Crystal Spring

Another night in the car, another morning of wipes and curbside tooth brushing. We slept in Girard so that we could visit Doc's Soda Fountain and Drugstore Museum in the morning. The Coca-Cola memorabilia that covered every wall and table, was mind-blowing. My mother would appreciate! And what better combination to a soda shop then an old pharmacy? Continuing the soda counter, it turned into an staged old style pharmacy, with powdered chemicals and old recipes. It was actually really cool to try and figure out what the ingredients were used for, how they mixed them all... Brings an appreciation for being able to access any medication that I want in a pretty plastic package prepared for me by a pharmacist. Moving on...

Nilwood
Turkey tracks in the pavement - This made my day. No, my week. You take a detour off the current route 66 to follow the old, winding 66. At the first turn, you are helped along with a themed turkey sign pointing you the right way. God forbid you would lose your way on 66 without seeing the turkey tracks ! In the original poured concrete of the route 66, there it was, well outlined by thick bright white lines, were about 3 feet long of turkey tracks. That's it. The advertisement though, impressive !

Carlinville
Million dollar Courthouse - Apparently this town has a very scandalous past, with a court house for which plans submitted suggested a total cost of 50,000$, with a final cost of 1.3million$. They later found out that one of the fancy, famous hotels in the town center (owned by the mayor, nonetheless) used some of the materials bought for the courthouse to build it's hotel. Why not?
1869 County Jail - closed to visitors, which didn't stop us from attempting to shove our face against dirty windows to see nothing interesting.

Staunton
Henry's Ra66it Ranch and Route 66 Emporium - Absolutely amazing. No words can describe how perfectly hilarious this place was. Bunny things everywhere, bunnies in large cages outside, "Little Red" (the star bunny) hanging out on the counter inside. Rich, the man who now runs Henry's, told us the story of when one of his bunnies, Montana, told him she wanted to run for president. Naturally, he did t-shirts and buttons, and she was happy and doing all the photos required of her... but then her mood changed. She just wasn't interested anymore, so she pulled out of the presidential race. Poor Montana. I think Rich needs to interact with people more often, too many of his bunnies speak to him. I absolutely loved him.

Livingston
Pink Antique Mall and Dinner - Oh boy. Pink, large things, statue of a beach boy looked 25 feet tall, pink and blue diner, antique store that was so full of stuff it was falling of the shelves... just perfect ! And to top it all off, the Harley Davidson Giant, the 4th and last of the giants, not holding anything this time. The store had a section of antique relics of their slave trading days, with some real thought provoking items. Original signs of "colored people swimming pool", "colored people washroom", and what stayed with me the most was a set of metal hand cuffs with the inscription on one cuff "Negro women or child only" and the other cuff "Property of Georgetown County Plantation police". Yeah, yikes.

Collinsville
Largest Catsup Bottle water tower - Catsup = Cheap Ketchup. Why not?
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site - Jack was super into the history behind these mounds. There were explanation boards showing what they look like under ground. They unearthed all of these, showing full rooms and corridors under these mounds. And yet, for some reason, someone decided "now that we can see all the beauty and work behind these, let's cover it all up with dirt and grass again". So that is what we starred at for about an hour. Different shapes, different sizes, of grass mounds. I don't get it.
Jack who edits this needs to add..."Well, first, these are the largest pre-Columbian settlement in the Americas. Which is crazy. We're talking 600-1400 C.E! Anyway, so these mounds represent funeral rites and their hierarchy and a bunch of things we still don't fully understand. It was incredible to think that people settled here, had a huge city, then everything just got erased with time. Except these mounds. Alright, back to Vee..."
Vee: yawn.

St-Louis
Gateway Arch - Obviously super tall. What I didn't know is you could ride a trolley to the top! I didn't do it, but you could ! It's unfortunate that the park all around was under construction, so we really didn't get to hang out or enjoy the space. Arch and nothing else.
St Louis Zoo - Absolutely amazing and free! My favorite word, free ! They had Kali, a polar bear, who kept just swimming in circles and coming up at different kids for photo ops, its was hilarious. The zookeeper says that because he grew up with humans (his mother was hunted when he was a baby), that he loves the attention. I felt like I was part of the group of mothers who were waiting for their kids, standing at the window. Jack sat down in front of the window and refused to leave for about 10 minutes. She made a friend. She still talks about it.
River boat cruise in the Mississippi River - In all honesty, complete waist of time and money... 20$ for a boat to go up the Mississippi river, describe what we're seeing along the way. Well, describing is a lose term: He would name the building materials, tell us how long it took to build, and how expensive it was. That's about it. He kept describing things that were on the other side of the boat, so we assumed we would get more of the descriptions on our side of the boat at our return. But no. So we saw nothing of his described things...
Forest Park - Considering the size of it, and wanting to stay good on our timing, we drove around it. Walking would take us all day. Beautiful, huge park. Not much to add. Oh, and free!
I must add - The City Museum was closed. I was so, so sad. It's closed Mondays and Tuesday, which were the 2 days of our visit. This placed looked so cool, with slides and climbing things, and ball pits for adults... So so sad. Timing sucks.

In case you haven't kept count, we still haven't showered. I've been dying for a shower but for some reason they're harder to find then I had hoped. Route 66 isn't following a major highway so I haven't had access to truck stop showers. The towns are so small there's no chance of hitting a gym or something. Having arrived in St Louis around 5pm, everything of interest was closed, so we needed to spend the night near St. Louis. We decided to do the 30 minute drive to the "Dr Edward A Babler Memorial Park" a state park which cost us 13$ for the night. We still slept in the car of course, too lazy to set up the tent when we're this comfortable in the car. But we did shower ! Probably what was a 20 minute shower. It felt so good ! So back to St Louis we go to continue our exploration tomorrow morning (and the next blog!)Read more