06/05/07 - 15/05/07 New York, New York We arrived in New York, I started reading Amerika by Franz Kafka. Very timely. One tunnel and one black Lincoln town car later and we were on that expensive strip of land - Manhattan Island. We de-bagged in midtown and strolled around Broadway and Times Square soaking up the atmosphere. A man sat in his convertible car, not just with roof down but converted to an office, with a desk installed in the back and passenger seats. Printer, Fax, Flat screen monitor, pot plants, stapler and pen pots - the works. Now there’s a [View Full Entry]

---

---

03/05/07 - 06/05/07 Chicago After our relaxing break in the Amish country we were ready for the hustle and bustle of big city life. Especially were we ready for Chicago Blues. We checked into the House of Blues hotel in the heart of the action and dined in the their blues club restaurant that night to the fantastic sounds of a solo guitarist and then full on bottle-necking blues band - Awesome! The next morning we headed to the museum of contemporary photography to have a nose but the work was just too contemporary for our tastes so we skipped of [View Full Entry]

---

---

30/04/07 - 02/05/07 Shipshewana, Northern Indiana With a week of the rental car left and in Chicago already we decided to head out of town for a few days, whichever way the wind would carry us and see the surrounding area for a while. The wind first took us north up the North Shore Drive into a very prosperous residential district with mansions and lake houses for the wealthy Chicagoans (is that a word?) to strut their stuff. We got so lost within the rabbit warren of the North Shore that we had finally had to ask directions to the Interstate [View Full Entry]

---

---

28/04/07 - 29/04/07 Springfield - Chicago, Illinois Evening entertainment in Springfield - not a yellow-headed, skate-boarding Matt Groening character in sight (One episode of ‘The Simpsons’ featured a close up shot of Homer’s driving license which read ‘Springfield, NT’ - a non-existent place) but a working 2-screen Drive-In so we parked up in front of the big screen, tuned the radio to the relevant FM station, grabbed a pizza, popcorn and sodas and settled down to “Bridge to Terabithia”. We didn’t see anyone get stranded Grease-style so no [View Full Entry]

---

---

22/04/07 - 27/04/07 Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri (The Great Plains) We stopped at the Art Deco Conoco service station and ‘U Drop Inn’ café in Shamrock to snap some photos and a Porsche 356 pulled in with 2 guys also doing the route backwards but in just 6 days!! Then it was goodbye to Texas and Hello Oklahoma, the State with the largest population of Native Americans and longest stretch of original 66 tarmac. We had just entered the state when we spied a set of cowboys practicing for their local rodeo in a paddock at the front of their property, [View Full Entry]

---

---

21/04/07 Amarillo, TX We were heading toward Conway on the south frontage road in order to spy the Bug Ranch - a kind of homage to the Cadillac range, only with VW Beetles, when we spied a white SUV with about 6 or 8 aerials on it’s roof, parked on the shoulder. “Stop, stop” I shouted to Jen, “they might be storm chasers”. Sure enough, as we pulled up we saw the logos on the back and side of their car - “The Kansas Storm Chaser - www.kschaser.com” and “Storm Chaser”. We had seen a severe weather warning for Amarillo on [View Full Entry]

---

---

18/04/07 - 19/04/07 Santa Fe and Taos Santa Fe was a beautiful change after Albuquerque - the buildings were all in apricot coloured adobe with narrow alleys of artisan shops surrounding a central plaza. In fact it was hard to buy anything except art and jewelry! In the center of the plaza stands an obelisk with inscriptions such as “To the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the territory of New Mexico”. Regarding the monument text, the local authority put up a plaque that reads “Monument texts reflect the character of the times i [View Full Entry]

---

---

From Grand Canyon we headed south to Flagstaff and there were those two digits popping up again as we spied our first 66 attraction, the Museum Club. Unfortunately at 11 A.M. we were about 12 hours too early in the day to appreciate the atmosphere and enjoy any live music in the place voted ‘Readers favourite Dance club’ in ‘Country America Magazine’ but we were able to pop in and enjoy the route 66 print material in the booths and the amateur taxidermist owner’s handiwork. Passing the famous wooden carved Twin Arrows, that had obviously seen better days, our n [View Full Entry]

---

---

14/04/07 - 15/04/07 Grand Canyon On all the lists you can find of the worlds 7 natural wonders, the Grand Canyon holds its place. Here’s the facts; it’s 217 Miles (349 km) long, between 4 and 18 miles (6-29 km) wide and a stunning 5000ft deep. The fast flowing turquoise Colorado river has been slicing its way through the Colorado plateau for 6 million years say the experts, accounting for it’s depth, but the canyon’s impressive width has been formed by erosion through weathering of wind and rain and most powerfully through ice. We drove Desert View stopping at th [View Full Entry]

---

---

13/04/07 - 14/04/07 A Dash of Utah As we’d stopped at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, an English woman we met told us that sunrise at Bryce Canyon was so beautiful that it had made her weep. Leaving Las Vegas, it was a slight detour North and would take us into an extra State where the book of Mormon, not the Gilead Bible makes bedside reading - Utah. To cause as much confusion as possible, seemed to be the goal of whoever named the viewpoints in Bryce Canyon National Park. The best place to watch sunset is at Sunrise Point and [View Full Entry]

---

---