El Reno

We moved on again this morning. Once again, Route 66 is so much better signposted now (yay!).
We travelled through lots of little towns today and again, there is just varying degrees of decay in most of them. I'm still surprised that there's not more effort by the states to try and make more of Route 66 and the tourism it builds for them.
We made a stop at Stroud to see the Rock Cafe, one of the old original buildings from along Route 66. It has been rebuilt/refurbished but we had an early lunch there to say we stopped at the Rock Cafe.
From there it was on through more small towns. One of the side trips we had planned to make on the Ozark Trail across one of the original Route 66 bridges was thwarted thanks to works on the bridge itself so that left us with an old stone gas station at Luther to see and the round barn at Arcadia.
Again, I am amazed at how little effort there is to 'advertise' relevant points along the way. We came across the stone gas station whilst driving, but there was no pre-warning, just a sign right in front of it. By the time we realised what it was, we were passed it with a line of traffic behind us and nowhere to turn around. There wasn't even a spot to pull over at the station either.
The barn is huge and bizarrely in the middle of town, not out in a paddock as I expected it to be. Again, a quick wander through (at least there was somewhere to pull over for this one!). It has also been restored and was interesting to see the state it had been in compared to what it is now.
We did fluke finding quite an interesting place - the Chandler Interpretive Centre. This was an old armory that had been left to go to ruin and a group of locals decided it should be restored rather than destroyed. They have done one room up as a ballroom and hire it out for special events and functions. Another room is done as a conference/meeting room that people can hire. A separate section is a Route 66 museum. They have different informative videos to watch, but the clever thing is that they have it set up so that you sit in old car seats and motel beds to watch them. Even the boys enjoyed the place as it had a small corner set up for kids to drive toy cars around and play.
Into El Reno for the evening. I had originally thought we might have gone back into Oklahoma City for a bit of a look, but it's a fair drive back in and now that we're at the hotel the boys really aren't that into getting back into the car.

Should be an early night before we're on the road again into Amarillo.

(By the way, STILL have not seen a live armadillo but oh my goodness, the dead ones we've seen!! SO MANY!)