Preview of the East leg

I had lunch today at Pops with a couple of guys from my office. While we were there, we slipped down the road to the Round Barn for a look at things to come when we make the Route 66 trek east to Chicago later this year. Can't wait!

The return trip

Thursday morning we fired up Joan (Garmin) and told her to take us home. Two days and 18 hours of uneventful (and, by comparison, boring) driving later, we made it. Not as much sightseeing as the trip out, but we did stop in a much less snowy Seligman for lunch. The Roadkill Cafe has a fun ambiance, and great food.


As we saw on the way out when we were forced onto it, the interstate is a different world. Much faster travel, but all about the destination, not the journey. Bobby Troupe's song turned out to be totally right:


"If you ever plan to motor West,
travel my way, take the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route 66!"

Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree National Park

When you've finished a road trip on Route 66 to the West coast, and are 1,500 miles from home, what do you do? In our case, you go visit your son for his birthday! Twentynine Palms is about 3 hours East of Santa Monica, so after enjoying the pier and the park we headed back into the desert.

We got to have dinner with Nick on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and spent some time on Wednesday driving through the Joshua Tree National Park. We didn't see much wildlife - just a few small lizards and a couple of roadrunners - but the scenery was beautiful.

The wind farms in California dwarfed the ones we saw in Texas

One of the millions of Joshua Trees the park is named after

Joshua Tree National Park is a big destination for rock climbers. Click on this picture to see where I've added arrows showing the climbers.

A breathtaking vista that pictures can't do justice. In the distance is San Jacinto Peak, with Palm Springs at its base. The line running across the middle is the San Andreas Fault.

Nick got to spend his birthday with Flat Alix!

The more interesting end of the line

Around the corner from the boring end of Route 66 is the Santa Monica Pier, where the celebration really takes place. We parked and wandered around the pier for a couple of hours. The weather couldn't have been better for an end-of-the-road celebration!

Terry Prince

We had lunch on the patio at a Mexican restaurant on the pier, where Terry Prince serenaded us. I can't find much of a web presence for him, but his songs and musicianship are amazing, and he apparently plays the pier on a regular basis. When he hits it big, remember you heard it here first!

Trapeze school on the pier

Ian Bowen with Kelly

We stopped (of course!) at the Route 66 kiosk at the pier, where we met Ian Bowen. In addition to manning the kiosk, he's the VP of the California Route 66 Association, so we learned a lot from him. Including the fact that Jerry McClanahan, whose EZ66 Guide we'd been following for 1,500 miles, lives just up the road in Chandler!


From the pier, we walked up to and through Palisades Park to see the Will Rogers Highway marker. Yet another beautiful place we saw on our travels.

Looking back at Santa Monica from the end of the pier

The Georgian Hotel, across the street from Palisades Park

This is just what it looks like: a street performer standing on a ladder, balancing a long stick on his head, wearing a loincloth and two live snakes, playing a flute.

The End of the Line

As day 5 dawned, we only had 70 miles to go to get to the end of Route 66. Knowing it was going to take us through some pretty heavy traffic we got an early start. Sure enough, the main thing we got to see on our final morning of the Route 66 drive was this:

 

Lots of beautiful (and very expensive) real estate, and we got to drive on both Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards.

Finally, after 5 days and 1,500 miles of driving we arrived at our destination. The thing we had come all this way to see. The climax of the trip. The End of Route 66:

That's it. No confetti, no band, no balloons. Just the intersection of Olympic and Lincoln Boulevards in Santa Monica, California. That's the end of Route 66, without so much as a sign to mark it. Fortunately, the guide had prepared us for the anticlimactic nature of the end of the road, and directed us to where the celebration really takes place....

Farrell's

After we got a room for the night in Rancho Cucamonga, we decided to grab a quick bite to eat. Neither of us was very hungry, so we thought maybe some ice cream would be in order. One of our goals on the trip was to avoid chains we can eat at in Oklahoma, so we fired up Joan (the name we'd given to the GPS) to find us a place for ice cream we don't have at home. Dairy Queen was about a mile away, so off we went for a blizzard.

On the way to DQ, we passed a Farrell's. I remembered it from the 70's, at Crossroads Mall in Oklahoma City. I thought they were all gone, and Kelly had never heard of it, so I made us stop there.

It's still the blast it was back then. Mostly a kids' place, to be sure, but we had a great time, and some good food. Lots of birthdays, lots of servers in straw hats and armbands singing and clapping, and some pretty impressive balloon creations.

In addition to the birthday songs, there's a special ceremony when you order the Triple Chocolate Brownie, which we did:

Farrell's isn't completely gone, and it's as much fun as it ever was. If you get to Rancho Cucamonga (or one of their other remaining locations), don't miss it!

Wigwam Motel

There are two Wigwam Motels left out of the original seven. We missed pictures of the one in Holbrook, Arizona during the snowstorm of '12, so the one in Rialto was a must-see.

We thought about spending our last night on Route 66 here, but the neighborhood was a little shady, and we had enough daylight left to press on a bit further, so we moved on to Rancho Cucamonga (which is a much cooler name than "Rialto") for the night.