Travel Tourettes from our Road Trips
For my first blog post that isn’t from the road i have decided ill try and give any budding road trippers a few Route 66 tips that we found useful or could of done with on our drive from Chicago to Los Angeles.
These are my own personal route 66 tips, opinions and views taken from our 2015 road trip along Route 66 and not in any particular order. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Six weeks and counting till we head stateside for our next big road trip and this time we will be California dreaming as we set out on a 1200 mile round route of the Golden State.
Our roadtrip will be taking in city’s, alpine forest’s, deserts, ocean views, state fairs, prisons, and a certain American mouse !
A refreshing nights sleep and a nice, but expensive, breakfast in the hotel left us raring to go exploring
what delights Las Vegas had to offer. As we are only here for three days it was decided that today we would have a good look around the hotels and explore the strip.
We are not big gamblers and even if we were, having a 13 year old child with us meant only one of us could head on to the gambling floor at a time so we weren’t going to be spending a fortune in the casinos. I did however hope id be spending a fortune in the malls and outlets of Vegas. I was left a little disappointed.
The road has obviously been covered in fresh tarmac recently as you can still see the original road creeping out from underneath the thick layer of black that had topped it but that didn’t make it any less breathtaking as it winded its way over the mountains.
Along the way we passed a number of settlements, some of which looked abandoned. I cant imagine its great fun living miles away from anywhere in the shadow of mountains in the desert, especially when winter sets in
I was standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona, and such a fine sight to see, It’s a girl, my lord in a flat bed ford slowin’ down to take a look at me ” sang the Eagles in 1972, so it would be rude not to find the corner they were singing about as we started todays travels in Winslow.
As it happens they were not singing about a particular corner but that hasn’t stopped the local tourist office dedicating the corner of Old Highway 66 and N Kinsley Ave to the line in the song Taking it Easy. Its a very popular photo stop on route 66
Today was a more leisurely drive of around 200 miles. We could of taken the freeway to Winslow and our next hotel but we wanted to try and and do a bit more of route 66 and see some must see attractions along the way such as the wigwam motel in Holbrook, the Meteor Crater and the town of Williams, Arizona.
We headed out of the Grand Canyon Village relatively early still slightly disappointed at the village ( but not the canyon i must add). We made a huge mistake at stopping at a McDonalds just outside to sample their breakfast thinking it would be quick and cheap and that they would have decent wi-fi – we were wrong on all three unfortunately but it was sustenance and saw us through to our first stop in Williams, Arizona.
Today’s drive to Monument Valley was a long one. In my normal day to day life i eat up 360 miles with ease up and down the motorways but 360 miles through winding pine forests and over barren rocky deserts is another thing all together.
We started the day with a drive up a windy mountain road to visit Los Alamos.
The name of the town may not mean much to many but its one of those towns that once held a very dark secret that pretty much changed modern warfare and the world we live in.
We left the Big Texan early and headed just out of Amarillo to the Cadillac Ranch. For those who don’t know what the ranch is, its essentially a bunch of Old cadillac’s buried nose down in the desert in 1974 as an art installation which people spray paint.
We left our bit of graffiti after finding a couple of half used spray paint cans on the floor and carried on our way along single lane old road past abandoned filling stations and buildings and parts of the larger main I40 highway where 66 wasn’t accessible
It would appear that i can now answer Tony Christies question, YES, i do know the way to Amarillo. Now thats out of the way i can get on with todays blog post about the journey along Americas Mother Road from Oklahoma City to Amarillo in Texas I think we missed a lot of old 66 on the way out of Oklahoma but i was more concerned with finding fuel and a Best Buy or similar in order to buy more storage for my GoPro. Once that had all been sorted we made our way to Yukon to pick up Route 66 again.