Big Texas

We left around 9:30 from our dingy but adequate Travel Inn and made our way to Clinton for breakfast at the Rt 66 Diner, which is probably one of dozens so named along the Mother Road. There are hundreds or thousands of businesses along RT66 that use the road as part of its name: RT66 Welding and Fabrication; Rt66 Toyota; Rt66 Dentistry, and so on. Every town has a RT66 mural, a RT66 sculpture, and I think we’ve passed 5 or 6 Rt66 museums at least, not to mention a dozen or more restored 40’s era gas stations. We stopped on the Oklahoma Rt66 Museum on Clinton, but took a pass on the National RT66 Museum today. But it seems to be good business for small towns that can use the business. When I looked at the logs of attractions we’ve visited recently, there seem to be almost as many people from overseas as from the US, with people from Denmark, Spain, France, the UK and Japan.

The Oklahoma RT 66 Museum on Clinton was excellent

Rt 66 Museum

Abandoned Motel signs are part of the charm

We skipped the National Museum

It's amazing to think of road building with tools like this horse-drawn grader which was used to build some of the Oklahoma section. Even though the RT66 designation was given in 1926, the last bit wasn't paved until around 1936. There are still original dirt sections you can drive on, but we avoided those except when we got lost once or twice.

After breakfast we drove through Elk City, Elick, and stopped in the almost non-existent ghost town of Texola, Oklahoma, sitting right on the Texas border. There was a one-room jail cell on “Main St”.

One room jail cell

Tezas State line at Texola

Oklahoma has been a great State to drive Rt66. In addition to Tulsa and Oklahoma City, there are a lot of nice small towns. Oklahoma has the most driveable miles of the original Rt66 at over 400. I loved driving to long stretches of old narrow, curbed Portland cement that hugged the rise and fall of the land instead of blasting through the rises like the interstate. The tire sounds going pa-thunk, pa-thunk, pa-thunk as we rolled of the weedy concrete joints was comforting.

Miles of Portland cement on the original roadbed

Rolling through Shamrock Texas, we stopped at the Devil’s Rope Museum in McClean TX, which is supposedly the largest barbed wire museum in the world. You won’t get any argument from me: there were hundreds of artifacts on display, not only dozens of types of barbed wire, but branding irons, saddles, ranch tools, fence building tools, and anything having to do with ranch and cowboy life you can imagine. I loved it!

There are a few places along our trip that had similar Burma Shave signs that always brought a chuckle, but it was hard to get a picture of them at 50 miles an hour. These are in the Devil's Rope museum

Branding Irons and a list of the branding marks used by Texas ranched in the Devil's Rope museum

Barbed wire used in war

Fence-building tools

The Texas portion of RT 66 isn’t as well marked as the other states so far and we got lost and turned around a few times as we switched from north frontage road to south frontage road on either side of US RT 40, but we made it to the Big Texan Motel by 5:00 and went across the parking lot to have dinner at the Big Texan Steak Ranch and Brewery. It’s a very touristy place, but it is Big Like Texas!