Chicks on 66?

Hello Everyone!

Meanwhile...as I am still in the suburbs of Chicago, I am traveling on Joliet Road going southwest. Then Joliet Road seems to end at West 55th Street and I have to take a couple of side streets which eventually gets me back on Joliet. I don’t know the story here, but it seems that this section of Route 66 is no longer drivable and this should not come of any surprise. Only 15% of the old Mother Road no longer exists.

Where Joliet picks back up, there is a geocache placed here by Panther in the Den, called End of the Road - DANG! That is one BIG Hole! (GC25MXR) It had a couple of favorite points and so I thought I’d go for it. Glad I did. I got a glimpse of maybe why the road is closed. 

There is a quarry here and my guess it either has to do with their operations or the road itself went bad and the city decided not to fix it or a combo of both. 

At first when I got close to ground zero (ground zero means that the location of the cache should be real close) I felt a bit uneasy. The neighbor looked a bit shady, some of the businesses where closed, and there was evidence that this area might be a place where the homeless like to hang out. 

I took a chance and went for it. The picture below shows what the old Route 66 road looks like now. 

The cache is located on this side of the fence, but there are 5 other geocaches on the abandoned road. I went for the 1st one, but the further away I was from my van, the more uncomfortable I felt. I didn’t find that cache and decided not to go for the other ones. Perhaps if someone I knew was there with me I would happily have searched out the other caches.

I found two other Geocaches on Joliet Road (Baby Yoda Loves Double D’s! (GC468PV) and A LOCAL Cache (GC2Q70B)) and further down the road I found another geocache by a gem of Route 66 icon...Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket!

According to their website:

"Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket got its humble beginnings sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s in an old gas station lunch counter. One day, two local farm women came in and overheard the owner (Irv Kolarik) talking about selling more food. Having a wonderful recipe for fried chicken, they approached him and offered to teach him how to cook fried chicken if he would buy his chickens from them.

Because the fried chicken was so good and the highway so busy, the Chicken Basket outgrew its lunch counter and the two car repair bays were turned into a dining room. Not long after that, with the restaurant still growing, the adjacent land was purchased and a brand new restaurant was built.

The Chicken Basket, as it is today, opened in the summer of 1946 on Illinois Route 66 and 79th Street in Hinsdale right next door to its original location. Because of the amount of traffic and distance from Chicago, the Chicken Basket was the perfect stopping place going to or coming from Chicago. These perfect locations also lead to the Chicken Basket becoming a Blue Bird bus stop. People came to the Chicken Basket to purchase bus tickets to travel as far away as Los Angeles or to send packages to loved ones anywhere in between Chicago and LA.

The restaurant’s many large windows allowed patrons to view the small private planes taking off and landing at the old Hinsdale airport across the street. There was always something going on at the Chicken Basket, whether the roof top ice skaters in the winter months or the live entertainment on the weekends.

The restaurant’s need for chicken soon outgrew the capability of the two local women, and another local farmer who was just moving into the area took over. That farmer was none other than Stanley Helma, father and grandfather of today’s owners.

In the early 1960s, Illinois Route 66 bypassed the Chicken Basket and the beloved Route 66 icon fell on hard times. People who remembered the restaurant couldn’t figure out how to get to it and it almost went out of business for lack of customers. In 1963, Dell Rhea and his wife, Grace, bought the restaurant at a bargain price. Dell, being very well known in the area, used his reputation to help bring people back to the Chicken Basket.

With a lot of hard work, good food, fair prices, friendly faces and the growing popularity of Historic Route 66 around the world, the Chicken Basket has become more popular than ever. The Chicken Basket was inducted in the Route 66 Hall of Fame in June of 1992. In 1994, the restaurant was featured in a documentary of Route 66 done by Bill Curtiss. The Chicken Basket was on the cover of Route 66 Magazine, featured in a Japanese Travel Guide, on Discovery Channel Europe in “Dine About with Max and Greg” as well as other Route 66 programs. Most recently, the Chicken Basket was inducted into “The National Register of Historic Places” in May of 2006."

The geocache nearby is called, Get Your Chicks on Route 66 (GC12AGN), and was placed by I Love Chicago! (aka Panther in the Den)

Well, that’s it for now. I am still in the suburbs of Chicago, but soon I’ll be hitting the first major realignment of Route 66. There happens to be caches on both realignments which starts in Bolingbrook and comes back together in Shadow Lakes. The next couple of blogs will feature each realignment.

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I had the time of my life on Route 66 and I am sharing my adventures with you in hopes that’d you want to experience Route 66 for yourself.