CA to MA day 8 Carthage, MO to St Louis, MO

The Boots Court Motel was by far the smallest room we have stayed in, but oh so cute. We hadn't really appreciated it so much the night before.

With a radio in every room- no TV, but there was wifi!

Our day started with a walk around the historic square of Carthage- there had been some real money here at some point in history. This is the Jasper County courthouse, built in 1894 out of native Carthage stone, and its bell tower was said to have inspired the bell tower in the 'Back to the Future ' movies. It's like a castle with all its turrets:

After a coffee and breakfast at the Mother Road coffee shop, we started our more sedate day.

We saw two old garages in a row- one we could drive up to:

The other (where we were personally escorted around by George), was so full of memorabilia, it was almost too much- Gary's Gay Parita Sinclair:

Dottie had a wonderful time there playing in the grounds with a farm dog from up the road- we ended up staying longer than we had intended.

Lunch was in Lebanon at a Mississippi Style Catfish place where we could sit outside and eat with Dottie watching the world go by:

We passed less and less of the older 66 signs, but the areas were more affluent compared to the western end of the route. Money seems to have been put back into some of the northern sections. This motel for example, has been partly restored with the help of a matching grant from one of the Route 66 Associations.

Love these distance markers they posted!

The eastern side of Missouri has less to see and the route follows the interstate very closely, so we ended up back on I44 to complete some of the way into St. Louis, although we did manage to pick up some of Route 66 going towards the hotel. There are several route possibilities, so it was just lucky we found one of them. We did do one last pitstop to a park for a walk with Dottie.

That is largely the end of our Route 66 adventure- we will be taking the interstate the rest of the way, heading towards Columbus, Ohio tomorrow, and Pennsylvania the day after that.

We've mostly been using a guide book published by Moon called Route 66 Road Trip, which, like most guides goes from east to west, so I've been reading the book from back to front :-) The best set of maps for keeping us straight were these.

We've driven 2422 miles so far.

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