Now the real work begins

It’s time to change the heading from east-north-east to west-south-west. After a quick 130 miles this morning, I have arrived at my Route 66 starting point. A little side trip to switch to fresh tires, then another to discover that Illinois DOES have great Mexican food (handmade tortillas), accounts for the rest of the day. Today’s weather was good, overcast and humid…but no rain!

A big shout-out to Peter Jacob and Mike Abt of Countryside BMW for getting me in for service so quickly. They have a great dealership with quite a legacy, based on the stories that Mike related. My compliments also go to the staff at La Cabanita for a wonderful dinner and their collection of Mexican wrestler masks.

The strategy shifts tonight. Up until now it was point and shoot, find a destination and then get there.
Now the destination becomes the journey. The journey is made up of hundreds of GPS tracks, some less than a mile and others hundreds of miles. They are not always in series, but more often in parallel. The final alignment of RT66 plus all historic alignments of RT66 produce a rather significant spider web of tracks that I’d like to cover. Many require backtracking and looping back to the final alignment. Many are spurs that go for miles and then dead-end. By staying true to RT66, I’m only 2,315 miles from home, but starting tomorrow, I’ll be covering 4,424 miles to get there.