Restored 1929 Route 66 Gas Station : McLean, TX

Not only is this a restored 1929 gas station, but apparently, this was very the first “Phillips 66” brand gas Station In Texas.

One thing I found kind of odd was that while other restored stations along the route had glass windows and you could see inside, this one had boarded up windows that were painted to look like glass.

That said, I found both the poverty and the politics of this town to be more than a little bit disturbing

THIS in particular gave me the heebeejeebees….

With emphasis on “the civilized world” …. WTF? SERIOUSLY?

Highly impressive rest stop: Mclean, Texas

I was on the opposite side of I-40/historic 66 headed in the wrong direction when I spotted this, but I had to stop and take a picture. It’s a rest stop that’s embedded into the side of the hill.

What caught my eye was the beauty of its construction, but now that I’m reading up on it’s designed this way in order to function as a Tornado shelter (this being Tornado Alley)

fullsizeoutput_4b48

Blarney Stone: Shamrock, Texas

I kissed the Blarney stone… have I become more eloquent? In Shamrock Texas’ Blarney Stone plaza, SUPPOSEDLY, they have a small piece of the ORIGINAL Blarney Stone that at some point got knocked off of the main back in Blarney Castle: Blarney, Ireland. Only thing is it’s never been verified, so …

fullsizeoutput_4b43

They’ve encased the thing in a massive piece of concrete to keep it from being stolen

fullsizeoutput_4b44

The Leaning Tower of Texas: Groom, Texas

Not much to say about this, It’s a water tower, and it’s leaning.

According to Atlas Obscura it was all done intentionally and involves some knowledge of physics to keep it like that, and the business (Britten’s truck stop and restaurant off Route 66 in Groom) that it was intentionally intended to promote is no more.

Roger “King of the Road” Miller Museum, in Erick, Oklahoma

The king of the road Is no more….‘tis sad. NONE of the web sites that I looked at told me this, heck even GOOGLE… which knows all… didn’t tell me this (when I was charting the trip… between then and now someone informed them, so this closure must be pretty recent) … So when I got there I was pretty nonplussed to discover an empty building with blocked out windows, and when I peaked in all I saw was an empty room.

you can sort of see where they have scrapped the name off the glass

That said, I was going to seriously cheat on this one anyway. My mom used to bake, that was until she discovered the Sarah Lee factory that was about a 15 minute drive from our house that had an ACTUAL outlet store that sold items that had failed their “perfection” tests… so like the icing was lopsided or the crust was not perfectly flat, etc., which they then sold at a deep discount. From then on, she just bought their stuff and presented it as her own work. That said…

Think of it as a memory of things passed … (pun intended)

VW Slug Bug Ranch: Panhandle, TX

Another Route 66 artwork is the VW Slug Bug Ranch, which is just east of Amarillo, in Panhandle Texas. This piece is sort of the baby brother of the much more famous Cadillac Ranch, which I was at a few days ago.]

Unlike the Cadillac Ranch which was built by a well known art group, and funded by a multimillionaire,

There was no one there to help me, and I was having a hell of a time finding a place to put the phone where it wouldn’t fall over…

no one knows for sure WHO built this, or even for sure who owns the Bug Ranch. And unlike it’s more famous brother, almost no one bothers to come to see this one… only one other person was there when I visited.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31