Route 66: Stroud to Elk City

This was another day of up and down roads. The first stop was in Chandler, at the house of Jerry McClanahan, the EZ 66 guide author. We learned not only about his experiences with / on route 66, but also about what they do in case of tornado alert (his house, as many in the area, had a tornado cellar), saw the multitude of paintings that he does (most of them Route 66 related) and of course he autographed our books.

Next was Seaba station in Warwick, where they had an interesting motorcycle museum where we saw a motorbike of the same age as me, who’s never been taken out of the box!

We kept going, noticed the change in soil colour to red, very similar to northern Australia. The Round Barn in Arcadia was very interesting – not only the guide who told us the story (Joe Baxter) in a very nice, rolling southern American lilt, but also the upper part of the barn which they transformed into a room for event hire and has excellent acoustics.

We bought sodas and lunch from Soda Pop.

We drove past Oklahoma City on the bypass (seems to be the city of oil and cowboys), then past the small town of El Reno with its many murals. At some point we went over a dead skunk and it really stunk (luckily we all avoided crushing it with the wheels).

In Weatherford we went to the start of a gravel road (which was very tempting) but we decided to stay off it.

Our final destination for the day was Elk City. We first went to see the Route 66 and old town museum (where they had an advert with young Ronald Reagan advertising cigarettes) before heading to our accommodation, a beautiful little place called Blue Bird Inn.

On the way back we noticed some very interesting clouds – and read about them on BBC next day as apparently they are quite rare, called mammatus clouds and are associated with severe weather and appear before or after storms.

A short video of the roads driven today can be watched here.