The sun is shining and we are ready once again to explore Route 66. This morning we are in Oklahoma City. We'll drive east on the Tollway to Chandler and work our way back down Route 66 to the RV.
Chandler has a REALLY nice building on Route 66. It houses a Route 66 museum, a conference room/library, a gift shop and a huge auditorium.
We had to pass up this great looking Route 66 museum yesterday on our way to Oklahoma City because it was closed. Today we're back.
This building is a former armory with hand carved stones and walls that are 22" thick.
The Event Hall used to be an indoor drilling (marching) area.
The Route 66 museum area is pretty unique in that they have overhead video screens with segments on Route 66. Their seating varies from airline seats to Ford Mustang seats to motel beds. Yeah, kind of unusual.
Each of the screens has a couple of presentations.
There is a series of eight maps you can buy of the states that the Route passes through. Someone put them all together and colorized them. It made for a really nice looking display.
The floor is a Google Map view of the area.
Their gift shop was chock-full of Route 66 items.
A couple of blocks away is the gallery of Jerry McClanahan, the writer of the EZ66 Guild Book we've been using along the Route. His book says to call him up when you're in town and he'll open up his gallery. We did and he did.
In addition to writing books about the Road, he is also an excellent artist who does work for himself as well as takes requests to have artwork done.
We had a great time talking to him about our trip and he even signed our book.
Down the road, the next "town" is Willard. They have an old gas station that the owner now stores his motorcycle collection in. We don't seek out motorcycle collections but this sure seemed like a lot of them to us.
He even has 1 of only 1900 Excelsior-Henderson motorcycles ever built. Still in it's crate!
Here's a great 116 year old landmark in Arcadia appropriately called the Round Barn. The roof had collapsed in the 1980's and rather than destroy it one guy started a campaign to restore it in the early 1990's. It still looks great.
Inside was a gift shop. Lining the walls was the history of the town, the barn and reconstruction efforts by the "Over the Hill Gang".
There was a "Why Round Barns?" article on the wall as well. They were economical to build. The capacity of a circle is larger than that of a rectangle with the same amount of siding. It was faster and cheaper to build.
And with that knowledge "we proceeded on..."to a giant soda bottle on the side of the road.
There were millions of bottles of soda on the wall of POPS.
There were some outlandish flavors like Toxic Slime, Zombie Brain Juice, and Sweet Corn.
As well as buying a couple of bottles of soda, we sat down and had a delicious onion burger for an early dinner.
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