Waltzing Across Texas With You

April 26, 2021

Monday, April 26 for Tuesday, April 20, 2021

We departed our nice Embassy Suites Hotel in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and started off for Texas. Our first stop was a little town called Yukon, OK.

Randy took this picture for two reasons -- even though it was daylight, this is one of the better-known neon signs (upper left) along the route, and when we had been through the Western museum a couple days before, one of the displays had a mannequin in a store or soda shop wearing a Yukon Best Flour apron.

In honor of another famous Oklahoman (born in Tulsa, but the sign was in Yukon).

As you will see, this was a very busy day. We visited two very nice Route 66-themed museums, and made a number of other stops. We had run into this a couple times already, but we really began a string of finding places we hoped to visit or see had closed. Many were what Randy called "COVID closed," but many were also permanently closed -- they couldn't make it economically, the owners had died or retired and no one else wanted to take on the business, or some other difficulty. Others might have been period at one time, but had modernized. (We would later find a couple old-time restaurants where the building was still there, but now it was a Mexican food place with no connection to Route 66.)

As we moved across Oklahoma, we looked for an historic marker at a place called Ft. Reno. On a lark, we drove down into the facility, which is a closed military base, now a U. S. Department of Agriculture facility.

We spent a longer time than we originally planned, because it was pretty interesting. Moving on ... this was one of those places where we were able to stay on "historic route 66" as the maps and signs called it. We stopped at a gas station / souvenir shop for a look, and it was one of those places that played up their connection to Route 66 and the area.

Randy's "bible" in preparing for this trip and designing her itinerary has been the EZ 66 Guide for Travelers by Jerry McClanahan. Jerry seems to like bridges, because he mentions the old classic bridges whenever the traveler is in the area of one. The one below is called a "pony bridge" because it uses 38 "pony" or small trusses to cross the South Canadian River. (Our engineering friends should enjoy this.)

I believe I have not mentioned this yet, but we were beginning to find Historic Route 66 harder and harder to travel. There are places where it just flat-out disappears, what was once public highway is now on private land, or as we traveled west, it was on native American reservation land. Sometimes it had been paved over and was called something else, or it was just under I-44 or I-40, depending on where we were. Often on the Interstate, there were signs for Historic Route 66. We knew we were on "the original concrete road" when we saw this:

We drive along at our leisurely pace, with no one else on the road in either direction (which I have thoroughly enjoyed), and occasionally would look over and see people flying along on the Interstate, glad it wasn't us!

In a little town called Hydro, we found Lucille's Historic Two-Story Gas Station, no longer a working station.

In a town called Clinton, we found one of the more interesting museums, called the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum. We took some nice pictures, which you will see below, but missed taking one of the front of the museum, which had a classic car displayed in a glassed-in front. Elsewhere we saw different pictures of this museum, and the car in the window was different in each picture, so they rotate them from local owners.

Some examples of pictures from building Route 66.

Something slightly more modern:

Apparently this was a working diner at one time -- it was pretty tiny!

I'm not sure why we didn't take a picture, but we ate at one of our favorite older-style diners in Clinton, too. Our young server was Alexa, and she said, if you need anything, just call Alexa!

As if we needed to see more museums! Elk City, OK has a "must see" attraction called the National Route 66 Museum. We think a good bit of the complex was closed or no longer active as described in our guide book. It was still an interesting place.

(In my early life, my Dad owned three or four Studebakers, so if I see one, I take a picture!)

I did not include here the pictures that Randy took of a curved wall that extended quite a ways, showing a map version of Route 66 -- at this point in our journey, it gave us a good perspective of where we had been and where we still had to go.

This was in one of their "village" buildings -- for women of a certain age.

As we were leaving Oklahoma, we passed through a little town called Sayre. A couple impressive buildings.

Finally, while it wasn't yet too late, we had a pretty full day, and passed into ...

Our first afternoon and overnight in Texas was in the town of Shamrock. They were one of the towns that mostly embraced their Route 66 history.

I especially laughed about the Route 66 dumpster!

We took a chance and stayed at the Blarney Inn, which seemed pretty authentically classic (and old), and seemed OK. It was inexpensive, but it was also not very good. I injured a finger on a piece of broken furniture, which put a hitch in my work on the blog that evening.

Very little was open for dinner in this little town, but we found a diner-type place that was good. We went out after dinner and went looking for neon signs. Our guidebook suggested places that usually have neon signs on, but our book is an early edition, and many of those places are permanently closed or no longer exist. That is a sad part of our journey.