Feb 26-28 -- Rt 66 in Oklahoma & Texas

On Sunday, Feb 26th, we left Arkansas for Oklahoma and decided after a little research to start in north-east Arkansas in a little town called Miami. It happens to be on the old (historic) Route 66, the so-called "Mother Road", which used to run from Chicago to Los Angeles. You can find out everything you ever wanted to know about Route 66 here and here. You might wonder why we decided to do this. Well, the Travel Oklahoma site had a section on some odd things that you could see driving along old Route 66 in Oklahoma. So, having no other predetermined destination in mind, we decided to check it out.

In Miami, OK, you will find Waylan's Ku-Ku Burgers. Never heard of it myself but apparently back in the 60s there were around 200 Ku-Ku Burger restaurants, mostly in the mid-west. This is the last of them. The building originally had the appearance of an old cuckoo clock but it's been changed over the years to add a dining room, drive-up, etc. But it still has the old cuckoo bird. This restaurant was bought by Eugene Waylan back in 1973 and he still comes in every day to do the cooking - he doesn't think anybody else can do it to his standards. He was there the night we stopped as you can see below. Also in Miami is a really neat old theater, the Coleman Theater. which opened in 1929. Early acts were mainly vaudeville and silent films but it's stage has been graced by the likes of Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Bing Crosby, and Jim Thorpe. It's a really beautiful old theater.

From Miami, we started driving down old Route 66 until it got to be a gravel/dirt road at which point I turned around and got us back on the "new" Route 66.  A bit down the road from Miami, we found

• the Totem Pole Park at Chelsea,
• the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore - a tribute to one of the most famous Americans of the early 1900s,
• the Blue Whale at Catoosa,
• the Golden Driller in Tulsa; at 75 ft tall it is the 5th tallest statue in the US and supposedly the tallest free-standing statue, 
• Alien Yard Art in Stroud - really weird! It's just in someone's backyard along Rt 66,
• a Round Barn in Arcadia - the last round barn in Oklahoma (I never saw a round barn before!),
• POPS 66 Soda Ranch (home of the 12,000 different soda bottles - more variety than you could imagine!), also in Arcadia,
• and the Golden Dome Building in Oklahoma City (the 5th ever geodesic building ever constructed).

We missed a few others after Oklahoma City - the directions for continuing on old Route 66 got pretty complicated because the route actually seems to disappear at times.  Funny enough, we later found that a long stretch of old Route 66 then parallels I-40 into Texas - barely 100 feet between the two roads!

Totem Pole Park

Totem Pole Park

Will Rogers

Blue Whale of Catoosa

Alien Yard Art

The Golden Driller
(that's Dolores at his feet)

Round Barn

POPS 66

Along Route 66 in Texas, we stopped to see the Leaning Tower and, at 190 ft tall, the largest cross in the western hemisphere in Groom, TX. Down the road in Conway, TX we found the Bug Farm (five old VW bugs planted nose first; another really weird site which was created as a parody of the better-known Caillac Ranch about 25 miles down the road). That got us to Amarillo where we stayed the 28th..

Leaning Tower

Bug Farm

Tomorrow, we're going to check out one or two things in Amarillo (the Cadillac Ranch, for one) then head on down to the Palo Duro Canyon State Park, about 1/2 hour south. The Palo Duro Canyon is said to be the 2nd largest canyon in the US. We are either going to rent a cabin there for a few days (if available) or stay in the nearby town of Canyon, TX.

I added pictures we took on Mar 1 at the Cadillac Ranch just west of Amarillo. We talked to the lady in the souvenir shop and she told us the story: This really rich guy from Amarillo named Stanley Marsh just loved Cadillacs and had quite a few of them just sitting around. Some architect talked him into planting them in a field as an attraction. When first planted they were not all graffiti-tagged (spray-painted) like they are now and apparently they were right along the road, not a couple hundred yards out in a field like they are now. Apparently, of all the things along Route 66, this is THE best known world-wide!

The Caddies

Well, that's all for now! ..... Dan