Route 66, The Mother Road

We left Oklahoma City for Amarillo, our next stop on the way West, but now we are actually on the fringe and we know it. It looks different.

We are driving on I 40, a major truck route East/West, and we see flat grasslands, huge cattle feeding lots, and the most interesting sight ever....acres of huge concrete poles and on top white funnel blades turning in the wind.

I have seen them on TV programs about alternative power sources but to see them in person is quite amazing. Science fiction movies of the 50's would have had used them as sentinels on the asteroid of Tron or some kind of defense system to shoot down Buck Roger's rocket ship. It was a unique sight.

Route 66, the Mother Road, connecting California to the East, the original U.S. highway system, it is the source of legend and folk lore. Pictures of motor courts, drive in theaters, hamburgers and root beer floats delivered to your car by a girl on roller skates, Indian souvenir shop shaped like Tee Pees, Corvettes and campers, and motorcycles, its all there , the American Road....Route 66.

Well even tough I 40 now has the traffic and only a small amount of the original highway has survived, it is still alive and well at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma.

So we had to stop and see for ourselves... after all that is what tourists do ..and we are tourists and we have to do what tourists do....TAKE PICTURES.

We spent a very interesting two hours there and enjoyed the museum and a film and then we had lunch in their parking lot in our wonderful motor homes and on to Amarillo.

Ft. Amarillo RV Park was unique. Each site has a wooden fence on either side, a concrete patio with new table and a little patch of grass with plants for each site in a sea of gravel .

The highlight, for me, was a deluxe 3000 square foot gift shop with a waterfall inside and a recreation building with a tornado shelter underneath...How cool.

Cadillac Ranch, post cards everywhere, it must be famous and it is only a mile away, ten cars buried upright in a field, we must see this. We go...we photograph..and we all wonder WHY? We look for a meaning, for a reason for doing something so stupid. But there is none. It's a tourist thing I guess.

Two days to relax, do laundry , dinner in our first Mexican restaurant,and we are ready to leave for Albuquerque....... and a week in the "Land Of Enchantment."