Davenport to Texola, Oklahoma. This is the last set from my drive through Oklahoma on Route 66 last month.
The drive from central Oklahoma through western Oklahoma to the Texas state line was particularly enjoyable. Like Kevin Durant I passed on Oklahoma City. As with St Louis I wasn’t inclined to stop in the big city (especially after making an exception for Tulsa).
The wall murals are in Davenport which easily won the prize for best Oklahoma street art. There’s more; this is just a sampling. Don, the publisher of the local paper, saw me while I was shooting in Davenport and came out to talk to me. The photo was taken in the office of the paper. Great guy. Everyone talks to me on this trip. No more complaints about how no one talks to me anymore and the invisibility that comes with aging!
The elderly couple in the one picture in this set own the Mohawk Lodge trading post. They have been married 64 years! She is part Comanche and Cherokee.
I went in the post office in Sayre to look at the WPA mural depicting the Oklahoma land rush. The woman in the picture is the postmaster. She wanted me to know it is casual Friday. After the pic – I always ask for permission – I said she had a nice face and that I do not say that to everyone. Big smile.
I stopped at the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton (which doubles as the local history museum). I first went by late in the day and got those two shots of their windmill collection as the sun was going down. The rest of the pics were taken the next day.
Towards the end of the set one can see various pictures of remnants of much older sections of Route 66. See how one bit just ends at the interstate? That’s typical for driving Route 66. It stops, starts up again, joins the interstate, gets off the interstate – it is like a puzzle. Sometimes there are multiple alignments. In one part of western OK I encountered a rare triple play with an older alignment, a newer pre-interstate alignment and then the interstate all running pretty much parallel to each other.
The last several pics are Texola at the Texas state line. Truly a ghost town. The final shot is a marker at the state line commemorating the “Will Rogers Highway” which is another name for Route 66.
