Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Today we enjoyed a cloudless bright blue sky while travelling from Greenville, IL to Chandler, OK (just east of Oklahoma City). Temperatures started below freezing but reached over 60 degrees by mid-afternoon.

Pam did a wonderful job capturing the above picture of the famous arch in St. Louis as we crossed the Mississippi River.

A short while later we began to flirt with famous Route 66.  Alongside both sides of I-44, the road we are travelling, are 2 lane roads with many interesting Route 66 icons. It made for very entertaining sights as we rolled through Missouri. 

We were startled to discover today that our Garmin Nuvi GPS had no turn-by-turn directions for roads west of the Mississippi River!  Turns out ours came only with the Northeast US region factory installed.  Fortunately we had printed Google turn-by-turn directions for our entire trip to California.  We find this is smart to do as the Garmin can sometimes make weird turn suggestions and it helps to have the Google directions for a sanity check.  Santa Claus also gave us a 2014 Rand McNally Road Atlas. This evening we were successful installing the balance of all 49 continental US states after some frustration with the Garmin website. 

In Oklahoma, I-44 is a very confusing toll road.  We paid our first toll ($4) and didn't collect the receipt.  Later when we left the toll road to purchase gas we were asked to produce a receipt so that we could receive a refund!  The toll booth agent had us sign a waiver and told us to pass through red light.  After filling our tank with gas we returned to the same toll booth.  Seeing cars ahead were retrieving tickets from the machine we did the same.  Upon reading the ticket we determined that the tickets were for eastbound travelers only and that we had violated state law and failed to pay the toll to travel westbound!  Confusing!