Return to Roswell Eastern Caravan Slideshow
Slideshow of the Eastern Caravan headed out to Roswell:
Photo Set:
Return to Roswell 2009 – Eastern Caravan travels West
Too many photos, not enough Time
Lots of stuff to do; not enough time to edit photos and post them. But here are some fun ones from the trip so far.
Entering Roswell
Entering Roswell
East to West: The trip to Roswell:
Almost Packed
We’re in the final throes of packing for our trip. This year we put together a spreadsheet on Google Docs of all the stuff we know we need to take, and we’re going through and checking off items as we speak.
Phoebe is cleaned up and ready to be loaded.
And the pets are all irritated that we are leaving.
I think that about covers it. Time to pack the laptop.
Roswell R2K Road Trip Prep
Today is my last Friday of work before vacation – 2 weeks of it! We’re going to go to the official Last Roswell R2K New Beetle event – this is the annual New Beetle car show that Stephanie attends in Roswell, New Mexico. It’s the 10th Anniversary of the Volkswagen New Beetle, and Stephanie’s car Phoebe turned 10 this year. It’s also the last event of it’s kind, for the most part. It’s becoming harder for people to attend due to the economy and to the age of many of the cars, and putting on a car show is a big process to organize, and the folks who’ve made it such a fun event in the past are worn out.
I went with Stephanie on a very long version of this cross-country trek in 2007, and took in all of Route 66 along the way, traveling all the way to California over 17 days.
Slideshow of Route 66 Trip Photos
This year, we take off Tuesday morning, June 23rd, and meet the rest of the Eastern caravan around Memphis, Tennessee, then proceed on to Roswell over the rest of the week, arriving at the car show on the weekend.
Google Map of the Caravan Route
Since we’ve done this before, we have a pretty good sense of what we need, so we haven’t killed ourselves packing yet. We’ll do a lot of that over the weekend. I’ll post some photos here to my blog and make updates, but I don’t plan to upload all my photos of the trip like I did before. It took a long time and I did very little photo editing on that round, and this time I want to post fewer, but better photos. I’m really looking forward to the time off and spending time with Stephanie, and I’m salivating at the chance to take photos all day long, too.
We’ll also keep in touch via Facebook, and Stephanie will be on Twitter, and I’m setting my blog posts to update Twitter as well.
And as always, you can follow along on the whole trip via the All Pods Go to Roswell webcams, running continuously through the trip by our friend Lisa.
Beetles Caravan
Beetle caravan @ Bob Evans
While checking out after dinner, we saw this “Beetle Caravan” of toys for sale.
Route 66 Road Trip Morning, Day 17 in Joplin, Missouri
We made a lot better progress yesterday on the trip home; all the way to Joplin, Missouri. And we even got a couple of stops in at the Cadillac Ranch, the Bug Ranch, and the restored U-Drop-Inn Gas Station in Shamrock, Texas.
See all Photos from Santa Rosa, New Mexico to Joplin, Missouri.
Today, we head home, to finally see our pets and our house again. Needless to say, we’ll anxious to be back.
Storm on the return trip
Trying to photo lightning; no luck.
Googie Retro Signs on Route 66
While waiting for my photos to upload, I was doing some ego surfing and found a nice woman named Cordelia had blogged about reading about our Route 66 road trip – and she mentioned that she looked up the word “googie” because I used it several times to describe some of the old retro signs along Route 66. I had intended to include a link to a definition of the term, but didn’t due to the lack of internet; it sort of made it hard to surf around.
Cordelia got a great definition from answers.com:
“Googie” describes a futuristic, often outrageous, building style that evolved in the United States during the 1950s. Googie architecture was designed to attract customers. The name “Googie” comes from a famous coffee shop in Los Angeles. Like the shop, Googie buildings often have flashing lights, sharp angles, boomerang and flying saucer shapes, and lots of glass and steel. On the east coast, googie ideas were expressed in the zig zag rooflines of coffee shops.The Googie style is sometimes called called Coffee House Modern, Doo-Wop, Populuxe, and Space Age.
—The article is attributed to Jackie Craven.
Also, Wikipedia describes “googie” thusly:
Googie, also known as populuxe or doo-wop, is a subdivision of expressionist, or futurist architecture influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age, originating from southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s. With upswept roofs and, often, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon, it decorated many a motel, coffee house and bowling alley in the 1950s and 1960s. It epitomizes the spirit a generation demanded, looking excitedly towards a bright, technological and futuristic age. Googie or Populuxe style of architecture was characterized by space-age designs that depict motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms, and parabolas. Building such as this reflects American society’s emphasis on futuristic designs and fascination with space-age themes.
In looking through all my pictures thus far, I have dozens, perhaps even a hundred or so, cool retro signs and buildings from along Route 66, so I’m going to put together, when I get the chance, a flickr photo set of just those pictures. Aside from being really cool, It will help me with some design ideas I have for a project I’m going to work on next…
