As you drive along Route 66 through Illinois on the way to St Louis you pass by the Twistee Treat Ice Cream building. If you don’t see the ice cream shack – you will probably have been distracted by the UFO, or great big tall man holding an ice cream.

It was the UFO that caught my eye as I drove past, just like a scene from M.I.B. This was the sort of kitch thing I was hoping to find on my drive down route 66. Then when I pulled into the car park I saw the huge man holding an ice cream. Clearly I was going to have to buy my own then and luckily there was one of the Twistee Treats ice cream franchise stands in the car park too. This was an awesome find.

There was so much to choose from that I got a little ice cream blindness like a white out on a snow covered mountain. In the end I asked for a Turtle Tornado. This was Vanilla ice cream, some hard chocolate dip, caramel and pecan nuts, all blitzed up in the cup. At the start I got a huge brain freeze, there were way too many nuts in it at first and I had to dig right down to the bottom to get to the chocolate bits. It was a really nice refreshing sweet on a hot day during a long long drive. It probably woke me up and helped me drive for a bit longer.

My Companion went for one of the soft scoops a Butter Pecan cone which was a Vanilla ice cream flavoured with butterscotch pecan in a cone wrapped in the stars and stripes, not sure that is a flavouring but it made it look cool. Although described as butterscotch that was not as prevalent as one might hope, the pecan flavour was the star feature, but it was still a really good ice cream, maybe not one that would get chosen again, but by no means a disastrous choice, just not quite as described.

Twistee Treats is a franchise, but it’s cone shaped resturant fitted in perfectly with all the other plastic classic models on this section of route 66. website: http://twisteetreatusa.com/

Back to that UFO outside this science fiction vehicle’s proper name is Futuro House ( House of the Future ) originally exhibited at Illinois State Fairs in the 1970s. The UFO is a one of kind very rare experimental home. Fewer than a 100 were manufactured and reports state that only 50 of those still exist. Now I want one.

Twistee Treats is located at the Pink Elephant Antiques Shop which is at 908 Veterans Memorial Drive, Livingston off I-55 and on the old Historic Route 66