Texola-Route 66-King of the Road

We did a windy bumpy drive across Oklahoma on I-40 today, from Oklahoma City to the little city of Texola, right on the Oklahoma – Texas border. There is nothing here other then the campground,gas station and a restaurant that's open four days a week. Before I-40 this city was right on Route 66 and looks like it was a thriving little city, today it's a Route 66 ghost town with a population of 45.
Here's a few picture of what main street looks like.

The old City Jail

We drove a little farther east on Route 66 just to see what it was like, after about 7 miles we came to a stop light in the city of Erick and there on the corner was the Roger Miller “King of the Road” Museum. No way you can just drive by this, so in we go, of course we were the only ones there so the curator gave us a one hour private tour of the place. We learned a lot about Roger, his father died when he was very young, then his mother who was working a number of jobs to support Roger and his two brothers became very ill and could not financially handle the family, she was going to put the boys in an orphanage and up for adoption (Roger was three at the time). It was here that her three brothers stepped forward and each took one of the boys to raise, so Roger was shipped off from Fort Worth to Texola, and as they say the rest is history.

A young Willie Nelson on the Left

They had some pretty neat stuff on exhibit, it seems that Roger was a pack rat and never threw anything away, so they have the credit card application where he wrote on the back the words for King of the road, other songs were written on napkins, post cards or anything that he could find. So if you ever find yourself in Erick Oklahoma with some time to kill, do it at the Roger Miller Museum.

Roger wrote over 1000 songs, cut 56 albums, and won 11 Grammy awards.

As we ride off into the Sunset, I'll close with this, come on now sing it with me, “Trailers for sale or rent, rooms to rent 50 cents” now you're going to be singing that the rest of the day.