Route 66 Day One

Denice and I headed out on our Route 66 trip this morning at 9:00 a.m.  We headed down the Rock Freeway and I pushed the cruise control for the first time and--guess what? 

Facing a 4,000 mile odyssey in our Honda Odyssey totally dependent on my right foot was too daunting for me so we turned the van around and headed back to Milwaukee to the Honda dealer.  We had just been there Tuesday night because we could not get the van out of gear and that turned out to be a little plug under the brake pedal that cost us about $100.

Well, the guy who fixed our van did not connect the cruise back together that night.  The good news was that the dealer could take us this morning and the fix was free.  The bad news was that we lost 2 1/2 hours sitting in the dealer's waiting room.

Denice and I headed out on our Route 66 trip this morning at 11:30 a.m.  We have three days to drive all the 2,000 miles to Santa Monica, California, where we intend to have brunch with Denice's sister Chris and her husband Chuck.  Then, from the pier, we head back over the 2.000 miles to Chicago on Route 66.

At 1:00 p.m., we were finishing lunch at the Road Dawg in Beloit, Wisconsin, and beginning to think that this was going to be a very challenging trip indeed considering at this point we thought we would be somewhere in Iowa. 

Speaking of Iowa, I was amazed to discover that you can find the cure for many diseases by peeing in a wayside.  Unfortunately, I failed to actually grab a copy of either paper so I will never really know. 

Near Des Moines, Iowa, I got confused in a construction zone and missed our turn off.  In reversing our route we turned around in the parking lot of a shopping mall that had a restaurant called Sticks which sounded to us from a distance like Asian food.  When we got close enough, this place turned out to be a Native American store.  Ironically, right next to it was

which proved to have great rolls so we were really happy.

Maybe we should have waited to eat because when we got to Lincoln, Nebraska, we discovered they serve gorilla meat which neither of us have ever had. 

So now we have settled in at the Settle Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska, about 125 miles short of our goal for today.  Ah, but tomorrow is another day.

Total miles: 568