On the Road Again

As we travelled the Route through Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma, we encountered lots of dilapidated old motels and gas stations, many still bearing cool neon signs.

We stopped at SuperTam’s to view his famous superman collection and we shared a bowl of chocolate and superman (of course) ice cream. Check out his guest book.

Again…a reminder of how the Route has become such an American icon that people travel from all over the world to drive it. We met a couple from Hong Kong while we were there.

As we continued following the Route, we had a short stint in Kansas, where we enjoyed stopping at “Cars on the Route”, which is actually the old 1934 Kan-O-Tex station. It’s been restored and is now the home of “Tow Tater”, the original inspiration for “Mater” in the movie Cars.

The Station celebrates this connection to the Pixar movie and has a little on-site gift shop and cafe.

We spent most of the day driving that day because we were headed to pick Dad up in Phoenix. Along the way we stopped at Pop’s, a gas station on the route that sells hundreds of different kinds of soda.

We all grabbed a type of soda that we had never tried before as well as a new kind of snack. Jackson bought a sucker with a cricket in it. He said the cricket tasted terrible, but he ate it. Pop’s also had some ‘sodascusting’ flavors such as nose bleed and buffalo wing.

We also got to an amazing part of the route where the road was curbed, long and constantly going up and down. These are called ribbon roads. At the crest of each rise, we were able to look out over miles of landscape. It was fun and kind of what you imagine Route 66 to be like.

We made a couple of other iconic Route 66 stops…

We also passed by the famous Cadillac Ranch (we would have stopped, but it snuck up on us and we before we realized it, we were zooming past. We did catch a fast look at the Cadillacs, all lined up, partially buried in the Texas soil at an angle. They were covered in graffiti. Pretty cool to see in person.

Then we watched the sunset over the New Mexican desert before we pulled into the historic route 66 motel, The Blue Swallow, in Tucumcari.

We rented the family suite, which is basically two rooms that have been joined together by small corridor in the rear of the rooms. It was the largest they have on site, but only able to sleep five people so we brought in a cot. The owner wasn’t very happy about it saying the room was only meant for groups of five (and there were 6 of us), but in the end we slept comfortably and got out of his hair the next morning.

We spent the next evening camped out close to a little beach on Ute Lake.

Our camp setup was good and we didn’t mind sharing it with close neighbors. We met Paula, a retiree who travels the country in a dilapidated small RV with her dog. We invited her for dinner (chili) and she and Molly (her dog) joined us. She shared with us about how she made the decision to go ahead and leave her job, sell her possessions and live a simpler, affordable life between visiting her children in Phoenix and St. Louis. She had such positive things to say about finding community and meeting wonderful people on the road. She also shared that there is a growing demographic of senior citizen women living this way because it is affordable. Our other neighbors were a couple of hispanic families with about ten giggly kids under the age of ten and in the evening, they played worship music as we all fell asleep.

The next day we played in the water, geode hunting and took a hike to some bluffs that overlooked the lake. Beautiful!

We did some laundry the next day and hit the road to Albuquerque, where pretty much nothing went as we expected. We’ll save that for the next post.