Rock Café: Built from the Road Itself

The Rock Café in Stroud, Oklahoma is built almost literally from Route Sixty-Six itself. When Roy Rieves started construction in nineteen thirty-six, he bought leftover Kellyville sandstone, the same stone that had been cut for the roadway, for five dollars a load. He spent three years mixing concrete by wheelbarrow and doing nearly all the work himself before the café opened on August fourth, nineteen thirty-nine.

The neon sign went up in the late nineteen forties, and the place became a fixture of the Mother Road. When Pixar's John Lasseter stopped in two thousand one on a research trip for the film Cars, he met owner Dawn Welch. She became the inspiration for Sally Carrera, the Porsche who runs a Route Sixty-Six motel.

The café survived a fire in two thousand eight and reopened the following year. It's on the National Register of Historic Places.