Getting My Kicks On Route 66!

When you create a “Bucket List”, it becomes just another piece of debris in the onslaught of daily data overload.

Put it on your calendar!

For me, and this trip, the spring of 2022 was to be the 6th rescheduling of this “Bucket” item… sabbatical denial, graduations (2), and a global pandemic each put this trip back a year or few. Through all of these, I took them to my advantage - getting better prepared, getting that one more thing you wanted to upgrade… but by 2021, you might say I was all dressed up, but nowhere to go! That’s when, just days before departure, returning home from a “bon voyage” dinner with my friends, Mike and Brenda Mucker, well, let’s just say it wasn’t indigestion that I was feeling. A hernia diagnosis, with two-weeks before a scheduled surgery and six-weeks’ recovery, this was a blow.

The saving grace was to hear from my wife, Darlene, “Why don’t you go do the Pacific Coast instead once you recover?” Riding the Pacific Coast Highway was a second bucket-list goal, further out on the horizon, targeted for the fall of 2023.

Some longer routes are definitely affected by seasonal timing - a ‘perfect’ window for Route 66 - west to east, following the general flow of the jet stream - is springtime, late enough to not have heavy winter conditions (wait until you read our Flagstaff experience!), but beating the summer storms through the mid-west (Ha!). For the Pacific Coast, with a recommended start after Labor Day’s end to summer traffic, my ride calendar simply swapped the two. I will eventually get that story blogged, but I built the format that I wanted and will use that to get the Route 66 blog up first, while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Doing a “day by day” blog in real-time on the road was not going to work, mostly because I was too tired to write and would fall asleep before getting anything coherently written. Personally, I tend to find those get monotonous as well. The daily pictures and notations are better suited for Social Media (Feel free to visit my trip album here). With that consideration, I will simply be taking the trip in order, grouping into segments so I can bring in additional pictures, memories, and thoughts.

Enjoy as I add to each. I cannot promise daily, maybe even weekly. Mostly due to my desire for posts to be “perfect” - that’s my issue, so I will seek to just update, warts and all, so that you can return, revisit, and see the progress as the trip lays out before you.

As I wrap up this preface, I will focus on the following “Table of Contents”:

• Preparation

• Departure/Getting to the Coast

Ride Begins! - California

• Arizona

• New Mexico

• Texas

• Oklahoma

• Kansas

• Misery

• Illinois/Chicago

• Not the planned ending, but the needed ending

I will enjoy reliving these memories, as I hope others will vicariously, and in turn, pave the way to living the dream. All roads lead to roam...