Tuesday I finished with the Acoma Pueblo and headed out to Tucumcari, 200 plus miles away, a short jaunt but okay on a day foreshortened by my tour of the Acoma Pueblo, the loss of an hour as I head east, and my pledge to myself to get off the interstate and spend some time on Route 66.

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Today is Thursday, September 20, 2018
This is my 163rd consecutive daily posting.

Time is 6.09am and the weather in Dallas, TX is 97, again, and sunny, again.
The hot weather of these last few days has not been a problem since most of my driving has been through the hottest times of the days.
Wednesday night I had a T-bone and a salad buffet.
It wasn’t bad.

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Don't forget to communicate with me @ ​​​​​​​domcapossela@hotmail.com. 

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Anne McEvoy Kilzer did:
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Dom- Enjoy the West.

My mother was from Arizona and we visited my grandmother every year in Pheonix- usually in June.

I always loved going there. Boy, was it hot!!

My grandparents had a cattle ranch that was 100 acres located is now downtown Pheonix. When my mother was 5 years old, my grandfather develoed menengittis and never recovered. He was cared for in the Veterans hospital, unable to speak or walk until he passed away. My grandmother lost all but 10 of the 100 acres to the bank that held the mortgage, but fortunately she had a business degree in accounting and started working at the Fedreral mortgage lending office. She eventually ran the office.  My mother had a passion for the cattle on their land and she showed her best cattle in State Competitions. She won a scholarship to Arizona State Univ. with her cow, Miss Daisy. Miss Daisy was the All State Champion for 3 years!  My Mom could really pick her cows! When she graduate she asked my Grandmother for a train ticket to Boston. She was a journalism and history major. When she got here she rented a room on Commonwealth Ave and got a job at the Somerville Journal covering the State House and local politics. My father was the Arlington and Somerville State Representative at the State House.... Honestly, my mother was the most positive and fun person I have ever know.  One Spring, when I was 13 yrs. old, my mother announced we were going to drive to California when school finished for the summer. This was without my father! He stayed in Belmont!  It was a great trip! We visited lots of relatives and saw about 25 colleges along the way.  What great memories. 

Looking forward to seeing all of you!!! Xxxx

Web-Meister responds:
Now that’s a nice story!

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And Peggy Fitzgerald did:
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Love that story!

I, too, love Arizona, for different reasons than Anne - Sedona is quite nice too - I saw cowboys! 

Web-Meister responds:
My heroes have always been cowboys.
I, too, saw one.
Two.
Because I want to see more than you. :)

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And now back to Route 66.

The song.
Nat King Cole – Route 66
word & lyrics by bobby troup:

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

The TV Show.
The television show Route 66 is well remembered for its cinematography and location filming.
Writer-producer Stirling Silliphant traveled the country with a location manager (Sam Manners), scouting a wide range of locales and writing scripts to match the settings.
The actors and film crew would arrive a few months later.
Memorable locations include a logging camp, shrimp boats, an offshore oil rig, and Glen Canyon Dam, the latter while still under construction.

The show had little connection with the U.S. Highway providing its name.
Most of the locations in the series were far from "The Mother Road", which passed through only eight states, while the series was filmed in 25 American states plus (one episode) Toronto, Ontario, Canada[3] (another episode featured a brief coda set in Mexico, but was filmed in California).
U.S. Route 66 the highway was briefly referred to in just three early episodes of the series ("Black November", "Play It Glissando", and "An Absence of Tears").
The actual highway is even more rarely shown, as in the early first-season episode, "The Strengthening Angels".

Route 66 is one of few series in the history of television to be filmed entirely on the road.
This was done at a time when the United States was much less homogeneous than it is now.
People, their accents, livelihoods, ethnic backgrounds, and attitudes varied widely from one location to the next.
Scripted characters reflected a far less mobile, provincial society, in which people were more apt to spend their entire lives in one part of the country.
Similarly, the places were very different from one another visually, environmentally, architecturally, in goods and services available, etc. Stars Martin Milner and George Maharis mentioned this in 1980s interviews. "Now you can go wherever you want," Maharis added by way of contrast, "and it's a Denny's."

Thank you, Wikipedia

And from the state of Illinois, the HISTORY OF ILLINOIS ROUTE 66 

Route 66 is the most famous road in America. Generations of travelers have romanticized this highway as a symbol of unlimited mobility and freedom of the road. Its iconic status is enhanced by the unprecedented volume of music, books, films, and other art forms that depict it as the essence of America's highway culture. 

It was born in 1926 as part of the new numbered highway network and quickly grew to be the preferred road west for a nation on the move. U.S. Highway 66 was not as old or as long as some other transcontinental routes like the Yellowstone or the Lincoln Highway but it quickly gained fame as the shortest, year-round route between the Midwest and the coast as it passed through the fabled landscape of the American Southwest. The construction of this thin, ribbon of road helped to transform the American West from an isolated frontier to an economically vital region of the country and made it accessible to anyone with a car. 

In its lifetime this celebrated road witnessed a continuum of highway and transportation evolution from Ford Model Ts plodding through rutted dirt to the rise of the monolithic American Interstate Highway System. Route 66 was the most well known road in a national network of public highways which succeeded in uniting a huge, dispersed nation into a cohesive whole. During its heyday, Route 66 mirrored the mood of the nation.

During the Great Depression, it became the Road of Flight for farm families escaping the Dust Bowl. In his classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck christened it the Mother Road and it has carried that moniker ever since. Even this monumental exodus was but a single surge in the mass movement of humans in the nation's history. Another was the post-World War II movement of ex GIs and their families to join the booming California job market. In the post war recovery years, optimism pervaded the national attitude. Times were good and people traveled. American families took two week vacations to drive 66 and see the wonders of the West and the new California scene. In the 1960s, the "Hippie" counterculture lured thousands of the nation's disenchanted youth west on 66, hitchhiking or packed into microbuses. The old highway is a road of dreams. 

Part of the charm of Route 66 is its idiosyncratic personality. Like a giant carnival Midway, this corridor of neon signs and gaudy roadside attractions was embraced by the traveling public as an exciting diversion from ordinary life. A trip on Route 66 promised an exhilarating pilgrimage where one might discover the unknown and experience the unusual. Route 66 is synonymous with fun and adventure. 

What made Route 66 an intimate adventure also made it dangerous. "Bloody 66" was totally accessible. It twisted through congested cities, crossed railroads on grade, and was riddled with blind corners and hazardous cross traffic. Every incremental improvement that was made to safely accommodate the increasing traffic brought the engineering closer to the Interstate Highway solution that would succeed the old road. 

Route 66 achieved a mythic status in American culture that could not be replaced by a safer but soulless super highway system. Mythical 66 refused to die. Illinois was the first state to hard surface the highway and the first to replace it with Interstate. It was where Route 66 began and finally, where it was officially ended. 

And from the Web-Meister:
Check out the gallery of pictures I took this day, Tuesday.

I loved that little lonesome tree I found at a barren rest stop.
Iconic for the images of the abandoned Route 66. 
I found an actual Museum 66 and Stacy, waving from the aqua-colored vintage, let me take pix.
What a gal.
As long as I paid the $5 entry.

So some iconic images from the early days of drive-ins.
Except for the one, bottom right, showing its aftermath.

Reminders of the glory days.
Bleak now.

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My friends, I’ve run out of time.
This is it for today.
See you in the morning mist and when the sky is blue.