We last met Tuds about a year and a half ago – such is the length of the Listener queue – with 4856 “If You Say So” of THIS GRID IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK fame. Will our checker have such an easy ride this time?
Talking of rides, the title might suggest a commercial planning line, but the instructions don’t sound like that, and a route across the States might just appear. And so it did, but with quite a ride for the solver along the way.
The preamble required a word to be removed from nine clues before solving, whose first and last letters indexed cells in the grid, which were to be joined, with their reflections, to make shape. (We thought “reflected in the central column” was rather awkward – it meant “across” not the more natural “within”.) Misprints in 14 other clues formed a jumble of the 3.4.5.2 beginning of a six-word title, whose fifth word was to be highlighted with an indication of the sixth beneath it. Finally, two cells would be found to contain clashes. Single letters were to replace these and joined by a line spelling out a “thematic epithet”.
We won’t pretend we saw the whole thing from the get up and go, and in fact enjoyed filling in much of the grid first from the well-written and gentle clues – but the penny was dropping rapidly so here it is: the logo of Route 66, the title being Bobby Troup’s Get Your Kicks on Route 66, and the line spelling out its epithet THE MOTHER ROAD.
A reminder that full parsing is always available on https://www.listenercrossword.com, but for the record the removed words were driving, keeping, amazed, judged, fabric, intrinsic, dead, angering, cleric, the corrected misprints gave killers, step, day’s, force, align, Mars, not, laid, main, protectors, sir, word, cups and king, and the clashes of
anGICO/praiseACH andGALOShing/confiNELESs gave CHICAGO and LOS ANGELES (replaced by T and D which created new real words).
The setter hedged bets on matters Oenophile with 14d allowing drinking or passing up alcohol, but 33d spoke of a drunken cry the night before involving a painful one when getting up, so with sympathy, we confirm their membership of the Listener Oenophile Club and hope we don’t have to wait so long before meeting in the bar again.