Kan-O-Tex Service Station

This nineteen thirty-four filling station in Galena, Kansas is the first Route Sixty-Six stop after you cross from Missouri, and it wears its history lightly. For decades it sat idle until two thousand seven, when four women from Galena bought it and brought it back as a tourist stop they called Four Women on the Route. They found a rusting International boom truck from nineteen fifty-one on the property and parked it out front.

Pixar animators had come through Galena while researching their film Cars, and that beat-up truck reportedly became the inspiration for Tow Mater. The station is now called Cars on the Route, and the truck, nicknamed Tow Tater, has become something of a pilgrimage stop. Kansas gets only about thirteen miles of Route Sixty-Six, but this station makes the most of every one of them.