Parades and Route 66

If you're my age or older, you probably remember hearing the song/saying/whatever the heck it was: Get your kicks on Route 66.

66 was opened in the 1920s and ran nearly 2500 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles. It meanders across Oklahoma -- we had more miles of it than any other state. Because of its importance in travel and migration, it's also called the Main Street of America and the Mother Road.

We just called it "our road."

The house where my sisters and I grew up is located maybe a hundred feet off one of the remaining sections of the old original 66 outside Sapulpa (right down the road from the TeePee Drive-In). I learned to ride my bike on that road. To skateboard and, later, to drive. We used to trek down it to visit my granny (when we decided not to cut across the fields, climb two barbed-wire fences and cross the railroad tracks) and up it to visit friends. It was nothing special back then, not to us. When people would come out in their restored old automobiles and convoy past the house (sometimes dressed to match the period of the cars), I just thought they were weird.

Anyway, back to the present . . . last night was Sapulpa's Christmas parade, and the theme was our road. There were old cars, girls in poodle skirts, old old fire engines and trucks, and a couple floats that represented the TeePee and some other places along the highway (the Blue Whale, Carl's Pigstand, Wimpy's Cafe, the old Dairy Queen). It would have felt a little more appropriate had we gone downtown to Dewey Street, which IS Route 66, to watch, but it was a nice trip back in time as it was.

And after freezing my butt off, listening to the music and watching the little boy beside us absolutely beam with excitement, I'm thinking at least some of the blah might be leaving my humbug!