The Route 66 Chick

I might have accidentally been almost a Fredhead long before the term was coined. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I made my first trip “out west” with my parents. That trip kicked off a life-long love affair with the mountains, the high desert, native arts, sunsets, buildings (I didn't know enough to call it “architecture”), and pretty much all things western. One of my mother's sisters worked at a Fred Harvey restaurant in the 1960s, one of the five Tollway Oases constructed up over the pavement of the Illinois Tollway in the Chicago area. My mother and I went to eat there a few times, sitting up over the toll road, having a nice meal and seeing my aunt at work. Existing at least in my memory, there was a Fred Harvey over-the-highway restaurant in Oklahoma, too, but I might have dreamed up that one. My parents had put in a decade of traveling together before I was born, and Fred Harvey must have come up in their recollections that they told me. I seemed to grow up hear...

On Wednesday night, I changed trains in Kansas City, from the short-run Missouri River Runner to the Southwest Chief, which runs Chicago to California. We were late upon arrival (about midnight) in Kansas City, but the Chief was held for us. Thankfully. Sleeping in a train coach is a real challenge, but still preferable to the hard benches in the Amtrak section of the magnificent (but not necessarily comfortable) Kansas City Union Station. On Thursday morning, I woke up to early light in the rolling plains of western Kansas and I parted the window curtains to start watching the passing sights. Grain elevators, dusty red roads, a man fixing a wheel, a German Shepherd lolling on cool concrete, water running full in an irrigation ditch. Then we were into the southeastern corner of Colorado, where the terrain changes again. We glided between low gray mesas dotted with scrub oak and mesquite. The sky was overcast with only occasional peeks of sunshine, so there weren't good v...

We were out of the gate, er, station, about an hour and a quarter late this afternoon (Wednesday) due to a brush fire and brake problems slowing the Missouri River Runner down on its run east to St. Louis before picking up a new batch of passengers and heading back west. Two heavy rain showers unloaded themselves on downtown St. Louis while we waited. I escaped outside for breaths of fresh air a few times during the wait, as there were nearby passengers with way too much Gain or Tide in their clothes plus some pesky strong-smelling floor-mopping going on. (Most of you know how chemically sensitive I am. That may be my next crusade – fragrance free areas. Wish me luck on that one.) While outside, I observed sheets of water coming over the side of the interstate sections high above every time a vehicle up there passed. An unsuspecting person wandering on out onto the sidewalk would have gotten a sudden and hard-hitting shower. The St. Louis Transportation Station – replacing the old fam...