Sunday morning I went geocaching in midtown Tulsa roughly along Route 66. I found this cute Little Free Library during my search. A couple of other searches took me to church parking lots. I avoid church parking lots on Sunday mornings. I avoid church also. (Just joking, I haven’t been since covid and have turned into a total heathen since.)
Parks are always a good place for geocaches.
And parking lots, if nobody is around.
A fellow geocacher maybe trying to get a hint on where to look.
Stopped by Route 66. A local business put up another muffler man, only this is a muffler girl. Stella Atom, the Space Cowgirl.
I love the kitschy Route 66 attractions. I don’t like driving Route 66 that much. It sure makes for slow going. Why do that when you are paralleling a nice freeway?
And I finished up at Oaklawn Cemetery. It is the oldest cemetery in Tulsa. The city has spent some considerable time and money excavating some old graves that were suspected to be those of Tulsa Race Massacre victims based on eyewitness accounts. I don’t think they have found anything conclusive yet. They have recovered genetic material and have encouraged local residents who think they may have relatives who were massacre survivors to report any DNA information they have. This past May the city reported that they have determined numerous people who have genetic ties to the bodies that were exhumed. Interestingly, none of the people contacted had any idea that they had relatives buried at Oaklawn or could have possible ties to the Tulsa Race Massacre.
There are other old graves there including several veterans of World War I, like the one above. The 804 Pioneer Infantry was a unit that did construction and maintenance work during the war. The enlisted men were almost all black serving under white officers.
On Earth Day, I manned a table at Tulsa’s Chandler Park giving out information about Earth Day, and Leave No Trace Principles and what our organization, the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition is about and what we are doing.
A couple of days later I was downtown at Tulsa’s Guthrie Green during a recycling event basically doing something similar.
Your regular car people hate this thing and hold in disdain. I thought it was beautiful. Zero to 60 mph is 2.6 seconds gets my attention. Also 11,000 pounds of towing capacity. Range of 340 miles.
I could never get a feel for the truck just looking at photos. In real life it is a very tough looking vehicle.
And a huge bed. Big enough for 4’x8′ building materials. The bed is a composite material so you don’t need a bed liner.
The interior is very simple, clean and spacious.
You have a very small simple steering wheel with no stalks for turn signals and all that. Those controls are on the wheel. You got this huge screen with everything else you need. I was impressed with the vehicle. The electric vehicle haters especially hate this thing. If somebody gave me one, I’d take it.
I have already converted my lawnmower to electric battery type. My very reliable, heavy duty gas powered mower finally seized up this year after 20 years so I bought electric. I’m happy with it!! Less than half the weight, no oil, no gas, no spark plug, no changing filters. My new mower is very lightweight and makes mowing a breeze and I can mow the whole yard using less than half the charging capacity. I didn’t try to get the best, I intentionally looked for the lowest cost, with the least problems that could mow my 1/5th of an acre lot.
It’s not going to last near as long as my old gas mower. Plastic mower deck is not going to last very long I am afraid. Oh well.
I found this beautiful blue Toyota Landcruiser at my brother’s apartment parking lot. Back in the I really coveted these things. Tough looking, cool. You grow up though and look for something else. When I was a kid we lived in the White Mountains of Arizona. My dad was transferred there as part of his job with the Forest Service. One of his coworkers joined the Forest Service kind of late in life (Probably he was fifteen to twenty years younger than I am now!) He and his wife were very nice, generous, cool people. Earlier in his life he was an actor in Hollywood. He specialized in being one of a group of bad guys. He worked some on the Lone Ranger television shows. How cool is that to a kid!! Anyway he and his wife on weekends would load up their Toyota Landcruiser and drive all over the National Forest, adjacent BLM land, and other places. No instagram back in the day so they did it all for their own enjoyment. Whenever I see a Landcruiser, I think of them.
I found a truck at the gym that the Cybertruck haters would love. A massive Ford F-150 with a two tone paint job and a cool Black Widow logo. Sorry, I should have got a photo of the logo. This thing is beautiful.
I’ll stick with my humble Subaru though. For as long as it will last. It does everything I want it to do. Want to know something funny, half the vehicles at the enviro events I attend are Subarus. Here it is parked in a place I am not supposed to be in to look for a geocache. Sunday morning I went to Sapulpa, OK to look around.
This was the first cache I found. It was kind of a clever installation. What nearly got me though was the cache container was full of ants. Little buggers, just waiting for me! You can see one crawling out of the container in the video. His friends followed.
In addition to the geocaches I found I checked out old and new Route 66 landmarks. The Tee-Pee Drive in was an old drive-in that was abandoned and fell into disrepair. Somebody bought it, fixed it up really nice and put this new sign up. It is not a neon sign, it is an LED sign, Bigger, better, and uses less electricity.
This is the old Rock Creek Bridge. It is a major route 66 stop but it can no longer carry traffic. At least they haven’t torn it down yet. You can still walk across it. It is not blocking Route 66. The new Route 66 is just a hundred feet or so to the right going across a modern bridge. What you have to understand about Route 66 is that it is not just one road. It is a living road and has been modernized and rerouted continuously since it started. The different routes are called alignments. Exploring some of the old alignments can be fn
Those are some of the original pavers from the when bridge was put up in the early part of the last century.
So I puttered around a few hours and went on home!!
Tuesday night Heather, Logan, our Pom Kodi, and I loaded up and drove to the Tulsa suburb of Sapulpa to check out the Route 66 Christmas Chute in their downtown. We went last year and loved it!!
The city blocks off several blocks of Route 66 downtown and install these big frameworks and then people decorate them. You walk underneath the decorations. It is wonderful and you have great light for taking photographs. Also the merchants really go all out decorating their storefronts for the occasion.
Most of the restaurants are open if you are hungry or thirsty plus there are pop up shops selling food, drinks, and gift items.
Logan really loves gingerbread cookies.
Heather loves snowmen.
I love the reindeer and the sled.
Kodi loves Heather!
He also found two other poms to have a faceoff with. They were barking at him and he was just looking. He didn’t like being pulled away. I swear Pomeranians are the most spoiled dogs ever but we still love ours.
The Grinch was in a storefront!!
I figured out what Santa is going to leave me.
If you like Christmas trees, they have dozens of them, from little dinette sized trees.
On interstate 40 last week on the way to a class reunion in Arizona. The Texas Panhandle is pretty flat but the skies were interesting. Lots of people tell me how “boring” this stretch of road is. I don’t find it boring at all! Oh no, I see all sorts of interesting things while driving.
I stopped for gas in Shamrock, Texas. Shamrock is home to the Tower Gas Station. A beautiful art deco structure from the 1930’s. It has been restored and is beautiful. It is no longer a gas station but more of a visitor center.
Attached is “Do Drop Inn” a former restaurant that has also been preserved. Roadside America has a post on this stop. The gas station and former cafe are big stops for Route 66 fans.
Further to the west on the freeway is the Bug Ranch. It is kind of like Cadillac Ranch (for a later post). I found it fun. It’s free and they take donations so I gave them a couple dollars. It’s another Route 66 attraction. Most references call it the slug bug ranch.
You can buy spray paint but I declined. I just wanted to take photos.
They had a couple of other vehicles as well.
I love road trips. The rest of my family hates them. I kind of like the Route 66 attractions but I don’t spend much time driving Route 66. Too slowwww!!!
This past weekend I attended the Route 66 Roadfest in Tulsa. It was an event sponsored by AAA to celebrate all things Route 66. They had a similar event in Oklahoma City the previous weekend.
The event features cars (lots of cars!), music (which I missed).
They had a section on vintage travel trailers.
When I was a kid our family had a similar trailer, a little bit bigger. We went all over the place in the thing in our family of five. Soon, my brother and I got kicked out into a tent on our own, which was fine with us.
The thing I wasn’t expecting and enjoyed the most is the “pods” they had set up showing the history of the Route 66 by decade and highlights of the culture of that time. The above diner was in the 1950’s pod. They had hosts in costume who would show you around. (Who knew that women in poodle skirts could be so fetching?) So each pod was like a time capsule.
Also, in the 1950’s pod was a display of photographs by Charles and Irene Custer who got married in 1950 and took off on Route 66 supporting themselves with photography. Fast forward to recently when somebody found almost 90 negatives in a barn made with a medium format camera. They processed the photos, digitized them and put them on internet. They are incredible. Check out the site here. (I am not displaying any because they are copyrighted so check out the link.) They are incredible visions of an all but forgotten world.
The above was in the 60’s pod showing a wall on school safety. When I was in grade school in Price, UT I was so jealous of the crossings guards. I wanted to be one but I was not a cool kid.
Remember window decals. So many families plastered their cars with travel decals. There were two types of families back then, window decal families, and people who wouldn’t be caught dead with them (that was us.) It was fun looking at all the old stuff and talking with the people there. I loved the pods and had no idea they would be part of the show.
The best part though I just stumbled onto. Michael Wallis, the writer and historian, who wrote “Route 66: The Mother Road” among 20 or so other books, participated in a conversation about the history and culture of the road. His book is credited with a resurgence in interest of Route 66. He did most of the talking. And he is a great talker with a wonderful voice. “He was the voice of the Sheriff in the animated movies Cars.” Some of the high points of what he said were:
He looks at the road, stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica, as a one big community traversing eight states. He said it is Blue on either end and red in the middle but the road itself is purple with very little rancor like you see in the rest of country. He is hoping that the road will help bring the country together as it approaches its centennial in 2026.
He talked about how we cannot romanticize history. We have to be on a continual search for the truth. He said for example people get upset when he brings up the fact that the businesses on the road were just as racist as any place in the deep south and there were a bunch of sundown towns where people of color were not allowed to be after sundown. He said the racisim ebbed away after the Civil Rights laws of the 60’s were enacted. He said history is never set, it is like an onion that has many different layers and one cannot be afraid of you will find out.
He said the road is for travelers not tourists. It is for people who are not in a big hurry and like to stop and look at things and try out local restaurants and independent motels instead of the chains.
He also told a bunch of stories. One of my favorites concerned a snake pit in the Texas panhandle where a business had a pit holding dozens of rattlesnakes. He said at 4 pm every day a friendly grandmotherly lady would come out with a basket little chicks in it and dump them into the pit. He said that was a big hit. He had a bunch of other funny stories to tell.
He finished by saying, “Remember, life begins at the off-ramp.”
His 45 minutes flew by. It was the best part of the show.
I think they are going to have this show yearly leading up to the centennial of the road in 2026. I’ll be back!! (And I’ll take in the music next time!!)
El Reno is a gritty suburb west of Oklahoma City. It’s in the center of the wheat belt so there are a lot of grain elevators. It was a Rock Island railroad hub, and an oil and gas operations center as well. Nearby Fort Reno was a cavalry outpost during the wars with Native Americans. And Route 66 runs right through town.
They even have a special place for love-locks.
And it is part of my year long turning 66 on Route 66 celebration.
Son Logan visited us over the weekend and on Monday I took him back to college. Our little 6′ 3″, 250 pound son is in his final semester (he better be in his final semester) and graduates this Fall. We are really proud of him! Anyway, dropped him and his stuff off, made a visit with the bursar and paid his tuition and fees and headed back to Tulsa.
I took the scenic route on part of it on Route 66. I was hunting down geocaches and doing a ten state Adventure Lab geocache at the same time. Hit the links to find out more about what I’m talking about. First stop was Pops on Route 66. They have a gas station and a huge selection of pop. I got me a selfie cuz I am 66 years old this year on Route 66.
Pops is a stop on the Adventure Lab and it also has a real geocache that I had found previously. Nearby there was another one.
A little bit down the road is the Round Barn of Arcadia, another stop on the Adventure Lab. With an Adventure Lab you don’t find a physical container, you have to answer questions about the stop.
And nearby is minor attraction in Arcadia. Tutons Drug Store. I think it has been closed very years but I love the rock work.
And another stop is an “Auto Trim Museum.” It was closed but I got the information I needed from the gate.
And then this find. Paul McCartney, on his 66th birthday, drove Route 66 with his girlfriend back in 2011. Not being a geocacher the former Beatle got lost and had to stop at a house and ask if if he was still on the Old Road (as Route 66 is called by some.) This was on an “alternate alignment” of Route 66 and I never would have found it if were not for geocaching. I guess great minds think alike.
Another stop was at this marker commemorating a stop Washing Irving made on his travels in Oklahoma way back when. Another bit of info I would have never known if hadn’t been for my sport.
It was close to here while looking for another cache that a couple of sheriff deputies stopped and asked me if I knew that my car tag was almost two years expired. I said no I didn’t. We chatted about that for a while and then they asked what I was doing and I told him all about it. So they said to get the tag renewed cuz they don’t care about it but you get a highway patrolman in a bad mood they have been known to impound your car and leave you standing by the road. (I took care of the tag the next day.)
And then a little later, I stopped at this old gas station from the early in 20 the century. Anyway I had earned the Adventure Labs cache and was a little unnerved by the thought of encountering a highway patrolman in a bad mood so I went on home.
So thanks for sticking with me. Here’s a photo from our vacation looking out the back side of the condo we were staying in. I took my drone but didn’t fly it. We were on the 15th floor so it was kind of like a stationary drone.
I hope everybody is well. I got my third jab yesterday and a flu shot. I’m still being careful and avoiding crowds as much as I can.
Sunday morning after dropping the kid off at work I headed to Turkey Mountain for a little hiking.
Virginia Creeper?
I’ve been reading the novel, The Overstory by Richard Powers and it is blowing me away with its talk of how trees in a forest are all interconnected and they exchange nutrients with one another and with other plants via a network of fungal hyphae, miles and miles of tubular fungus that exchange minerals with trees for sugar. I already read the book and then I started reading it again. It’s pretty amazing.
Hairy Ruellia?
The woods on Turkey Mountain are very new. It used to be small farms and ranches but oil was discovered and what trees that were there were cut down for fuel for the boilers that powered the pumps.
Headache!!! I’m afraid some poor mountain biker hit his noggin.
So the trees that are there now are pretty new and mostly skinny. There are a few older ones that are bigger and are more spread out. I find the whole life cycle of tree thing to be fascinating.
American Trumpet Vine maybe
I know that Sunday I pretty much had the place to myself. Most people on Turkey Mountain stick to the more established east side with its overlooks of the Arkansas River and well developed trails. The west side is a little wilder and the trails less established and mapped.
I went all the over the the YMCA and took a pic. Not much going on there.
Shining Sumac perhaps
Just 3 miles but hey I was refreshed.
In the afternoon I checked out Route 66 for some geocaching. I stopped one of my favorites. The Blue Whale of Catoosa.
Right next to it was this. Apparently it is supposed to be an Ark as part of a journey through the Bible attraction but it didn’t really take off.
I found this museum in Catoosa. It was closed but it has a great mural out back.
And this is an old bridge on Route 66 that has been relocated. So I am continuing my turning 66 on Route 66 thing that I have going on.
