Amara Rose of her Health, Wealth and Wisdom blog writes that, with the encouragement of a friend, she took Route 66 instead of the interstate from central Arizona to the high desert of Southern California.

… I took Historic Route 66 almost all the way from Prescott, AZ (actually picked it up in Ash Fork) till it ended in Route 58 just outside Barstow, CA, and it was a much more enjoyable way to travel; especially the AZ portion, with all the darling little "Old West" towns along the way that I would never have pulled off Rte. 40 to see. Who would have thought Oatman, for example, was such a tourist attraction, sequestered away in the mountainous high desert, pop. 120? (I wonder where the locals buy their food?) But I stopped there, even ended up buying a new fanny pak, which I needed, then climbed back into my "mobile sauna" and crossed the state line.

…

Route 66 also offers up humorous posts along the way, to enLighten the load of the weary traveler. Here's one that tickled me (written in 4 successive signs):

Train approaching,
Whistle squealing
Pause! Avoid that
Rundown feeling.

(It actually took me a minute to "get it"!)

Buck Wolf of ABC News has a list of places where you can sleep where movie and music stars once laid their heads.

Two are on Route 66.

One is at the Oatman Hotel in Oatman, Ariz., where Carole Lombard and Clark Gable honeymooned in 1939. It's Room 15, and it can be yours for $55 a night (it apparently doesn't have air conditioning, though, so go when it's not in the midst of the Mojave Desert summer).

Perhaps you'd expect more from Hollywood's most famous couple than a wedding night in Room 15 of the Oatman Hotel, where you'll still find the same white iron bed where Gable and Lombard awoke for the first time as man and wife.

Burros still wander the streets of Oatman, once a gold mining town, with less than 150 residents. It hasn't changed much since that March night when the screen legends decided Oatman was their best shot at any degree of privacy.

Lombard, who died three years later in a plane crash, never returned to Oatman. Gable visited several times to play poker with the miners.

Nowadays, the Gable and Lombard Room is the Oatman Hotel's most expensive accommodation. Still, hopeless romantics brave the desert heat to make whoopee where one of the most famous Hollywood marriages was consummated.

For an extra $2, you can get a souvenir copy of the movie stars' marriage license, and all the guests get a bag of animal feed to indulge the town's local, four-legged celebrities.

The other is the Trade Winds Courtyard Inn in Clinton, Okla. (ABC News has it listed as a Best Western, but it lost its franchise recently.) Room 215 was where Elvis Presley slept several times during road trips from Memphis to Las Vegas or Hollywood.

…His room at the Best Western (sic) remains a shrine — with fans now paying $80 — rather than the usual $46 rate — to sleep in the same king-sized bed as the King himself. 

Tuesday is an election in Tulsa to extend a third-penny sales tax for capital improvements throughout the city.

It's not a sales-tax increase; it's an extension of the current third-penny sales tax that's in effect. The old third-penny is set to expire, and the election Tuesday will allow voters to decide whether to extend it, fund new capital-improvement projects and finish old ones that didn't get completed because revenues came up short during the last third-penny period.

To see an overview of the third-penny and its list of projects, go here.

Route 66 News endorses the third-penny in particular because about a quarter of the $16 million in Arkansas River development money will go toward helping build a Route 66 museum. Passing the third-penny will help free up several million dollars of the $15 million Vision 2025 fund for other projects and improvements along Route 66 in Tulsa County.

The museum remains an important future attraction to Tulsa, but it was going to be a Vision 2025 money-eater. The third-penny would help ease this. For a more detailed explanation of the museum, go here.

The third-penny has gained wide support. The current mayor supports it. The previous mayor supports it. All of the current city councilors — which include Democrats and Republicans — are on record as supporting it. But getting out the vote Tuesday will be important because you always have a certain percentage of people who will vote against a tax, no matter how necessary it is.

The third-penny also is proving to be important because the city is going through a budget crunch and has almost no money in its coffers for capital improvements. Without the third-penny, many of the street improvements and other projects simply won't get done.

So head to your Tulsa precinct Tuesday and vote "yes."