On the Road Again...

Six years ago, John and I took the first of what's become an annual road trip from Austin to Grand Haven, Michigan. The round-trip is around 2500 miles. Almost a quarter of those miles lie in Texas--takes a while to slip the Great State's surly bonds--and once outside, millions of acres of corn and soybeans to look forward to. We mix up the routes each trip to ensure that we'll see something different. And firmly believing that the road less traveled is always the more interesting route, we do our best to avoid those thruways Steinbeck warned against.

Today, we're setting out once again for Grand Haven, lucky to be escaping the Texas heat for a couple of months. Our trip north will take us to some familiar places (talking about you, Memphis!) but we'll visit new towns along the way, as well. It's always exciting anticipating what we might stumble across.

Here are some places we've experienced so far:

Paris, Texas

El Paso, Illinois

The only federal building that's in 2 states (US Post Office, Texarkana)

What just might be the most beautiful Superfund site in the United States

(Herculaneum, Missouri)

We think this is the original Trader Joe's

(Lord-knows-where, Arkansas)

A Courthouse that's had a tree growing out of its roof since 1870

(Greensburg, Indiana)

And the "World's Largest Bottle of Catsup" (Collinsville, Illinois)

By far, the most surprising thing we've come across was in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. We found it while driving down the Rock 'n Roll Highway, a stretch of US 67 that runs from Little Rock toward Memphis. Rockabilly Highway would have been a better name for the road--it used to be lined with honky-tonks frequented by the original rockabilly greats--but when it came time to name the road, the politicians and civic leaders feared any possible connection to, God forbid, hillbillies. (Here's a picture is of a plaque along the route. Shake it, boys!)

One block off the Rock n' Roll Highway is a monument to what is has to be the most obscure bit of Beatles trivia. After their concert in Dallas on September 18, 1964, the Beatles headed off for a couple days of relaxation at a Dude Ranch in southern Missouri. (Walnut Ridge was the closet airport with a landing strip big enough for their plane.) The stopover was supposed to be secret, but there was no way to hide a plane that big in a town that small. When the Beatles returned to the airport two days later, locals were there to greet them. The Fab Four (dressed in suits and ties--because isn't that what everyone wears upon leaving a Dude Ranch holiday?) graciously greeted the crowd before boarding their plane and heading off to New York for the final stop on their US tour. In the above pic, John and Blu were all to happy to follow in the lads' footsteps.

Happy to be on the road again, and can't wait to see what we'll discover this time around!

Lagniappe: The final 2 photos aren't from one of our road trips--I took them in April when John and I were in Cuba--but I'm including them to show that Beatles monuments are everywhere. The first photo is Santa Clara, the next, Trinidad. Fidel originally banned the Beatles and their music. With US invasions on his mind, he didn't have any patience for a British one and the commercialism he felt it represented, but after a while, he let up and embraced them like everyone else. Cubans love los Beatles!