Checking in

This post comes from a clean, comfortable and inexpensive room at the Gardens Motel in Litchfield, Ill.

We got into Litchfield not long after the sun began to dip low on the ripened wheat and sprouting horseradish fields.

On the way, we found the concretes at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard in St. Louis are as good as ever.

El Gallo Jiro, on an old alignment of Route 66 and the National Road in Fairmont City, Ill., still serves its delectible goat tacos (if you see a rooster on a taqueria sign, you know you’re there).

The numerous cars in the parking lot showed that Scotty’s continues to serve beer and grub in Hamel, Ill., into its seventh decade. Ditto for the Ariston Cafe in Litchfield.

We saw that a women’s softball game was taking place on the playing field behind the historic DeCamp Junction pizza and beer roadhouse south of Staunton, Ill.

It was a pleasant surprise to see a Shell station in Hamel stocks Ski, a southwestern Illinois soda, in its cooler.

The long-closed Soulsby’s Station in Mount Olive, Ill., continues to look as if it could produce full-service gas if you pulled under the wooden canopy.

The long-abandoned Vic Suhling sign in Litchfield still keeps watch over the old road, despite being raked year after year by the elements.

Driving onto an older alignment into Litchfield well south of town, we marveled about how you couldn’t tell what decade you were residing.

At Shaw’s in Litchfield, a tavern that has squatted near the old Mother Road since the 1930s, we met up with a bunch of friends and roadies, heard a bunch of new stories and a few good-natured lies, as the amiable bartenders served ice-cold Stag beer for $2 a bottle.

The Wi-Fi signal at the motel room is listed as “very good.” And so is life here on the Mother Road.

More from the Will Rogers Awards banquet tomorrow …