Sad to see you needed to knock on wood harder, apparently. Good luck. No experience with those blazers myself.
Sad to see you needed to knock on wood harder, apparently. Good luck. No experience with those blazers myself.
Nonsense, it wouldn't be an adventure if nothing broke!
SO, what do you guys want to read about first: the car troubles, or the road adventures? OK, we'll start with the good stuff. 
Due to our delayed start, we passed the Missouri State Line around 11AM.
Of course, no trip through St. Louis would be complete without catching a glimpse of that most famous of St. Louis sights: The flipped-on-its-side-delivery truck:
How does this even happen at in-town speeds?
Though I wanted to stick around and watch the crews right the violated truck, wife ushered me along to what we were really there to do: go up in the arch! Because the Arch is currently undergoing re-landscaping, we had to buy our tickets in the old courthouse. Which, if you've never been inside, is quite the impressive structure of its own. The view up into the dome is particularly noteworthy:
There's also all sorts of murals depicting westward expansion, the underground railway, and all other manner of 7th grade American History lore.
Going up in the Arch is its own adventure. You stand in this little stairwell-looking area and wait for 7 tiny doors to open.
When the little doors open, your wife (who is mildly claustrophobic) and small child (who doesn't know any better yet) reluctantly go through one of the doors into a tiny white pod, like something out of a science fiction movie.
The doors shut, you rattle and clank back and forth for several minutes, watching the bowels of the monument go past you though the little windows in the side of the pod. And then you arrive at The Top, where a National Park Service Ranger greets you. As does this:
I am pleased to report that all parties made it to The Top and back without incident. Mrs. VCH even said that she liked it, which was remarkable. We headed back to Level 8 of the parking garage, where we'd left Lucy the Jimmy, and went off in search of The Mother Road. Tummies were growling by that point, so we broke out the snacks as we headed West. However, dried fruit and nuts just weren't cutting it. We needed something a bit more...substantial. Time for a S'mores Concrete!
Ted Drewes, a St. Louis institution since before God walked the Earth, also doubles as a tree lot this time of year. And they still sell wooden Christmas Trees. I liked this litle guy; Mella, however, was unsure.
The three of us split a "Regular" concrete, which was enough to make us bloated with dairy and initiate severe brain freeze.
OK...gotta pause here. Small child is awake, and we need to get moving. more to come!
Yay for cool road trip write ups!! Sounds like you're having an awesome time, treasure it. 
If you haven't yet hit the Baxter Springs, KS part of route 66, you might think about taking a slight detour to see the ghost town of Picher, OK . It's definitely spooky.
Regarding The Corner in Winslow, the flatbed Ford is provided, parked on the corner, just down from the statue of Jackson Browne. The bar across the street will be blasting Eagles tunes. You might even have to wait in line for a photo, since it's Winslow's principal tourist attraction these days. Be sure to check out the historic La Posada Hotel while you're in town, a quick walk-through is worth the time. It's an original Harvey House hotel that was restored about 10 years ago, to the tune of around 12 million dollars, and it's spectacular if you like historic buildings.
My wife also hated the pods at The Arch. She stated it was like climbing into a commercial sized clothes dryer.
We did about a 12 hour drive over Thanksgiving with a 14 month old.
The arch is cool. We stopped there one year with the Deucelings but didn't go up. We should have.
Waiting to hear what Mrs. VCH thought of your heroic mechanical save.
tpwalsh wrote: I'm not sure which way you're headed down 66, but I have a well equipped garage(and a place to crash for the night) in Bloomington/Normal, IL if you get in a bind. Looks like it'll be great fun! Post lots of pictures!
Do I know you? Did you go to CCSCC autocrosses at all? Or the weekly meetup at K's?
In reply to mtn:
I think he posted in the "Illinois Folks" thread and had a gray or silver WRX sedan that he raced at one time, and may still race, if that rings a bell, and if I'm thinking of the right guy.
Edit: nevermind, that was GaryP.
In reply to mtn:
They still have the weekly K's meetups??? I thought that pretty much died with CII...
Lovin this road trip. Similar to one i took a few years back!
You're in for a real treat =)
In reply to mtn:
Probably not. Haven't been to an AX yet as we just moved in August, and I've been back and forth to NC for work.. well until Monday when I start my new job at Big Red, not that one, the more Normal one. Between the move and the new kid we haven't done much other than just survive. I'm hoping to get out to a CCSCC event or three next season.
What's the meetup at K's? Shoot me a txt(my number's at the end of the roadside assistance thread)
In reply to Jim Pettengill:
We drove though back in April. Quite frankly, while worth the ~15 minute detour if you're an Eagles/classic rock fan, the whole town is one big E36 M3hole...and I've lived in quite a few E36 M3holes in my time!
If you have time(and $$) hit Meteor Crater instead.
When last we left our heros, they were departing St Louis, bellies full of frozen custard. Mrs. VCH said, for the first time, that she had gotten her kicks. Which, as you know, are a key part of a Route 66 trip.
Since we got a pretty late start, and spent a good bit of time ogling the Arch, Courthouse and Ted Drewes, the determination was made to hop on 44 after we hit the St. Louis outskirts and boogie for a while. Around 2 o'clock the little alarm clock in the back seat woke up and demanded lunch. The cool thing about random hop-offs of the interstate near Rt. 66 is that you often find things like this:
The original motel was gone, replaced by a Travel Lodge. Still, the old signs are cool relics of American History.
After a bit more highway, we decided to rejoin our favoured road in Cuba. This motel was (I think) the inspiration for part of the movie "Cars".
The gas pumps were dry...
but they did have this weathered old Chevy parked out front. Had we timed our trip better, this looked like it would have been a neat stop-over. Alas, the highway re-beckoned.
But not for long. :-) Cuba also hosts the World's Largest Rocking Chair. For scale, my wife is 5'2" tall:
One of many murals we saw along the way.
By this point we were really chasing daylight, and hadn't made it halfway across the giant diagonal of Missouri. So we booked it. Hard.
The sunsets keep getting more and more beautiful the further west we headed:
And then...
Just the other side of Springfield (cue Simpsons music) Route 66 branches off as MO-96, and since it was already dark, we figured we'd find a room and some grub at the next decent-sized town we came across. MO-96 blazed through Phelps, Plew, Avilla, and other semi-abandoned dots along the map. Katie was driving- she'd been driving, in fact, all day- and a white Trailblazer in front of us decided to make a very fast right turn. She slammed on the brakes, and I heard the wheels lock briefly as the antilock brakes did their thing. Shortly thereafter, the dashboard began freaking out. The speedometer needle bounced around frantically, the ABS light illuminated, and the dash brake light flashed on and off repeatedly. The truck seemed to be driving OK, though.
We pulled into Carthage and settled in for the night at the Best Budget Inn just east of town. After unpacking the Jimmy, we went out in search of dinner and I noticed (as I was driving now) in addition to the dashboard antics, the transmission was acting strangely. It would hold gear until redline, and then upshift violently, even at light or part throttle. I nursed the ailing Lucy to Habaneros and as delicious, authentic-seeming Mexican food was consumed, numerous google searches and a frantic plea was made to GRM for advice....
Naturally, after dinner, when we went back out to the Jimmy, the problems all magically vanished, and the truck ran normally. Still, action is always desirable over inaction, and proactively we drove to the nearest auto parts store- an O'Reilly's. It was about 8 o'clock at night by now; luckily the store was open for another hour. The two guys still manning the deserted store were extremely helpful- they got out their OBD-II scanner (I'd left mine at home, trying to pack lightly) and found errors at all four wheel speed sensors, as well as the instrument cluster and Vehicle Speed Sensor. Deducing it would be highly unlikely for all 4 wheel sensors to spontaneously and simultaneously sizzle, I rolled the dice on the VSS. The O'Reilly's guys let me borrow some tools off the shelf, and I crept under Lucy to locate the offending transducer.
There is is- screwed right into the side of the transfer case. A few quick flips on the socket wrench extricated the sensor that General Motors put there, and a few more cranks tucked the new one neatly in place. I checked the power coming from the vehicle PCS, and it was 5 volts- perfect. Mella and mommy waited in the Jimmy as I settled up with the store, and then it was back to the Best Budget Inn for the night.
^^ I will presume this photo was take per my request and since you mention they waited in the car, I gather that this pic was not taken by Mrs VCH.
Excellent!
I am enjoying the tale.
A little spoiler alert: I'm about a day behind on the recaps here, so while I'm regaling you all with takes of Tuesday, I'm sitting here solidly in Wednesday, sipping my glass of wine in a hotel room. I wish the updates would write themselves as they happen, but as it goes with road trips, so much of the time is simply spent "in the moment". As it should be.
Tuesday morning, while Mrs. VCH finished readying Small Child, I drove across the street to fuel up the Jimmy and perform the morning ritual under the hood. We hadn't noticed it the night before, but the gas station across from Best Budget Inn had a strange sort of sculpture suspended above the pumps...some sort of John Deere airplane...thing.
The Carthage, MO Best Budget Inn:
Odd vehicles on poles was a recurring theme in Carthage. The man driving this truck had apparently been left by his woman...though it's unclear if this is because of his truck, or all the dogs.
This is the historic Boots Motel, which is currently undergoing renovation. They have some rooms available for let, however we arrived too late in the day to catch the proprietors and make a reservation. However, they did recommend the Best Budget Inn to us, which turned out to be a fine lodging establishment, especially for the price.
Today's route took us due west out of Carthage, through Joplin, and across the MO-KA line for a brief, 13-mile-long fling with Kansas's stretch of Route 66. As I was driving that morning, and Mrs VCH was dealing with little VCH in the back and figuring out how to use my fancy camera phone, we didn't get any pictures until crossing into Oklahoma. So you'll have to take my word about us actually driving through the Sunflower State.
The Sooner State started off a bit confusingly. Alt 69 drained out of Baxter Springs, Kansas, into the whole Quapaw-Commerce-Miami (pronounced "My-AM-uh", apparently) area. Easy enough. But headed towards Narcissa, the formerly paved-in-a-normal-way road turned into this:
I remembered in my reading from the night before (our "plan" for this trip being developed somewhere between "on-the-fly" and "seat-of-the-pants") that this was the "Sidewalk Road" part of OK-66. When they first built this road, they only had enough money to pave an 8 foot wide stretch. It was later widened, but only with stone/cinders/crushed up whatever. So it's kindof like driving on a cobblestone street, only with more dust.
But then Route 66 turned from bad, to worse...
And finally to, "WTF???"
Here we are, over a thousand miles from home, in a 15 year old SUV with 168,000 miles on it and having just broken down the night before...and I'm mud-bogging it through northeastern Oklahoma. However, I never did have to engage four-wheel-drive, so I guess it wasn't that bad of a road.
A lot of 66 though this part of the state is through some fairly sparsely populated areas. Signs of life past pop up periodically.
Near the fringes of Tulsa, the town of Catoosa hosts a giant concrete whale, sitting in a pond, erected as the 34th wedding anniversary present from a man to his wife. Naturally, I had to climb on the whale tail.
Somehow, they actually celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary together as well, though without any new masonry mammals.
More Route 66 signage, this time from a business that was not defunct.
Due to the constraints of time, and the fact that we'd only managed about 371 miles the prior day, we elected to take the fast way though Tulsa, which spat us out on the southwest side around Supulpa. Roadside attractions for gearhead couples such as us began to increase in frequency.
Unfortunately, so did the percentage of really, really bad drivers. I haven't spent a ton of time driving in Oklahoma, but it seemed like nobody looked, or cared at all, before pulling out into traffic. We had several near misses- one with a really battered F150 tow-strapping a Buick out of a gas station, in a 65 mph zone, as we were coming up on the gas station. And there were others. In fact, coming into Bristow, I saw a white Dodge minivan on it's roof, likely a result of having pulled out into traffic and getting clobbered by the Suburban that was sitting nearby. Eeek. By the time we left the state, any time I saw a car approaching us from a perpendicular street, I instinctively covered the brake pedal with my foot.
Just northeast of Oklahoma City (or OKC as the locals call it), we stopped for lunch at a newer place in Arcadia- Pops. Pops specialty is, well...
They have several hundred types in bottles, and a decent burger-based menu as well. Mrs VCh and I each plowed through a "Mother Road Burger", each comprised of 1/3 pound of beef, topped with pulled pork BBQ, onion rings, cheese, some sort of sauce, and pickles, all of it somehow shoved between two heaps of cornbread. It was freaking delicious.
Daylight was quickly disintegrating into dusk as Lucy the Jimmy made her way west out of OKC. We really needed to be on the other side of Amarillo when we started off Wednesday morning to be close to schedule- which meant cranking out right at 500 miles Tuesday. Right as the sun was setting, the Lone Star State came into focus.
Well, as focused as it gets in an 85 mile-per-hour through-the-windshield-at-twilight picture taken by Ansel Adams. 
The Texas sunset was the prettiest we'd seen so far on our trip.
Going....
Going...
Gone.
I-40 from west of OKC into Amarillo (and, in fact, clear into New Mexico, as it turns out) is posted 75 mph, and I ran a dime over pretty much the whole way into Amarillo Tuesday night. We ended up finding a motel on the west side of town, which was clean, and, well, cheap, had a quick dinner at My Thai (which, though the food was good, had the ambiance essentially of a Pizza Hut with some oriental statues thrown up between the booths) went back to the motel and fell asleep on the king-sized bed, the in-wall heat pump churning away.
Great trip!!
The one town on 66 I know well is Shamrock Texas. I worked out of there for a couple of months. It has all of the old Route 66 architecture that you're probably getting sick of, but I still kind of have a soft spot for it. I lived out of a hotel across from a junkyard that had a guard donkey. He would absolutely lose his mind when the weather was right for tornadoes. It's long in your rearview now.
Good updates, you're weaving a tale.
In reply to mazdeuce:
I remember Shamrock...right before we ended up in the stink-hole that was Amarillo.
Only a dime over? That is slow for that Highway Very cool trip. Fun to see all of the interesting parts of Route 66. Happy travels.
bmw88rider wrote: Only a dime over? That is slow for that Highway
Well, the speedo only goes up to 100...and I'm pretty sure that it's speed governed to 95 or 98. And we'd you know, like to make it to Phoenix with a little life left in it. 
Let's see...I think we're on Wednesday morning now. Yep, that's right. Wednesday morning, 7:30 or so Central time. Being so close to the Mountain Time Zone, the sun rose a bit later than we were used to.
The past few mornings we'd grabbed some quick bites of breakfast from our cooler, combined with whatever passed for a "continental" breakfast at our place of lodging. The Interstate Motel, at $39 a night, offered little in the way of amenities like any sort of breakfast, or, you know, things like free soap or a clock in the room...so we headed to one of the few chain restaurants I'll purposely visit.
Scattered all the way. Their namesake Waffles are pretty tasty too, and need nothing on them.
Amarillo stinks. No, I mean literally, it smells bad. The heart of the Texas panhandle is the epicenter of beef production, and when cattle raising transitioned from "let them roam the praries and eat grass" to "let's shove them all into a pen and feed them antibiotics", the cattle weren't the only thing that became concentrated. Yeah. Luckily, a little west of the city the eye-watering stench of bovines stewing in their own E36 M3 dissipates. And we came to the other thing that Amarillo is known for: Cadillac Ranch.
Small Child wandered around the buried behemoths in wonderment; unfortunately we gave her a bit too much free reign and she did what all little ones have a tendency to do: found the nearest mud hole. After extricating her and her booties from the muck, I found a couple of somewhat-full spray cans of paint laying around. Festively, they turned out to be green and red. And so, the VCH clan made it's mark on Stanley Marsh's creation.
I think this should be our Christmas Card photo this year.
Much of 66 west of Amarillo is now I-40, or a frontage road thereof, so we re-entered the interstate to get to the New Mexico line. A couple of small towns along the way necessitated slight detours, such as Adrian, which is the halfway point of Rt 66 between Chicago and L.A.
Ruins lie along much of the 66 landscape, marking ex-towns as we approached New Mexico....
Next up: The Land of Enchantment.
This last gas station very much reminds me of something out of the movies "Two lane Blacktop" of "No Country for Old Men."
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