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Cruise Control 1
This is how cruise control works, right?...was without wifi so my blog entry is happening a day later. The day started with a hearty breakfast at McDonald's. Our jaunt across the panhandle of Texas was some of the straightest, flattest roads we've been on thus far. Mike says it gets his vote for the flattest, most boring stretch of road. Even more boring than Reno to Las Vegas. We saw a few sleeping armadillos along the side of the road. There wasn't much to take pictures of at 60 mph except a crop of windmills and lots of cows. They grow a lot of both in north Texas.
It wasn't long before we crossed the border into OOOOOOOOOklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. Everybody sing! A few miles into the state we stopped at a rest area/info center. Nice place. 4-star hotel bathrooms with slate tile floors and walls, granite counters and roomy stalls. What is it with me and rest areas? I know, right? Anyway, once we were comfy again we wandered into the information center. There were racks and racks of brochures for attractions all over the state grouped by region. We picked up a couple and went up to talk
to the friendly people behind the counter. The older gentleman was very helpful when we asked about Route 66. There are a couple museums; one gives an overview of the route, the other is specific to the Oklahoma portion. He also gave us a road map of the state and a thick visitor's guide. The young woman who was working there with him asked where we were from. We told her and she said she'd always wanted to visit Washington. She'd just recently discovered she had family in Washington so now has even more reason to visit. We asked where they lived. Marysville. I'm not kidding. Small world, right? Neither Mike nor I were familiar with the last name (I don't remember what it was), but we probably have friends or acquaintances in common. We gathered up our brochures, thanked them for their help and headed down the road.
We decided to visit the closest Route 66 museum in Elk City. It's quite a nice complex. The museum dedicated to the historic highway is actually quite small, but is part of a 5 museum complex. Your $5 (yes, five dollars) admission fee gets you into them all. The complex
is set to resemble the town 100 years ago. There are buildings with old west style storefronts with windows displaying what the interior might have looked like. Wooden sidewalks and red brick paths connect all the buildings which encircle a waterfall and pond. We spent a couple hours wandering from building to building, museum to museum. At the opera house, we met a couple of gentlemen who turned out to be on the board or committee who oversees the running of the complex. We talked with them for maybe 15 minutes. They said the museum is at the point in it's life where it needs a curator. Right now it's just the board or committee who decide what improvements need to be made and how to do them as well as what the displays should look like. They'd recently been evaluated by someone who knows all there is to know about museums and how to run them. They should have the written evaluation soon. We're keeping our fingers crossed for them. If you're ever near Elk City, OK go visit.
On the road again to our overnight spot.
Again we dry camped at Wal-Mart. This time it was
Original Guard Rail and Road
The chunk of concrete below the guard rail is a piece of the original road. not on the nice pavement of the parking lot. It was a small store with a small parking lot and every row of parking stalls had cars parked just right to prevent us from taking the row for ourselves. The nerve of some people! Because of their lack of hospitality, we were forced to park on the side of the building near the loading dock...in the dirt...with no wifi.
Because we've gotten fairly early starts most mornings, we're at our next destination by dinner time or so. After setting up camp for the night (which took all of about 10 minutes), we walked through the store looking for carrots. We needed to change up our on-the-road snack food from the Costco size bag of pretzels we'd been working on. Note to self...get another bag of pretzels. We walked into the store and noticed right away it wasn't a Super Wal-Mart; therefore, no carrots. Now what do we do? We wandered back to the trailer for dinner. Shortly after dinner the wind picked up and the dark clouds moved in. Along with the dark clouds came rain. Lots of rain. Lots and lots of rain. And lightning. Lots and lots
of lightning. Not the cool bolt lightning, sheet lightning that lights up the storm clouds. Not much thunder, though. I enjoyed watching it while downloading photos from the day, hoping the batteries in all the devices held out long enough. They did, whew!
Mike had given up and gone to bed. On top of the bed, as did I eventually. No electricity=no AC=stuffy trailer when there's a rainstorm outside. We had the windows open earlier and had a nice cross-breeze cooling the air, but when the rain started coming through the screens we had to shut them. So Mike and I were laying on the bed and he suddenly sat up and put his shirt and shoes back on. He'd realized the electrical cord from the trailer to the truck was lying in the bed of the truck which was probably filling with water. And did I mention the lightning? It took him a while to come up with a plan to get the cord out of the truck while minimizing his risk of being struck by the lightning. Even though most of it was up in the clouds, once in a while a bolt could be seen in
the distance. He made it to the truck and back without being caught by Thor, Zeus, Perun or Indra. After toweling off we both laid on the bed watching the storm out the window. About an hour later it had passed so we opened the windows in the bedroom to get the cross-breeze again. At some point during the night we had each crawled under the covers because it had gotten too cool.
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Annabelle
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I remember the guard rail, the little blue car (yes, most of the ones I remember were red), the gas pump and a bunch of those things!! Fun! Had not heard of this museum. Will have to go there if we ever get through that way again. Why were there two doors in the school? Boys and girls? or color....?