Historic Route 66: Galena Kansas to Clinton Oklahoma

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Galena Kansas

   Galena, Kansas, is the first or last town on the shortest stretch of Route 66 in any state, just thirteen miles in the south-east corner of Kansas, and the town makes the most of it. The name is Latin for lead ore, and the place was founded in the 1870s when miners struck rich lead and zinc deposits in the Tri-State District, which spread across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. The boom made it a rowdy town of thousands, and the legacy remains in the huge piles of mine waste, known as chat, which still stand on the horizon, and in the contaminated ground that has taken decades to clean up.

   Read the complete Galena Kansas write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Galena Kansas is where the day begins. Next is Tulsa.

2. 2. Tulsa

   Tulsa grew rich on oil, and it still carries the confidence of a city that once called itself the Oil Capital of the World. In the 1920s the fields around it produced fortunes, and the money went into buildings, so that the downtown skyline is one of the best collections of Art Deco architecture in the United States, with ornate towers and a church, Boston Avenue Methodist, that looks like a cathedral from the future. A seventy-six-foot statue of an oil driller, built for an exposition and known as the Golden Driller, stands on the fairgrounds with one hand on a derrick, and the locals love him.

   Read the complete Tulsa write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Tulsa comes up about 173 km into the recorded legs. Next is Oklahoma City.

3. 3. Oklahoma City

   Oklahoma City was born in a single afternoon. On the twenty-second of April 1889, at noon, thousands of settlers lined up on the edge of the Unassigned Lands and, at the sound of a gunshot, raced in on horses, wagons and on foot to stake claims, and by nightfall a tent city of ten thousand people had grown on the prairie where the city now stands. The Land Run, as it is called, left a legacy of improvisation and optimism that the place has never lost. Today it is a sprawling state capital of more than six hundred thousand people, with a lively downtown, a canal in the old Bricktown warehouse district and an energy that surprises visitors who expect a quiet prairie town.

   Read the complete Oklahoma City write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 344 km into the recorded legs you reach Oklahoma City. Next is Clinton Oklahoma.

4. 4. Clinton Oklahoma

   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.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Clinton Oklahoma closes the day.