Tinker Tom and Leroy

On the way to Afton, I was finally able to stop along the side of the road to take a picture of the buildings that once were the Country Court Motel. I know Beth had asked about them after I posted a photo of their well-preserved sign, and others might have been curious as well. As you can see, they are well beyond repair. I doubt they'll be around long. The sign survived far longer than the actual motel.


It was another good day at Afton Station, with a total of 9 visitors on a gloomy, cloudy day. My first visitors were two 80+ year old friends from Missouri. Leroy is a retired school teacher and his friend Tom is blind. Since he was my first blind visitor to Afton Station, I was fascinated by his ability to "feel" a car's year and model. Amazing! I made a squashed penny for him and he was wonderfully thrilled to feel the pattern with his fingers. These two guys were intelligent, funny, and had some great stories to tell. They now hold a very high place on my Favorite Visitors list. Leroy, the sighted gentleman, has lived within a mile of Route 66 all his life and knows it like the back of his hand. He does a lot of solo travel with a tape recorder and has been all across Route 66 and to Alaska, camping by the side of the road most of the time. Every Sunday he and "Tinker" Tom take to the road and look for new and different places to explore. You could tell they were the best of friends. Tom and Leroy stayed for hours, alternating between sitting and talking and going to the car showroom for another dose of vintage beauty. I am now madly in love with two 80-year-old men! Visitors like these make it all SO worthwhile!

Two guys with a big Haulmark trailer stopped by on their way to pick up a car. They own a custom restoration shop near Oklahoma City. Judging by their immaculate truck and trailer and their matching company uniforms, I'm guessing their resto business is a class act.

A family of five from Drexel, MO stopped on the way to visit family in Afton. The three little kids insisted on smashing some pennies. It's fun to see kids get a big kick out of that machine because, when you come right down to it, there's not much at the Station to appeal to kids. I need to think of some more kid-friendly attractions.

In December of '07 we had a devastating ice storm that completely paralyzed Tulsa and surrounding areas, permanently changing the landscape due to the vast number of fallen trees and leaving much of the city with no power for up to 10 days. I was lucky to never lose power, but I did have one "interesting" incident. I had just put the car in the garage (not an attached garage) to keep it from having trees fall on it. I was just getting out of the car when a very large tree fell across the garage door, trapping me in the garage. Fortunately, I had my cell phone, but I had no phone numbers programmed into it and the only number I had memorized was Ron's, all the way across town. I called him and he called my next door neighbor, who rounded up enough neighborhood men to come and trim and move the tree away from the door enough so that I could squeeze my way out. Kind of scary!

Why am I telling this story today? Because tomorrow we're expecting another bad ice storm, and I'm nervous. I can survive just fine, even without electricity, but I MUST get to my dialysis treatments, and my driveway is steep and pretty unnavigable (and unwalkable) with a coat of ice on it. So, I hope the weather prognosticators are wrong, wrong, WRONG this time!