Weatherfield – Clinton – Texas

We left OKC and found Lucille’s, a landmark service station and restaurant where the proprietor lived above the pumps.  

We then motored on to Weatherfield, MO to spend the night.  The night clerk was an chatty unemployed anglophile English professor who ended up giving us about 30% off, pretty much in exchange for asking his opinion on such topics..

Next morning dawned 40F but sunny and bright, with a forecasted high of 75F.  We stopped in Clinton MO to see a really good Route 66 museum, all done up in retro style:

 

The exhibits were well done, and organized by decade.  In the 20’s, to get the road built with a minimal budget,  Oklahoma actually instituted a law requiring every able-bodied male between 21 and 45 to provide 4 days labour annually to the road-building effort, or pay a $5 road tax in lieu of same.  

In the dust-bowl years of the 30’s, some 60,000 Oklahomans used the newly-built road to escape the drought and collapsing farm prices that made life in Oklahoma unworkable.  They left mainly for California.  

The 40’s showed a 400% increase in road deaths, mainly due to more powerful cars, and roads that were finally good enough for fast driving.  The government response was to hire police officers as a “highway patrol” specifically to reduce speeding. 

The 50’s and 60’s were the golden years, with lots of drivers and driving vacations.  

Do you know who  killed Route 66?  It was Nazis!  

Actually, it was Eisenhower.  But Nazis made him do it!

• The Nazis commissioned the German Autobahn road network in the 1930’s, ostensibly as a Depression-era job-creation scheme, but with an eye to moving men and materiel in their planned military conquests of central Europe.  (In the same way that the Henkel bomber was commissioned as a means of carrying parcels for Deutches Postes.)

• The benefits of the Autobahn were not lost on Eisenhower the General.  When he became President, he pushed for the development of the current Interstate system.  (He also pushed for other Nazi-inspired technologies: jet engines, cruise missiles, ICBMs, atomic bombs.  Thank God the Allies won...)

• Route 66 had been built to follow the same general right-of-way as the transcontinental railway line from Chicago to California.  Now Interstate 40 did the same.

• Once the Interstate 40 was open, traffic on Route 66 dropped significantly.  Businesses servicing travelers now needed to be on or near the Interstate exchanges.  Those towns near an interchange survived, while those without exchanges withered or died.  Some like Texola are ghost towns, with buildings being reclaimed by Nature.

After leaving the museum, we traveled west towards the border with Texas.  In many places, we traveled on classic classic pink concrete Rt66 – pretty much as the only vehicle most of the time.  The landscape became much flatter and more open.  There was a long line of wind generators, said to generate enough to power 40,000 homes, but I’ll hazard that their placement along the hilltop ridge means that they also blight the vistas of those 40,000 homes.  It sure would be nice if someone could find a more aesthetic solution to this problem.

A few sights along the way to the Texas border:

At Sayre we stumbled upon their annual Will Rogers festival.  They block off the main street and have some small town entertainment:  a flatbed truck for a stage, some local musicians playing favourite country songs; a display of vintage cars; a hayride for the kids.

There is even a miniature kiddie train – six primary school passengers, with a 10-year-old as the driver - driving on the city streets around the perimeter of the fair. 

 We then headed to Texola and the Texas State Line:

 Once we in to Texas, the landscape became a lot flatter, and pretty-much tree-less.  Route 66 actually becomes a dirt road near Jericho (a newer alignment was paved.)  Here is a panorama of the vistas:

 Here is a classic art deco Conoco station in Shamrock, TX:

Travel in Texas has its own unique hazards:

(Actually, I drove over a 4 foot snake today, killing it.  I thought it was just a branch.  I don't know if it was a rattlesnake or not.)

Route 66 disappears under I-40 for a few miles near Delany.  Here there is a snazzy new rest area, done in an Art Deco style.  I am impressed that even the sheltered picnic tables they offer have the look and feel of an old Route 66 station:

 Near Groom there is a water tower that is deliverately installed at an angle, merely to attract attention and draw in traffic.  In Groom itself there is a 190-foot tall cross, illuminated at night, that is allegedly the tallest in the Western Hemisphere.