That smell, and the proper red color of the dirt, made the drive through Oklahoma a lot like driving through my native Georgia, where every town, no matter what size, seems to have a barbecue place, the pits behind or to the side fired up and fragrant by 8am.
My candy bar brunch was wearing off, so in Stroud I stopped at the Rock Cafe for a late lunch. This tiny restaurant is another of those Famous Route 66 Landmarks. They've even got a photo of author Michael Wallis on the wall.
The waitress/cashier/busgirl's name was Nikki (I resisted the temptation to ask if her parents named her that or if she did. I justasked for the spelling). Nikki sat down at my table to take my order. I got a good cheeseburger and a Diet Coke.
They have a guest book, too, which I dutifully signed. They also had the usual assortment of Route 66 trinkets. They had a very nice T-shirt, actually 100% cotton, but they didn't have one in my size. Nikki assured me that they'd have them next week, but I'll be at work by then.
If I hear Jewel sing about putting on her PJs and hopping into bed one more time I think I'll scream.
Occasionally 66 would meet the tollway for an interchange, but, for the most part, it kept to its own, winding through very pretty landscapes.
After Stroud there was another stretch, like the one in western Oklahoma, where an older roadbed followed the current one with frequent connections. It wasn't abandoned, since there were houses along it, but all the bridges were missing, and it was discontinuous in other places.
I saw some more tiny oil pumps. I'd seen them in Iowa, too, but I think I forgot to write about them. I've also seen many of them in southern Illinois. They look like Jurassic Drinking Birds, but without the hats.
East of Kellyville, on the south side of the road, just before the it turned into a four lane commercial extension of Tulsa, was a collection of adorable stone cabins. They were fenced in and have been abandoned for years. They, and the ground around them, have been used for dumping trash. The windows are gone, as are a few of the stones.
Instead of bypassing Tulsa as I had Oklahoma City, I went to Oral Roberts University to see the Giant Praying Hands. I had no idea they were this big. They are gigantic. The thumbs look over ten feet long.
I used the AR2 to take some photos of me standing at the base to try to get a proper frame of reference. Just as I was shooting the last two frames the clouds parted and the sun shone down on me brightly. Coincidence?
While I was there, two other groups came up to show their devotion. They both parked in the handicapped spot to avoid having to walk fifteen feet farther.
Traffic was nasty on the streets of Tulsa, since it was almost six, and it took me a while to get back to the expressway. I dropped off it where 66 split and the tollway began again, right at Catoosa.
One of the most famous of the Famous Route 66 Sights is on the east side of Catoosa, an 80 foot sky blue whale sitting in a pond. This used to be a swimming attraction, where travelers and locals alike could stop to take a dip in the pond, shooting down the slides protruding from the whale if they wanted.
The attraction has been closed for ages, and the whale has looked pretty bad, but it has been repainted! The whale and the picnic table now have bright, clean coats of paint on them, although the bathroom doesn't. Honest, this is big news for Route 66 aficionados.
Claremore has three favorite sons, although two are daughters, and they've all got streets named after them. Will Rogers was probably the most famous, but Patti Page was popular, too. My favorite was Lynn Riggs, author of Green Grow the Lilacs, the novel that was the basis for the musical Oklahoma! (That exclamation point is part of the name of the musical, not the punctuation for the sentence.) I believe the train station in the movie, where the Kansas City song was sung, had CLAREMORE written on it.
I drove into Craig County, so I had to stop and take a picture of the sign.
In downtown Vinita a new McDonald's, complete with Playland, takes up an entire block right across from the courthouse. This is a vibrant downtown area.
Two blocks from there I saw a sign that said "World's Largest McDonald's 3/4 Mile" and pointed to the right. I had to take the detour. As I was driving down this road I wondered why there would be a big new McDonald's within a mile of the World's Largest McDonald's. I found out when I got there.
The World's Largest McDonald's, nicknamed the Glass House, is a big arch-shaped oasis on the tollway. (We call them oases in Illinois, anyway. They are rest stops along the tollway with a restaurant, rest rooms, and gas stations that can be reached without leaving the pay area. The restaurant often spans the highway in a bridge so that drivers in both directions can visit without being able to reverse their direction of travel.)
Since I wasn't on the tollway, I had to park outside a fence and walk into the area. This walking distance is why they built a McDonald's in town. That and the lack of a drive through window. And the long lines.
The World's Largest McDonald's is a cheat. The actual counter and kitchen area are the same size as that of any McDonald's, but the lines are longer. They must be counting the whole facility when they claim "World's Largest".
I visited the gift shop and talked for a while with the girl running the register. I learned that the ATM was removed about three years ago, but she didn't know why. She asked if it was as nice outside as it looked. I told her that it was, unfortunately for her. She wouldn't be getting off work until nine. She suggested that I stop in Miami for the night, rather than going on to Joplin. She also pointed me toward the dessert counter, where I could buy a Diet Coke without waiting in the horrible lines.
On the eastern edge of Afton I stopped at the Buffalo Ranch. There was a sign in the gift shop window, dated January 22nd, 1997, that said that the attraction was closed due to the death of the owner. The door was chained shut.
Inside I could see all the merchandise, including displays in the window. It looked as if it could open any minute. What was even stranger was a pair of peafowl (a cock and a hen) staring in the glass door as if they expected someone to open it for them.
At first glance the pens behind the building looked empty, but I could see that the backs of them opened into a large corral. In there I saw several deer. There was also a half dozen or so buffalo, including a calf (if that's what one calls baby buffalo).
I got as close as I could to the buffalo, but I was still a pen away from where they were eating. One saw me and walked through a gate into the pen in front of me. There was a double fence between us, so he couldn't get closer than five feet to me, but he got as close as he could. I took a few pictures and he snorted a few times. Then he walked back to where the hay was.
Maybe he thought I had some food for him, but I prefer to believe he just wanted to give me a photo op.
I've stopped in Miami for the night. The "i" at the end is pronounced "uh", just like the "i" at the end of Missouri.
Tomorrow I plan to follow 66 through the corner of Kansas, then from Joplin to Carthage, where I get to visit the Precious Moments Chapel again!
I've already driven 66 from west of Springfield to Carthage, and tomorrow is my next to last day of travel, so I may quit following the road for a while. We'll see.