$5 worth of sandstone and a lot of grit
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Happy Friday, Reader! We've tucked ourselves into our own little corner on the edge of Green Country in Oklahoma, where those wild chat piles (heaps of tailing piles from the lead and zinc mines for you non-Okies) pop up out of the ground like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. Jody may or may not have admitted to racing up those chat piles back in the day. This week brought the best kind of visitors—good friends ready to swap stories and check out our neck of the woods. We kept them entertained with tales of local Bigfoot sightings and the mysterious Spooklight. Never a dull moment around here! This week, I am sharing highlights from the small towns of Warwick, Chandler, and Stroud on Route 66 in Oklahoma. The road is reconnecting us to forgotten memories and giving us new stories to share. The purple Yamaha caught my eye as we pulled into the parking lot. Jody had a blue-and-white model as a kid, and seeing this one brought back memories of riding the streets of Picher on warm summer nights, pushing his curfew to the limit. This old building has been hanging around since 1921, five years before Route 66 was even a thing! John and Alice Seaba built it as a filling station, and it's been sitting here ever since, watching the Mother Road grow up around it. Step inside now and you'll find room after room of vintage motorcycles, each one with a handwritten tag telling its story. Where it came from and what wild adventures it survived. And some of them survived a lot. There's a bike in there that was hit by a tornado. There's a Hydra, the motorcycle Captain America rode on screen. There are dirt bikes, road racers, and some machines so ancient they look like bicycles with big dreams. I couldn't stop reading the signs, not because I had to, but because I just had to know the stories. Every bike had been somewhere. Every bike had a person behind it. Standing there in that old brick building, surrounded by machines built for speed and freedom, I couldn't help but wonder what it felt like to hop on one of those vintage bikes, point it west, and just go. Talk about chasing adventure! That feeling? It hasn't changed a bit. The road just looks different these days. Just like Route 66 itself, this sign shows its age, but it's still out there doing what it does best. Roy Rives put this whole place together back in 1936 for just $105. That's $100 for the land and $5 for leftover sandstone from paving Route 66 right out front. Talk about a bargain! Travelers have been rolling through downtown Stroud way before it was even called Route 66, and that Coca-Cola sign has been keeping watch since the road went by another name. Every bike in that room had a sign, and every sign had a story. I ended up standing there way longer than I meant to, soaking them all in. Someone painted this on a barn outside Chandler ages ago to tempt travelers toward a cave in Missouri. Out of the 400 signs that once lined the road, fewer than 50 are still out there doing the same job. One thing to knowIf you're boondocking in Oklahoma in the spring, trust me, bring a generator and more fuel than you think you'll need. We've got 2,600 watts of solar and two lithium batteries, but after four days of stormy skies, we still had to run the generator all night and into the next day. Maybe running the AC to battle that Oklahoma heat and humidity had something to do with it! We squeaked by with about a gallon of extra fuel, which sounds like plenty until you're watching both the gas gauge and the sky. The sun always comes back, but have a plan for those days when it decides to hide. Some roads give you miles. This one keeps giving you memories. Next stop, Bristow and Sapulpa, where we're guessing the road has a few more waiting.
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