Route 66 Preview

For the past few days, Ro and I have been driving out to Santa Monica. I have been riding for about 45 minutes each morning in the motel room using a portable fluid trainer attached to my bike. My hope is that these brief workouts will both preserve my fitness and help heal my knee. FWIW, I am not counting these trainer miles in my yearly total...

The interstate driving route that we chose parallels long sections of old route 66, giving us a high-speed preview of portions of the cycling route. In Texas today, we exited I-40 onto a piece of old 66 to shoot a few quick photographs. We needed to stretch and I wanted to test a new UV filter that I picked up for my dSLR wide angle lens.

Although I will not be able to carry the dSLR camera on the bicycle, I will have it in the evenings and hope to get access to it at rest stops for some higher quality photos. However, most of the impromptu shots that I take during the daily cycling route will be taken with the same point-and-shoot that I have been using thus far on the blog. In either case, I will be compressing the high-resolution images for posting to the blog. If anyone is particularly interested in any of the dSLR photos, I am saving the uncompressed TIFF files. They are about 15MB each.

Anyway, I found a concrete slab -- presumably from a long-dead roadside business. It still has, what appears to be, remnants of vinyl floor tile. PVC was first plasticized, creating what we now simply call 'vinyl', in 1926 but was not widely used in flooring until after 1933. So, I'm guessing that this building was no older than that. I was only there to snap a quick photo or two, not to conduct an archeological dig, so I did not study the remnants. It is possible that the flooring was actually linoleum, in which case, the building could have been much older. Of course, it is also possible that the flooring remnants were not original to the initial construction.

In any case, I got a photo. By the way, that's an old Santa Fe boxcar in the background. The UV filter seems to work fine...