Hello. My name is Bill Allen and this is my first home page, so bear with me. My grandson Patrick set it up and showed me how to put the pictures in, and he tells me that if I make a mistake it is easy to fix. We'll see.

I retired last year after 34 years as a machinist at the tractor plant here in East Peoria, Illinois. My wife Laura retired the same spring from running the cafeteria at a grade school. We were married on June 6, 1959, and for a long time we said that for our 40th we would drive Route 66 the whole way, from Chicago to the ocean. Laura's folks took her on part of it when she was a girl, and I had driven it as far as St. Louis more times than I can count. So this June we did it.

We took our 1996 Buick LeSabre, which is maroon and rides like a davenport, a Route 66 guidebook from the library that we renewed twice, a stack of AAA maps, a small cooler, and a spiral notebook where Laura wrote down every gas stop and every mile. Most of the old road is still there if you look for it. Some of it is a frontage road next to the interstate, some of it is under the interstate, and some of it is just two strips of old concrete going off across a field. We drove as much of it as we could find.

Here is the trip one day at a time. Click on a picture to see it bigger. The date in the corner is the camera's. Laura took the ones I'm in and I took the ones she's in, and I'll let you decide who is the better photographer.

SATURDAY, JUNE 5  -  East Peoria to Chicago to Springfield
Left the house at 5:30 in the morning and were downtown by 8:30. Route 66 starts on Adams Street a block from the lake, at a sign that says BEGIN, and Laura made me go around the block so she could see it twice. Then out through Cicero and Joliet to Wilmington, where the Gemini Giant stands in front of the Launching Pad drive-in. He is a spaceman about 30 feet tall, green, with a silver helmet and a rocket in his hands. I am the little fellow down at his feet. We had a hot dog and kept going south through farm country that looks just like home, the corn about ankle high. Slept in Springfield.

SUNDAY, JUNE 6  -  Springfield to Rolla, Missouri
Our 40th anniversary. Forty years ago at 2 o'clock in the afternoon Laura and I were married in her home church in Peoria. This year at 2 o'clock we were crossing the Mississippi into St. Louis with the Arch right there in the windshield. I told her in 1959 I would take her places, and it only took me forty years. We ate our anniversary supper in Rolla at a place with checked tablecloths, and the waitress brought out a piece of cherry pie with a candle in it because Laura had told her. No pictures of that. We were busy.

MONDAY, JUNE 7  -  Rolla to Tulsa, Oklahoma
Missouri is hills and old motor courts, some open and some not. Then Kansas. Route 66 only runs through about 13 miles of Kansas, down in the corner, and we drove every one of them twice because I missed a turn. Into Oklahoma in the afternoon. Slept in Tulsa.

TUESDAY, JUNE 8  -  Tulsa to Oklahoma City
The Blue Whale at Catoosa, just outside Tulsa, on a gray morning. He sits in a pond where people used to swim. Nobody swims there now, the paint has gone chalky and there are cattails all around, but he is still smiling. That's Laura patting his nose, and our Buick up on the bank. The guidebook says a man built the whale for his wife as an anniversary present. I pointed that out, and Laura pointed out that I had only brought her to look at it.

In Oklahoma City we went downtown to see the fence where the federal building was. People have hung teddy bears and license plates and T-shirts and notes all along it, and they are building a memorial there now. We didn't take a picture. It didn't seem like the place for one.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9  -  Oklahoma City to Amarillo, Texas
Western Oklahoma flattens out and the wind comes up. By the Texas Panhandle you can see a grain elevator for twenty minutes before you get to it. Laura counted cattle for a while and gave up.

THURSDAY, JUNE 10  -  Amarillo to Tucumcari, New Mexico
The Cadillac Ranch, just west of Amarillo: ten old Cadillacs buried nose-down in a row out in a field. People paint on them, and nobody minds, and after 25 years of it the paint is about an inch thick. I stood by the first one so you could see how big they are. Those are cans on the ground. That night we stayed at the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, which has the prettiest neon sign on the whole road and a little garage next to every room.

FRIDAY, JUNE 11  -  Tucumcari to Albuquerque
Laura took this one out her window at about 60 miles an hour. That's her arm, and the maps on the seat, and a mesa out there on the horizon. New Mexico is where the country turns red. No picture we took does it justice, but here is a try. In Albuquerque the old road is Central Avenue, and it still has its neon.

SATURDAY, JUNE 12  -  Albuquerque to Holbrook, Arizona
We drove the road through the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, which you can do right from the highway, and got to the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook about suppertime. Every room is a white concrete teepee. Laura is standing at ours, shading her eyes, and the trunk is open because I was unloading it, as usual. Inside it's a regular little motel room, only round. We both slept fine, and I will admit I had my doubts.

SUNDAY, JUNE 13  -  Holbrook to Kingman
Flagstaff in the morning, cool enough for a sweater, then down out of the pines and into the desert again. West of there is the longest stretch of the old road still left in one piece, close to 90 miles of it, and we had it nearly to ourselves.

MONDAY, JUNE 14  -  Kingman to the Colorado River
The road out of Kingman goes up over Sitgreaves Pass on switchbacks with no guardrails, and Laura rode over it with her eyes shut. Oatman is an old gold mining town hanging on the side of the mountain, and wild burros walk right down the middle of the street. They come from the miners' burros that got turned loose. You buy a sack of feed at the store, and then you are very popular. This fellow got his whole nose in Laura's sack. A tour of ladies on the boardwalk thought it was the funniest thing they had seen all trip. So did I. We crossed the Colorado into California that afternoon and stopped at the first motel with a pool.

TUESDAY, JUNE 15  -  Across the Mojave to Pasadena
The Mojave Desert, Barstow, and over Cajon Pass into San Bernardino. It was hot as a foundry out there. Traffic from San Bernardino to the ocean is something else. We stayed in Pasadena.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16  -  Santa Monica. The end of the road.
The book says the road technically ends a few blocks away, but everybody goes out on the pier, so we did too. A young fellow from Germany took our picture and said congratulations when Laura told him why we were there. That's the Ferris wheel behind me, the Pacific behind Laura, and a couple of sea gulls who wanted to be in it. It was gray and cool, and we stood there a long time.

JUNE 17 TO 21  -  Home the fast way
Interstate 40 and 44 home, five days, which after all that felt a little like cheating. We pulled into our driveway on Monday, June 21, at a quarter after four, and the grass needed mowing.

THE NUMBERS (from Laura's notebook)

Four rolls of 24 comes to 96 pictures, and about 70 of them you can tell what they are. These are the best of the bunch. The drugstore developed them and Patrick scanned them for us in July.

If you have driven the old road, or you are planning to, write to us. We would be glad to tell you where the good pie is.

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Page made by Bill Allen with help from Patrick.
Last updated September 12, 1999.