We left Memphis fairly late in the day, so there was no chance of ever making Oklahoma City. We opted for Little Rock, Arkansas where we spent the night and set out next day for Oklahoma City. On arriving there we opted to stay in a Hotel (albeit a cheap Hotel) rather than a Motel that evening. They had a free shuttle into Downtown Oklahoma, but we decided that we weren’t here to see cities. We had set out to explore the great wildernesses. That wilderness trip we had dreamed up didn’t really start (we thought) until we reached Flagstaff and The Grand Canyon, still almost a fortnight away by our rough reckoning.
Of course we didn’t expect to be sitting in our car, driving for fourteen days straight until we got to Flagstaff. We also had in view that as we passed into Arkansas we would be ‘joining’ Route 66, one of ‘the most famous roads in the United States.’
Well, you can’t really say you joined Route 66. What was Route 66 was officially removed from the United States Highway System as long ago as 1985. Of course, you can build a new and better highway, but you just can’t kill the old and ancient routes that grow in our collective consciousness. You can take a rubber to the road, but you can’t erase all of that collective memory in the books, songs, poems, films and personal stories that get handed down.
We could have made Albuquerque in one day, but we had decided to set out, at the very least, to find the ghost of Route 66. With that in mind our destination was a modest drive to Amarillo.
The Interstate Highway connecting Oklahoma City and Amarillo is the Interstate 40. Which for most of the way, vaguely follows the old Route 66. Indeed, there are roads either side of it that variously show up on the satnav as ‘Old Rte 66’ or ‘I-40 Service Road’.
The new ‘I-40’ now bypasses all of the towns that the old highway joined together. Obviously, therefore, it misses most of the iconic sites that created the dream that was Route 66. We tried to follow the dream by taking almost every turnoff between Oklahoma City and Amarillo. We often even managed to resist the instructions to rejoin the I-40 and travelled parallell, on the old Route 66.
Not all of that was worth the effort, but when we did come across old pieces of history, or even the fairly new museum in Clinton, it was like filling in the pieces of the dream we were trying to uncover.
Towards the end of that day of dream catching, we pulled in at a ‘rest and information’ area about an hour from Amarillo. We hadn’t really set out to find information, rather, we wanted to book our accommodation for that night. The rest area itself was a pretty spartan place with not a lot of ‘information’, but a scrawled sign informed us that we could pick up maps and the currently absent information from the Welcome Center a few miles on at junction 76. We decided that might be worth a visit. It was early and we had plenty of time to spare.
We took junction 76 and visited its information centre. It was like walking into a suburban public library. Row upon row of shelves, that instead of books were full of leaflets and brochures that, I don’t care how big Texas is, seemed to cover every square mile of texas. We came out with an armful of leaflets to Study.
When we arrived at our accommodation one place just jumped out at us: Big Bend. We looked hard at our plans and our new ‘unplans’ and just decided we had to do it.
It’s six hours south and we’re supposed to be heading west.
We can work it out.
