Right after the 2006/2007 school year ended at Golden Hills, Mr. Trone and I took off on the most unforgettable motorcycle ride of our lives. After watching the movie CARS from the summer before, he and I decided to plan a ride down Route 66, beginning in California and ending at the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois.
We decided to start out our ride in California, so we took off from Tehachapi late on a Friday afternoon. By the end of the day, we were spending the night at Mr. Trone’s mom’s house in Las Vegas. At the Hoover Dam, we stopped and walked around and looked up at the astounding suspension bridge spanning the sky above us. After taking loads of pictures, we took off for Arizona stopped at the “Jackrabbit outpost,” had a tasty chocolate milkshake in Seligman, and ended up camping overnight in Holbrook, Arizona at a KOA campground. I found out, much to the dismay of the “King Father,” that I became very claustrophobic in a mummy sleeping bag. This meant when we arrived in Sante Fe, New Mexico on Sunday, we had to spend the night in a hotel, so we could ship ALL of our camping gear (Which cost about $100 or more!) back to our kids in Tehachapi on Monday morning. So, guess what? We stayed in hotels for the entire rest of the trip, AND lightened our load on the bike by probably one hundred pounds.
The next leg of our trip took us through New Mexico, where we saw the “Blue Hole,” which was a pond as blue as the sky and so deep, we could not see the bottom. What was so remarkable about this was the Navy was doing training lesson for their divers. They were in scuba gear, and they kept coming up with buckets of rocks and debris from the bottom of the pond to clean it up. Then, we rode by a lumber mill, and we were struck by the scent of freshly cut wood for miles and miles. Breathing it in was so refreshing, I can still smell it today! In Texas, we ate a humongous steak at the Big Texan, and we were so stuffed, we could barely finish HALF the meal! By the time we got to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, we began to notice ugly black rainclouds off in the distance. Mr. Trone said we should stop and put on our weather suits, but I didn’t think we needed to. That was a big mistake! In seconds, the rain came down like cats and dogs, and we were drenched! In Texas, they call these storms gullywashers. By the time we were able to stop to put on our rain gear, it was too late. Everything single thing on the bike was soaked as well as us. We were even driving through intersections with nearly two feet deeps “lakes” of water to get to the hotel, so we could dry out. So that night, we went and bought the biggest Ziploc bags in the world to put all our stuff in, so it wouldn’t happen to us again!
As we traveled through Kansas and Missouri, we kept noticing barns that had big advertisements painted on their roofs. This was a way for businesses to get people to visit their places along the route. We stopped in a small town in Missouri and bought a “chocolate concrete” at a famous ice cream parlor. It was similar to a Blizzard, but much thicker and tastier. Of course, Mr. Trone thought it was a waste of time that we stopped, because he thought that his Snickers Blizzard was a whole lot better! When we got to St. Louis, Missouri, I was so excited, because I finally got to see the famous Gateway Arch! Mr. Trone had already been there, so he parked the motorcycle by the Mississippi River and waited for me to walk up the long, long set of stairs to the Arch to take my pictures. After I was done, we stood in the Mississippi River in our Red Wing boots and took a picture of our feet to commemorate our visit. About an hour after we left, we stopped for gas, and that is when I realized my giant purse (full of everything I owned except my cell phone) was missing. So, we drove ALL the way back to St. Louis (Much to the dismay and ANGER of the “King Father,”) to look for it. I reported it to the Arch Police, and they told me they’d call if they found it. At this point, we were already supposed to be in Chicago, but now we were nearly a day behind schedule.
When we spent the night at the hotel somewhere in Missouri that night, Mr. Trone made this comment to me, “Well, there’s not much more you can do on this trip to make me any angrier than I am now, so I guess the rest of the trip should be great!” When we left that morning, we ate breakfast at the Village Grille, and we were on our way to the Windy City. I think we arrived somewhere after lunch, and the most amazing thing happened while we were standing at the bottom of the Sears Tower taking pictures. A voice on the line of Mr. Trone’s cell phone said, “We found your wife’s purse!” Apparently, the vice-president of The Old Spaghetti Factory had been taking a walk along the Mississippi River, and he found my purse on the ground, where it had fallen off the saddle bag. He had his manager call me, and she told me she would send it to my sister’s house in Pennsylvania, where we were headed next. Later that day, when we were traveling to my sister’s house, we stopped at Wendy’s to get a burger, and Mr. Trone looked at me and said in his dry sense of humor. “God must really love you!”
I could expound on many, many more of our adventures during this ride, but for time’s sake, I will end here. All in all, Mr. Trone and I agreed whole-heartedly on this one thing. This motorcycle ride topped them all. We knew we would never, ever, ever have a more magnificent vacation than our 2007 Route 66 trip, because we fell in love all over again!!!
