It's A Sign

Not a sign of the Zodiac.  Not a sign of things to come.  Not a sign of the times.  Just a sign.  And we made it!  The tremendously creative team of Ron M., Marly, and Kane produced this big (4' by 3') sign in preparation for the show at which we have a booth this weekend.  And all it took was a half a day and a lot of glue.  My fingers are stuck together, so pardon any typos tonight.  :-)

It's a good thing we had a project to occupy our time today, because we had a grand total of two visitors.  Not surprising, since it poured a cold rain all day. One traveler was a gentleman from Union, IL who is very much involved in railroads and works at the Illinois Railway Museum www.irm.org, the largest railroad museum in the country.  He was very interesting because of  his font of information about trains.  We sent him off to Ollie's Station for lunch.  With its railroad motif, he should be thrilled.

Our only other visitor was Mrs. Starbird, wife of the famous Darryl Starbird of the well-known museum of custom cars.  She came to bring some of their brochures and get some of ours.  Since we're only about 15 miles apart, we tend to send most of our car enthusiast visitors to them, and them to us.

Are you ready for some statistics?   These are from the Rutgers University questionnaire and study done a year ago in which they asked Route 66 travelers some questions about their trip and some proprietors of Route 66 businesses about economic their situation.  Thousands answered their questionnaires which led to a very  long and detailed evaluation.  Here, however, I will just list a few stats. . .

• Visitors spent on an average of between $1500 and $2000 per travel party on their trip.
• Average travel time on Route 66 -- 11 days
• Most travel parties were pairs of middle to high income adults
• Reason for trips included:  historic sites/monuments, notable places/landmarks, landscape, U.S. history, and vintage restaurants and motels
• As an example of numbers of travelers, the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton, OK received approximately 35,000 visitors, about 10,000 of which were foreign travelers

For much more about this study, go to: http://www.tulsaworld.com/article.aspx/The_Mother_Lode/20130331_211_G1_CUTLIN279199, a good article in this weekend's Tulsa World which summarizes the results.