“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.” — Jeremy Irons
This old junker is part of the Route 66 Memorial located in the Petrified Forest National Park. Note the passing semi on Interstate 40 in the background. — Photo by Pat Bean
You Can’t Get There From Here
As I continued on the park road after leaving the restored Painted Desert Inn and the mystery of the missing 200 million years’ unconformity, I found myself back at Interstate 40, but with no access to it.
This wandering old broad wonders how many of my readers traveled this road in its heydays. — Photo by Pat Bean
Located in sight of the freeway’s roaring traffic of semis and automobiles with occupants in a rush to get some place, I came upon a rusted, wheel-less relic of a different age. Like the A-Dome in Hiroshima, the only building remaining after the city’s bombing, this junker was a reminder of what once was.
Route 66 lives on only in memories, and bits and pieces of a route that truly takes one nowhere these days.
This tickled my funny-bone. — Photo by Pat Bean
I didn’t have the same degree of sadness in my heart as the day I stood before the A-Dome in Japan, but I wasn’t jumping up and down for joy either. Route 66 is a part of my past, a road that took this Texas flat-lander to magical places where there were mountains when I was only 14.
But then I thought of all the many places that today’s highways have taken me in my life. In the eight years that I have been a full-time RV-er, I’ve traveled this beautiful country called America from sea to shining sea. And more than once.
With this in mind, I gave a second look to this Route 66 memorial standing in front of me. And I laughed at the absurdity of encasing the front section of an automobile in cement. And this wasn’t the first such one I had seen. There had been similar encased old cars in the Albuquerque aquarium I visited, and in the Auto Museum in Santa Rosa.
Yup! Route 66 may be gone, but it certainly isn’t forgotten.
Bean’s Pat: Egret and Ibis http://tinyurl.com/cwefngs My kind of poetry.
*This award is simply this wandering/wondering old broad’s way of bringing attention to a blog I enjoyed – and thought perhaps my readers might, too.
Pat Bean's blog 
I feel a certain sadness when see & read about Route 66, and its bypass, but the history is still there for those who want it, and as you’re a great example for, a great part of history is the intangibles, memories and filling in the gaps.
Change happens, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It’s nice to relive the happy memories of what once was, however.