10/1/14 - Still on our way to Albuquerque

Joplin Mo.

Kansas stop

Auto parts store in farm country

We had breakfast at the Waffle House this morning.  What can I say? - inexpensive, filling, quick, and we were off to the  interstate for the first part of our journey today.

We soon switched to the back roads and onto Old Route 66 again. We stopped at a small store for directions, and to look for souvenirs from Kansas.  What was on display wasn't a lot  was different from shops in other states.  It was the usual stuff with Kansas on it instead of some other states. Kansas has the lowest number of road miles of Route 66  of any of the states unless you miss a sign and have to backtrack.

While we were on the back roads we stopped by an auto parts store in one of the small farming towns to look for a positive crank case ventilation  (PCV) valve gasket.  The one on the T-bird was leaking.(Not serious) This store carried heavy duty lubricant in 5 gallon pails.  That's not something that you find in the Auto Zone in Portland. OR, but they didn't have what we needed.  I ordered it from the Bird Nest in West Linn, OR and they are shipping it to us in Albuquerque.

We continued on and were in our third state by 10:00 am our time...whatever time that was...

I got a call from Roger. our truck driving friend.  He said his schedule had changed and he was going to be in Oklahoma City about 1:00 today and that his wife, Vickie was traveling with him.  We made some adjustments to our itinerary and met them for a chat  before we all continuing on.

I read the GPS wrong on the way out of the city and we accidentally headed for Dallas, but I realized my mistake when we were only 5 miles out of our way and it was still easy to get back on track.

We stopped by the largest Route 66 road sign that we have seen so far.  it was at the Route 66 Museum which, unfortunately, was closed.

We stopped to look at the Art Deco Service station that was the model for the service station in the movie Cars.  This is where the Italian forklifts worked, remember?

Our journey continued on  a combination of back roads and the interstate. The alignment was almost  the same in this area, The business routes taking us into the small towns which was the Old Route 66.

We arrived in Amarillo, our destination for today. We are now where we intended to be on our route by this time.  We made up the two days that we lost due to the transmission repair. Most of what we wanted to see, we did see, except the biggest Catsup Bottle (darn!), on this dash across 4 states.

Since we are in Texas we decided to eat Texas Style at The Big Texan Steak Ranch.  The only similarity between this and the Waffle House is that they were both filling. It was big, loud and a fun place to eat, at least once.