Story By: Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
The International meet is over, and we are over 2000 miles from home with a car that has electrical issues. The power door locks are not working, and the car is draining the battery. I cannot lock the car and I have to disconnect the battery every night. But the car seems to be running fine. Route 66 was the best part of this whole trip, and we weren’t going to miss it. With Mel, his trailer, and a Triple-A card, we decided to go for it. I must admit that I was a little apprehensive, so I put on a strong face for Carlene. Besides, it was a bucket list item for me to drive through all the towns listed in the chorus of the “Get your Kicks on Route 66” song. It starts with St Louie.
We had planned to take more time coming back, but deep down inside, I just wanted to get home. Mel was totally flexible and kept telling us that he was good with anything we wanted to do. The only thing he told us he wanted to do, was to check out antiques. We set out from St Louis thinking Oklahoma would be a first day destination goal.
We stayed on Interstate 44 for a long while looking for signs of Rt 66 tourist attractions. The first thing we saw was an old gas station on the frontage road around Cuba Missouri. We took the next exit and doubled back looking for it. We found the old Route 66 road and stopped at a curio shop where the world’s largest rocking chair was on display. Now you can buy Route 66 memorabilia almost anywhere but to me, it had to be purchased on the mother road or it just wasn’t right. We looked around the store and bought some stuff. I found some dash magnets that had the Route 66 sign and each of the states on them. I bought the whole set but only placed them on the car after we had been in the designated state. We put Illinois and Missouri on the glove box and left the rest in the bag.
Back in our cars, we headed back to try and find what we had seen from I 44. We got to Cuba MO and found some neat buildings, but we were now a distance from the highway and really didn’t want to spend too much time looking for what we had seen. We figured there would be plenty of places like that, so we resumed our westward journey. It started to rain again, and we got a little lost. So, we turned around and headed for the main highway again. We saw an antique store along the frontage road and decided to wait out the rain inside while we checked out the merchandise. After that, we got back on the Hwy and drove through Joplin Missouri, the next town in the song.
If you stay on Interstate 44 all the way to Oklahoma, you miss going through Kansas and I wanted to get as many states as I could. The old Route 66 is a run-down road that clips the southeast corner of Kansas at Galena. And it was run-down for sure. We had to drive over a questionable bridge to get into town, but it was well worth it. They say Galena Kansas is the home of Gus Mater from the “Cars” movie. We got a picture of Gus in Galena to prove it. We also saw a big Route 66 mural there. As it turned out, Route 66 Murals were painted on buildings all the way through, we even have one in Sapulpa. It was Saturday and there wasn’t much else to see there as the town looked deserted. We headed out of town for Oklahoma after taking more pictures.
We were doing just fine until we came to a roundabout in the roadway. I didn’t understand the signage, and we went in another wrong direction. I suspected we were going the wrong way but drove several miles before I decided we had better turn around. Now Mel was pulling a trailer so looking for a safe turn around spot on a two-lane road took longer. We got back to the roundabout, chose the correct exit and made our way to Miami for the night.
