One with the Road

We started out the day in Tulsa, OK and made our way along the last remaining remnants of the Oklahoma road sections up in the north east corner of the state. One key landmark to see here is the famous Blue Whale swimming hole.

Blue Whale in Catoosa, OK

This old Route 66 family attraction fell into disrepair over the years, but was relatively recently restored by a family group of volunteers. The Blue Whale is actually a themed decoration of a swimmer’s dock out into the pond using the side fins as slides into the water and the tail of the whale as a diving platform. While this is all sort of the epitome of classic Route 66 cheesiness, this particular item is actually pretty cleverly designed to serve its functional purpose and you can imagine the fun kids travelling along the old road must have had here over the years.

Kansas Route 66

From Oklahoma, while I-44 goes straight into Missouri, the old road actually follows through the corner of the state of Kansas. The Kansas sections of the road, while mostly replaced with a modern road SR-66, there are good signs to point the way to abandoned road sections that can still be driven….sometimes dead ending into failing bridges or overgrown pavement sections that can no longer be accessed by car. We did seek out an original 1923 vintage Route 66 “rainbow” bridge that can still be driven by car – although with some reluctance by Jeff who was almost inclined to inspect the underside of the bridge before deciding to trust the 5 ton weight limit signage as valid.

Rainbow Bridge KS-MO Border

Full Bridge View

Once crossing this bridge, you are basically at the Kansas – Missouri border where the newer Kansas SR-66 turns into Missouri SR-66 so you can make your way over to Joplin, MO and onto I-44. In Missouri there are very few original sections of Route 66 still in existence so, atypical for our journey, we remained on the Interstate all the way up to St. Louis to allow for the maximum time being spent at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park later in the day. This park, otherwise known as the St. Louis Gateway Arch, is of course one of the major tourist attractions of the area and can be seen from miles away from pretty much anywhere in St. Louis where there is a decent outside view.

Pathway to the Arch

We made our way from the Riverside parking area through the Arch park and up to the base of the Arch itself. Both of us had seen the Arch from afar in the past, but this is the first time we actually dedicated the time to make a visit.

From the Base of the Arch

While an impressive sight at over 600 feet tall, to two ends of the Arch are closer together at the base than we had imagined. Looking to get the whole experience of the park we opted to take both a Mississippi River Boat tour to view the Arch and the city from the river and also take the tram ride up inside Arch to take a peek out of the windows at the top.

Tom Sawyer Mississippi Riverboat

St. Louis as viewed from Mississippi

Another Shot of the Arch

Pretty damn cool spot actually, and we both enjoyed the views from the riverboat and from the Arch even though it turned out to be a very long day by the time we made it back to the hotel and were able to crash for the night.

The historical Route 66 road continued from St. Louis and did not end until reaching Chicago, but the quantity and quality of authentic road sections still in existence dwindles greatly from here to the end of the road…..too much so to justify closing the loop back to Chicago. Not to mention, Chicago was already covered on this trip, so our travels here on Route 66 come to an end. Thank You Route 66, we had a blast getting to know you better.

Tomorrow we take US-50 out of St. Louis, MO through southern Illinois and Indiana straight to Cincinnati, OH for an overnight stay with Jeff’s brother Adam.

By reputation, we understood that Oklahoma was supposed to be the best state for experiencing the original Route 66 and today was the day to find out for ourselves. We started off in Amarillo, TX and made our way across the rest of the Texas panhandle. This part of Texas is amazingly FLAT. Flatter than Iowa even. So flat, in fact, that when roads miles to the north or south ran parallel to our routes, you could actually still spot trucks on those roads driving “along” side you and even the sticks of their road signs were visible too. This is no exaggeration and wish we would have taken pictures to prove it.

Anyway, as we approached the state line of Oklahoma, the ground started to return to a more typical rolling terrain. Expecting the Route 66 driving to be good, we took advantage of every opportunity to drive road. We were not disappointed and in general the road surface was good, so today was a great day of road tripping off of I-40. In fact, we figure we were able to drive more than 120 miles of our 375 mile day on Route 66 itself.

One of the first interesting landmarks we saw was this cross sitting between Route 66 and I-40 in Groom, TX. This cross was erected by some religious group to promote their organization and it is amazingly large. Check out its size relative to the tractor-trailer sitting directly in front of it.

Cross in Groom Texas

Once crossing from Texas into the Oklahoma, the very first town on Route 66 is Texola, OK. For this particular town, we had a mission of taking a photo of a very famous sign that would greet Route 66 drivers as they entered from the west. Unfortunately, we could not locate it – even after consulting with some locals. Perhaps our information was bad relative to location and/or it may no longer exist….which can be a problem when looking for famous Route 66 landmarks. The sign was purported to say:

There’s no other place like this place anywhere near this place so this must be the place

Maybe it wasn’t the place, so after giving up on locating this, we continued on down the road to Clinton, OK which is home to the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum.

Route 66 Museum in Clinton Oklahoma

This is the best valued admission fee we have paid for the entire trip. In fact, we told them the $3/person they were charging was not enough and would still be a good deal at twice the price. In any case, we highly recommend stopping here if you ever have the chance. It has a great collection of Route 66 facts, figures, equipment, stories, and artifacts….too many to do justice here.

Once we got to Oklahoma City, OK we were able to drive the entire rest of the day’s trip to Tulsa, OK contiguously along the original Route 66 roadway path. Here is a collection of a few Route 66 landmarks we saw:

Restored Phillips 66 Station in McLean, TX

Route 66 Diner in Clinton, OK

Very Large Soda Bottle

Old Red Circular Barn in Arcadia, OK

Speaking of Oklahoma City, one of the other stops we made today was at the Oklahoma City National Memorial recognizing the lives of those lost in the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building on April 19th, 1995. The first photo here shows a shot of many of the 168 empty chairs at the memorial that each represents a person that was killed that day. The locations of the chairs correspond to the floors each person was on when they were killed and all the chairs collectively physically reside where the original building was constructed.

Chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial

The second photo here shows the Survivor Tree that amazingly was not destroyed by the collapse of the building. The rest of the symbolism of the memorial is well documented on the memorial’s website and we both agreed that it is a very well done tribute to those lost, those who responded, and those who survived.

Survivor Tree at Oklahoma City Memorial

Survivor Tree in Context of Memorial

Tomorrow we make our way from Tulsa, OK all the way to St. Louis, MO…the Gateway to the east.

Yesterday we did conclude our detour down to Sedona by making our way back to Flagstaff and onto Route 66 and I-40 again to head east across the rest of Arizona.

Leaving Sedona on 89A

East of Flagstaff, Arizona flattens out and here is a general idea of what the typical view you might find here.

Arizona Route 66

Much of the rest of Route 66 through Arizona has been completely replaced by I-40, but there are towns here and there where Route 66 reappears as the business loops off of I-40 through said towns. In those cases, many of the historical landmarks still exist, although some are abandoned in place. One hotel that still operates is the famous Wigwam Hotel where you can still spend the night in a concrete wigwam.

Wigwam Hotel on Route 66

One of the major stops we made for the day was a visit to Meteor Crater about 6 miles off the highway. This place is a 50,000 year old natural impact crater about 1 mile across. It was created by a meteor approximately 150 feet across and is generally very well preserved. It is hard to appreciate how big this crater really is, even when you are standing next to it. Look carefully for the people near the edge of the crater in this photo and note that you could play 20+ separate football games at the bottom of this crater with 2 million people watching from along the rim and still have a lot of room to spare.

Meteor Crater Overlook

Meteor Crater Horizon Window

After the crater, while still in Arizona, we moved onto the Petrified Forest National Park. Here we found the Painted Desert in the northern areas of the park and the actual petrified wood forests more to the south end. One thing to note about this park is that it is a drive through park and especially when approaching from the west, it is much more efficient to branch from I-40, enter the south end of the park and then pickup I-40 again after exiting the north end. If approaching from the east, you would want to go through opposite direction.

Painted Desert Driving

Petrified Jeff

Petroglyphs on Newspaper Rock

One cool thing to note here is that an original section of Route 66 that has been since abandoned, used to pass right through the north end of the park. If you pay close attention while making your way along the park access roads, there is a little monument area paying tribute to the original Route 66 road.

Route 66 Monument in Park

Storm Way in the Distance

From there, we made our way through the rest of Arizona and into New Mexico to finish the day in Albuquerque….losing one hour in the process. This hour, is the hour we should have lost moving from Pacific Time into Mountain Time, except that Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time, so we got to hold onto that hour all the way until getting into New Mexico last night.

Today (Saturday), we headed out from Albuquerque towards Texas along I-40 to pickup more of the landmarks we could find along the Route 66 segments that are still there. One particularly noteworthy one included our stop for lunch at the MidPoint Café. This particular spot in Adrian, TX is at the geographic mid-point along the original Route 66.

MidPoint Cafe on Route 66

Corvette at Midway Point

Another cool spot is known as Cadillac Ranch. This place is a monument of sorts commissioned to be built by some eccentric wealthy person from the area. Something most people don’t know about Cadillac Ranch is that its current location is different from where it was originally located back before I-40 was there. This is another indication of the eccentricity of the owner of this monument, we suppose.

Cadillac Ranch from Road

A monument you can touch!

We ended on Route 66 in Amarillo, TX today, losing another hour due to the switch from Mountain Time to Central Time. Heading east and losing time, especially two hours in two days, is a lot harder to handle than when we were getting extra hours earlier in the trip. Fortunately, we only have to cover one more time zone change before arriving home. Although, now we are starting to really get bummed that our trip is almost over! What a blast the last 3+ weeks have been!

Tomorrow, we continue our way along historical Route 66 up to Tulsa, OK.