CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: planning record, not independently verified geometry.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distances and riding times are planning figures. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A one-way ride of 467 km, Clinton to Tucumcari - roughly 6 h 24 in the saddle. The stops in between: Shamrock Texas and Amarillo. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,350 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Clinton sits in western Oklahoma on the old road that Americans called the Mother Road, and the town has leaned into that fact. The Oklahoma Route 66 Museum is here, laid out decade by decade from the road's birth in 1926 through the Dust Bowl, the migration west that John Steinbeck wrote about, and the postwar boom of motels and neon. For someone about to ride the same alignment, it works as a good briefing before the miles start. The Washita River runs just to the south, and the land around is red soil, wheat, cattle and wind.
Read the complete Clinton Oklahoma write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Clinton Oklahoma is where the day begins. Next is Shamrock Texas.
Shamrock, Texas, is a town named by an Irishman, and it has never been shy about the fact. A homesteader called George Nickel, so the story goes, gave it its name in 1890, and the town now holds an annual St Patrick's Day festival with a parade, a Blarney Stone and a great deal of green. It sits on the old Route 66, in the Texas Panhandle, a country of flat horizons, grain elevators, cattle and wind. The population is under two thousand, and the nearest other town of any size, Wheeler, is a good half-hour away.
Read the complete Shamrock Texas write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Shamrock Texas comes up about 129 km into the recorded legs. Next is Amarillo.
Amarillo is the city where the Texas Panhandle shows its hand: a flat, windy plain stretching to every horizon, with a skyline of grain elevators, water towers and big sky. At around 1,100 metres above sea level it is higher than you think, and the wind is a constant companion, often strong enough to lean a bike over on the long straights. For anyone riding Route 66, it is the natural place to start or end a day, with everything a traveller needs and a handful of landmarks that have become part of the road's folklore.
Read the complete Amarillo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 283 km into the recorded legs you reach Amarillo. Next is Tucumcari.
Tucumcari is a town of about five thousand people on the high plains of eastern New Mexico, and it is one of the best-preserved fragments of Route 66 in the Southwest. At roughly 1,250 metres, with the flat-topped Tucumcari Mountain standing over the town, it was a natural stopping place for travellers heading west, and in the heyday of the road it had thousands of motel rooms. A string of billboards, stretching for hundreds of miles in both directions, used to advertise it with a simple slogan about stopping for the night, and the motto stuck.
Read the complete Tucumcari write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Tucumcari closes the day.
Clinton Oklahoma → Shamrock Texas is 129 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Shamrock Texas → Amarillo is 154 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Amarillo → Tucumcari is 184 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.