The personal authentic travels of a world-wide drifter, you'll always see pics of me at the locations being described (if the other blogs you're reading don't do that, odds are they were NEVER there, just saying…)
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?
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)
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 …
They’ve encased the thing in a massive piece of concrete to keep it from being stolen
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.
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)
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.
The Midpoint Cafe stands one what is supposed to be exactly on the midpoint of route 66, so that it is located 1139 miles from the route’s original endpoints in LA and Chicago (initially I was wondering WHICH endpoints on which date… since we already know that on the LA end it’s been moved a few blocks, but Wikipedia says the endpoint when it was first constructed in 1928).
The cafe has had many owners and names over the years, but according to Wikipedia, once the bi-passed towns began to organize themselves to try to put Route 66 back on the map…
“The president and founder of the U.S. Route 66 Association called me one day. He said, ‘Kid, you better do something because you are at the midway point of Route 66. You need to change that name.’”— Fran Houser, former owner of the Adrian Café
That said, I was DEEPLY impressed with the efforts they’ve made to drive home that point.
directly across the street from the cafe I was able to take this photograph, ALL BY MYSELF… no one there to help me… how you ask?
THIS is how
What you’e looking at is essentially a camera stand placed so as to give you the perfect framing for you photographs. You put your camera here, set the timer and run over to the sign and wallah, a perfect photo. (Of course I didn’t run, I used the count down mechanism I can trigger on my apple watch)
Same stand photographed from the other side so you can see the bright white line proving the point yet again, that the restaurant sits at the midpoint
In fact all its missing is a line down the middle of the floor
unimpressive gift shop, but I was tempted….
I didn’t eat here, so I can’t give a food review… while it all looked very tasty, there was nothing on the menu that was even remotely healthy. It consisted of things like grilled baloney sandwiches and pie… what I would describe as comfort foods for people who grew up in 50’s.
Located on Historic route 66 in Vega, Texas you’ll find the almost fully restored Magnolia Service Station. It was first built, in 1924, on what then the Ozark Trail (a system of locally maintained roads that connected towns in the southwest, that predated the Federal highways). The station already existed therefore, when Route 66 was developed (so as to connect the short pre-existing paved roads into one fully connected paved road that traveled through main streets of towns from Chicago to California), and continued to serve its travelers.
The station was closed when I got there, but they’ve placed so many historical explanations into the place’s windows, that I still learned a lot and the visit was totally worthwhile, in my opinion
And by looking through the windows, I still saw a great deal and got a pretty good gist of the whole thing…
Across the street from the station you see this….
The view across the street
I think it may be there to give you a feeling of what the station may have looked out towards back in the 1920’s, but with no docent on duty, I’m guessing.
Cadillac Ranch is one of those classic American public art works that everyone has seen in pictures, and of course its been on my list of things to see in person. The fact that it was cold and VERY wet and muddy, kind of added to the fun
Finding this was a little bit problematic. My GPS for my car had no idea where it was, and the address I had for it, the program didn’t recognize… but, as I was on I-40 there was internet, so Google maps to the rescue. It’s located between two off-ramps, so I took the one to the west of it, which brings you to a gas station. There I found a plethora of folks who had just come from there (and not one group of them either). I talked to a couple in the car parked next to me, and they assured me I was in the right place and it was about a half mile down the road and I couldn’t miss it because of how many cars were parked there.
In something I had read on one of the travel sites I had referenced before starting my Route 66 trek, a writer had warned that if it’s wet, the mud becomes like tar and almost impossible to get off your shoes afterwards. For the last four years I’ve been schlepping around a pair of rubber boats for JUST such an occasion (and yes this does mean I had the boots in my car back in 2016 in Canada at the boat graveyard when the muck had actually pulled my shoes off my feet, only I’d forgotten they were there).
Although some folks opt to take their shoes off and just kind of go for it… like this girl did… but it was raining and 48 F, what WAS she thinking…
It turned out this was a very good thing because in order to access the site you have to go through this gate, and because everyone takes a fairly similar path to the site, the ground is lower along the path and fills up with water, becoming a bog it’s very difficult to avoid stepping into, especially if like me you’re not sprightly.
Over the years the piece has become interactive, not just with the elements, but also with the viewers, which is tacitly encouraged by the artist who created (aka the permanently unlocked gate).
People bring cans of paint to use, but most times don’t use all of it and leave behind half used cans for the next person…
although others will come through from time to time looking for the empty cans and disposing of them.
Why yes, I’m in Texas. This big guy stands right on route 66, in front of a small gift shop (with an unimpressive collection of things I’ve seen 100 times already) that visitors to the Cadillac Ranch from Amarillo have no choice but to pass, and also functions as the check in office for a small RV park.
See the black box hanging from the fence?See the guy sitting in the car? He doesn’t look happy
Remember that black box hanging from the fence in the picture above? I managed to sit my iPhone on that, leaning it back against the fence, walked over the spot, and then used my Apple watch’s camera app to trigger a three-second countdown… I was seriously impressed with myself.
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.
And by looking through the windows, I still saw a great deal and got a pretty good gist of the whole thing…
It turned out this was a very good thing because in order to access the site you have to go through this gate, and because everyone takes a fairly similar path to the site, the ground is lower along the path and fills up with water, becoming a bog it’s very difficult to avoid stepping into, especially if like me you’re not sprightly.
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 