US66 Tour - Day 4 - Rolla to Tulsa

Yes, as the song says, 24 hours later we were in Tulsa.

A fairly uneventful day. Not a lot of stops en route, just mile after mile of pounding the Mother Road, about 320 in all.

Set off and headed through the Ozark Mountains (hillbilly country). As the miles were munched on what has to be said was a fantastic stretch of road, you really got a sense, not previously experienced, of what this road is about, what makes it so great and why people want to keep it as a historic route. Fantastic. I almost had to pinch myself to believe I was riding Route 66, in the US, on a Harley. The temperature has beeen in the 90s all day but the sheer pleasure we have got has been the overiding factor.

We stopped off for a late lunch at a place which is quite famous on the route. Not only for its home cooking but also for the fact that the building in which it is housed was once a bank and was once robbed by Jesse James.

Our next stop was at a sixties attraction, the Blue Whale. Yes, it is a blue whale, light blue that sticks out into a lake (see pic). When opened as an attraction, it was a swimming 'pool' and kids could slide down into the water from the beast. Now health and safety has all but shut it down, so now it is not much more than a folly, with the 'pool' now a lake for fishing. Bear knows the owner, so we were introduced to the man before we had a look round. His father actually built the place. From there it was a short drive to Tulsa and our next stopover but en route we did a slight detour to cross a bridge over a creek which was built when the road opened in 1926.

During the day we passed from Missouri, through Kansas and are now in Oklahoma, the fourth of our eight states on the trip. Tomorrow we will again we pounding the miles, Oklahoma has more of R66 than any other state, and head for our next stop at Weatherford.

Watch this space.

Neill