Howdy from somewhere on the road! We're Hank and Peggy. Hank retired from the phone company in 1996 after 31 years and I retired from the school district the spring after. In the summer of 1997 we did something our kids still think was crazy: we sold the house in Muncie, put the good china in our daughter's basement, and bought a 1995 Chevy conversion van with 22,000 miles on it. We named her Dolly. We've been living in her most of the year ever since, and we have not regretted it one single day. Well, maybe one day. Ask Hank about the mud in Arkansas.

This page is where we keep our trip journal so the kids and grandkids (and anybody else who wanders in) can follow along. Peggy types most of it at the library when we stop in a town, so if a couple weeks go by with no update, we're just somewhere without a library. We'll catch up.

We also run the Backroads WebRing, a ring of home pages about road trips, the outdoors, cars and the places in between. If that sounds like your page, come on over and join us!

We'd been saving this one. Route 66 was the road Hank's folks drove to California in 1948, and he's talked about doing it "the whole way" since we were courting. So this June we pointed Dolly at Chicago and took the old road, or as much of it as is still there, all the way to the Pacific. About 2,400 miles by our odometer, five weeks and a day, with a whole lot of pie. Here's the journal, straight out of Peggy's spiral notebook.

June 7 - Chicago, Illinois. Started at the "Begin Route 66" sign downtown, which Hank insisted on getting a picture of from three different angles. The film's at the drugstore, we'll see. Got out of the city by noon and followed the old road through Joliet. Slept at a motor court in Pontiac that had a real ice machine, the kind you lift the lid on. The lady at the desk gave us a hand-drawn map of which parts of 66 are still drivable through Illinois. Worth more than anything we've bought so far.

June 9 - Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln's home and Lincoln's tomb. I cried at the tomb, I always do. Supper at a place we'll call the Corn Dog Capital, because it was. Hank had two.

June 11 - St. Louis, Missouri. Walked across the old Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi, which they've fixed up for people on foot now. It has a bend in the middle! Frozen custard afterward. Dolly rode the interstate around the city, which is against our rules, but Peggy is not driving a van through downtown St. Louis for anybody.

June 13 - Rolla, Missouri. The Ozarks start to roll here. We found a cafe on the old alignment called Dot's Skillet where the waitress remembered every regular's order and had ours memorized by the second cup of coffee. Chicken-fried steak the size of a hubcap. Stayed at the Hilltop Court, six little cabins with a swing set nobody uses anymore. The owner says we were the only guests that night. Doesn't seem right.

June 15 - Joplin, Missouri, and the Kansas corner. Route 66 only runs about 13 miles through Kansas, so of course we had to drive every foot of it and count it as a state (see the list below, we're strict about this). Galena, Riverton, Baxter Springs. A nice man at a filling station that's now a little museum told us which curves were the original 1926 road.

June 17-19 - Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Oklahoma has more of the old road left than anybody, or so they told us at every stop, and after three days we believe it. Stayed at the Prairie Sky Motel outside Clinton, where the neon still works and the pool doesn't. We stopped at the Route 66 museum in Clinton, and Hank bought a cap. Then Elk City, then Texas.

June 21 - Amarillo, Texas. The Cadillac Ranch! Ten old Cadillacs stuck nose-down in a field west of town, all in a row, and people just walk out from the frontage road and spray-paint on them. That's allowed, apparently. We didn't have any spray paint so Hank wrote our names in the dust on a fender. A big steak that night at a place that offers you a free 72-ounce one if you can eat it in an hour. We watched a young fella try. We won't say how it came out.

June 23 - Tucumcari, New Mexico. Oh, we love this town. Rows of old motels with the neon lit up at night, some of them still going strong. We stayed at the Sunset Trail Motor Lodge, where the room had a little garage next to it for your car like they did in the old days. Dolly didn't fit but she appreciated the thought. There's a fella on our ring, Glenn, who photographs these old signs. Go look at Neon Nights after you're done here, he knows more about Tucumcari than we ever will.

June 25 - Santa Rosa and Albuquerque. The Blue Hole in Santa Rosa is a natural spring 80 feet deep and clear as a window. Scuba divers in the middle of the desert! Albuquerque's Central Avenue is old 66 and it goes on forever. We ate our weight in green chile.

June 28 - Gallup, New Mexico. Trading posts and a train every twenty minutes. Peggy bought a turquoise ring she did not need. Hank bought a bolo tie he definitely did not need.

June 30 - Petrified Forest and Painted Desert, Arizona. If you only see one thing on this whole road, see this. The old logs have turned to solid stone, with colors like a jewelry store, and the Painted Desert at sunset looks like somebody spilled every crayon in the box. The park road actually crosses old Route 66, and there's a marker where it went through. We slept in Holbrook. There's a motel there where the rooms are shaped like teepees, which you've probably seen in pictures.

July 2 - Winslow and Flagstaff. Yes, we stood on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. Everybody does. Flagstaff was cool and piney and we took a side trip up to the Grand Canyon for the 4th of July because you just do. Hank says the canyon counts as a Route 66 side trip. Peggy says it counts as the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. We're both right.

July 6 - Williams, Seligman, and the long stretch to Kingman. The road from Seligman to Kingman is the longest piece of old 66 still in one piece, and it feels like 1955 out there. Burma-Shave-style signs by the road. Hackberry, where the old general store is now a sort of shrine to the road. Kingman for the night at the Desert Rose Motel, which had a sign shaped like a rose, mostly lit.

July 8 - Oatman, Arizona. The road up over the Black Mountains is all switchbacks and no guardrails. Peggy drove with her eyes closed (she was the passenger, don't worry). Oatman has wild burros walking right down the main street, and one of them ate half of Hank's sandwich out of his hand. Then down to the Colorado River and across to California at Needles, where it was 111 degrees.

July 10 - Barstow, California. Hot. Hot hot hot. We met up with Rick and Tammy from the Desert Rats Off-Road Club, who are on our ring, and they showed us a piece of old road we never would have found. Thanks, you two! Dolly stayed on the pavement.

July 12 - San Bernardino to Santa Monica. Down the Cajon Pass and into the orange groves, except most of the orange groves are houses now. Through Pasadena and into Los Angeles, which took most of a day on account of traffic, and finally to the end of the road at the Santa Monica pier. We took our shoes off and put our feet in the Pacific Ocean, and Hank said, "Well, Mom, we made it," which is what his dad said in 1948. Then we found a motel and slept for twelve hours.

Total: 36 days, 2,448 miles on the odometer, 14 pieces of pie (Peggy), 19 pieces of pie (Hank), one flat tire (Texas), and one very dirty van. We're headed back east the slow way now, through the mountain states, and will write it up as we go.

We have a big paper map of the United States taped to the inside of Dolly's back door, and every time we sleep a night in a state we color it in with a yellow highlighter. (Our rule: you have to sleep there. Driving through doesn't count, and neither does an airport.) Since we can't scan the map, here's the list. 38 of the lower 48 as of this September!

Hank wants it noted that we have also slept in Ontario, Canada, but Peggy says it's not on the map so it doesn't count.

Two years of full-time van living have taught us a few things. These are stuck to the dashboard on an index card.

1. No interstates unless there's no other way. The interstate gets you there. The two-lane road shows you where "there" is.
2. Off the road by 4 o'clock. Find the motel or the campground while it's light, then go exploring on foot. Driving tired is how you end up in a ditch in Arkansas. (Ask Hank.)
3. Never pass a sign that says "PIE." This is the most important rule.
4. Eat where the pickup trucks are parked. Never had a bad meal that way yet.
5. Call the kids every Sunday. Find a pay phone, put in the quarters, tell them we're alive. They worry.
6. Talk to the person at the desk. Every motel clerk and waitress in America knows a road you've never heard of.
7. 200 miles a day is plenty. Some days it's 40. Some days it's zero because there's a county fair.
8. Whoever isn't driving is the navigator, and the navigator is always right. Even when she isn't. (Peggy wrote this one.)
9. Leave a place a little cleaner than you found it. We keep a trash bag and a pair of work gloves by the door.
10. Don't be in a hurry. We're retired. What's the rush?

People write and ask how we manage in a van full time, so here's what's worked for us. We're not experts, we're just two people who've made every mistake already.

• A 12-volt cooler. Plugs into the cigarette lighter and keeps things cold-ish, no ice to drain. We keep milk, lunch meat and Hank's insulin in it. Unplug it when the engine's off overnight or you'll wake up to a dead battery. (Ask Hank.)
• A big road atlas, the spiral-bound kind. We have the Rand McNally and we've worn out two. Every state on its own page, and you can write on it. We also pick up the free state maps at the welcome centers, which show more of the little roads.
• Join AAA. Paid for itself the first year with the tow in Texas. The tour books and free maps are a bonus, and a lot of motels knock 10 percent off if you show the card.
• A roll of quarters for laundromats and pay phones. Always. We keep a coffee can of them.
• Curtains. Hank's sister sewed us a set on Velcro for all the windows. Privacy, and it keeps the van cooler in the sun.
• A little propane camp stove and a percolator. Coffee at a rest stop at 6 a.m. with the sun coming up is the best coffee there is.
• Two flashlights, and know where both are.
• A folding table and two folding chairs. The good aluminum kind. Set up outside the van and suddenly you have a front porch, anywhere.
• Get the oil changed every 3,000 miles no matter where you are. Dolly has 91,000 miles on her now and runs like a top.
• Keep a journal. You will forget the name of the diner in Rolla otherwise. (Dot's Skillet. We wrote it down.)

Where do we sleep? Mostly the little independent motels, they're cheap and they need the business. State park campgrounds when the weather's nice, Dolly has a fold-out bed in back. Church parking lots with permission, and the driveways of our kids and Hank's brother in Tulsa, who is a saint.

All the pages on the Backroads WebRing are worth a visit, but a few we'd especially point you to:

• Neon Nights: Old Signs of the Mother Road - Glenn takes pictures of the old motel signs we drove past. He writes about them the way we feel about them.
• The Corvette Diaries - Lou and Marie and their yellow '72 Corvette. Retired like us, but they go a lot faster.
• The Minivan Chronicles - Denise and her four kids. We only have to keep track of each other. God bless her.
• The Henderson Family Home Page - Not on our ring, but Bob and Linda run the Front Porch ring and were the ones who told us how to set one up. Thank you, neighbors.