The day had arrived for our trip to the USA to ride Route 66. This trip had been in the planning for a long time and it was to celebrate a mate’s 50th birthday.
We were keen to travel and go to the airport early, I was fortunate enough to be a Gold member with Virgin Australia at the time. This made our check-in quick and painless even though we were flying in economy class.
The flight was crowded as you would expect, we had the “pleasure” of a set of very young twins crying in tag team for most of the flight. At least I got a decent set of headphones under my Gold membership.
Landing in Los Angles and going through Homeland Security and Customs was painless. We collected our bags and wandered down to the next terminal to catch our flight to Chicago. It was here I discovered a Virgin Lounge and we made great use of it until it was time to depart.
In the early evening we got to Chicago, we were just a little excited. We were at the beginning of the historic Route 66.
We jumped in a taxi and asked them to take us to the Best Western in Countryside, Illinois. I had pre-booked us into a motel that was walking distance to Illinois Harley-Davidson who were the Eagle Rider location at the time.
Once booked in we had a short walk for some dinner. Rafferty’s Irish Pub was nearly directly across the road. After having a feed it was time to have a rest we had been on the go for about 25 hours.
