One Day, Two States, and a Sasquatch: Joplin & the Kansas 13
Some days on this project take a week to plan and an hour to shoot. This one was the opposite — a single Saturday stacked with murals, monuments, a hundred-year-old store, and a sky full of balloons. Here's how it went. *
August 29, 2026 Travel Blog #1
Joplin, Missouri
The day started at Route 66 Mural Park, 619 S. Main Street, in front of Andy Thomas's Tri-State Corridor Mural. Unveiled in April 2025, the mural crams in 25 regional landmarks — Nelson's Old Riverton Store and the 66 Drive-In both make an appearance, which felt like a preview of the day ahead. Thomas has said outright that the mural isn't geographically accurate, and that honesty is worth noting rather than papering over.
From there, a quick stop at the Route 66 shield and interactive sign near the Sign Designs building, on the other side of the road from the 3D Chalk paintings (next) — easy to miss if you're not looking for it.
Next was the newest chapter of Joplin's 3D World Street Painting Gallery, this year's sixteen works at 1717 W. 7th Street. Joplin now holds the world's largest 3D street painting gallery — 29 anamorphic pieces across three years. This year's Centennial-round pieces were painted by international artists including Leon Keer of the Netherlands, and the trick only works from the marked footprints — step off them and the illusion falls apart.
Into Kansas — the Thirteen Miles
Kansas's stretch of Route 66 is famously short, and famously packed.
First stop: Gearhead Curios, home of Big A the Texaco Giant — the first muffler man ever installed on Route 66 in Kansas, erected in September 2024 by artist Mark Cline. Big A is modeled on shop owner Aaron Perry, white beard included. A personal connection made this one easy: I'll talk to Aaron, he'll be the one to confirm which of the conflicting height figures (20 ft or 22 ft) circulating online is correct. He says 22’ or with the concrete base 23’.
A few blocks away on Front Street, Galena has leaned all the way into its centennial identity — near Luigi’s Pit Stop is a drive through Sunflower-and-Tow Mater Welcome-to- Kansas arch painted by Sandra Dawn & David Mason, a truss bridge-style Centennial Arch with a Gorilla created in part by Dale Oglesby, and a police cruiser perched on a pole nearby as a tribute to Michael Wallis the voice of the Sheriff straight out of the movie Cars.
Backtracking a bit I found the Mural Park, with the Kansas Dept. of Commerce Centennial Shield and the well-known "Greetings from Galena" tile mural, a separate piece from the drive-through shield on Front Street.
From Galena, the road runs to Riverton and Nelson's Old Riverton Store, which turned 100 years old in 2025 — a year ahead of the highway itself. Built by Leo Williams, passed through his widow Lora, then the Eislers, and now run by their nephew, the store is still exactly what a hundred-year-old roadside stop should be:
flowers out front that current owner Scott
Nelson tends the way his Aunt Isabell taught him, and a line above the door that's stuck with me since — "Go often to the house of a friend, lest weeds choke the path."
Last Kansas stop, and the one that required doubling back after a bit of a wrong turn: the Baxter Springs Historical Mural, a 100-foot wall on the old Water Works plant building at the corner of Route 66 and Highway 69, across from the high school. Painted by father-son artists A.J. and Jordan Wood and unveiled in October 2024, it runs through the town's whole history in sequence — cattle drives, the Civil War-era massacre, Indigenous history, the railroads, the "Whiz Kids" baseball era, and Route 66 itself. The funding gap for the project famously closed itself when a foundation trustee happened to overhear the right conversation at the right time. Small towns still work that way sometimes.
The wrong turn is how I ended up in front of a striking older bas-relief mural on the American Bank building — its own piece of Baxter Springs history, one I'll be tracking down more details on before it makes it into the book.
Back to Joplin: Sunset and Balloons
The day closed at Missouri Southern State University for the Route 66 Balloon Festival, part of the Centennial's broader calendar of Missouri events. Balloons at rest are one thing; balloons lit from inside at dusk are another thing entirely.
The undisputed star of the evening was Scout the Sasquatch — a towering, grinning special-shape balloon throwing a peace sign at the crowd, glowing orange against a darkening sky. A raccoon, a llama, a duck, and a checkerboard classic rounded out the lineup, each one lit up in turn as the burners fired.
It's a strange kind of symmetry: a road turning 100, and a festival balloon shaped like a Cryptid, both drawing a crowd to a field in Joplin on the same summer evening. That contrast — the historical weight and the sheer, unbothered fun of a Sasquatch balloon — is exactly the kind of thing this book wants to hold onto.
*This post only scratches the surface — the deeper history behind every stop today, from Galena's murals to Nelson's hundred years, will get its full due in the upcoming Route 66 Centennial book. Consider this the postcard version.
I do love sharing adventures with my Queen Bee.