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Route 66; it's America's most famous highway!
Nat King Cole sang about it, "Get your kicks on Route 66," and so did the Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, Michael Martin Murphey, and a host of others.
The highway was featured in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which later became a movie starring Henry Fonda and was the setting for much of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
In the early '60s, "Route 66" was a popular television series with Martin Milner and George Maharis. A more recent kick-boxing flick with Jean-Claude Van Damme was filmed along Oatman Road, one of Route 66's most famous sections in Oatman, Arizona. And the story goes that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon in the Oatman Hotel on Route 66. The hotel is now a museum.
How famous can a highway be?
With all the sound, the song, the story, a television programme and appearances in books and movies (most recently "Rain Man"), Route 66 has become the most famous highway in America.
Much of Route 66 is now gone along with Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, and a number of others that were replaced by interstate highways. And gone with it is some of the romance of travel. According to William Least Heat Moon in his book, Blue Highways, “Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.”
Nevertheless, you can still get your kicks on old Route 66—if you can find it. For decades Route 66 was a link between California, Chicago and the eastern United States until the last segment was decommissioned in 1984 as part of the U.S. Highway System. But about 85 percent of what author John Steinbeck called the "Mother Road" still exists. Few roads can rival its history, colour and roadside culture.
I remember it for reasons other than its fame.
I was not yet in my teens when I travelled with my parents on a motor vacation trip across America. The highway we took was Route 66. We were off to visit grandma. How could a youngster possibly forget the wonders of America that the magnificent highway had to offer? Who wanted to get to grandma's in a hurry anyway? I must have driven my father crazy with all the stops I pleaded we make. Why couldn't we stop at the Blue Whale Amusement Park off the highway in Oklahoma or stop to eat frozen custard at the Ted Drewes' Frozen Custard Stand in St. Louis? What was wrong with sleeping in a wigwam rather than a motel in Holbrook, Arizona?
And, Dad, we have to stop at Quapaw, Oklahoma, where a mysterious phenomenon called "spooklights" occurs along the bluff at Devil's Promenade. And was my father right when he explained these Southwestern Tinkerbells weren't the side effects of a magnetic field but the headlights of ghost cars?
And grandma can wait a little longer while we stop to gaze at Galloway's Totem Pole Park near Foyil, Oklahoma, which features a bizarre, 60-foot totem pole, one man's monument to gaudiness
But you didn't have to stop to be amused. You never tired of Burma Shave signs that flashed by as you rolled down the highway. And all the billboards. Today’s flavorless interstates can't compare.
Those who want to travel "US Rte 66" won't find it on road maps, unless it's one they find crumpled up under the front seat or else moldering in their glove compartment for years.
No, to find it nowadays you must buy a guide. Several good books that focus on Route 66 are available in bookstores and on the Internet. Among them are Route 66 The Mother Road by Michael Wallis, Route 66 Travel Guide by Tom Snyder and Searching for 66 by Tom Teague. An excellent guide book is the EZ66 Guide for Travelers by Jerry McClanahan.
My friend, Ed Boden, who has made the drive, advised me that the best way to find your way is to have at least two different guidebooks and a lot of patience. Ed recently bought a 1930 Model A Ford and plans to make the drive again. His trip is planned for October of 2008.
The fact is that ‘the route that does not exist' can still be traveled—or at least you can travel much of it. Route 66 continues for about 2,400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica. Which brings up a point which no one could explain. If it's America's Mother Road, why didn't it run clear across America from coast to coast, like Highway 40 or the Lincoln Highway?
Route 66 currently begins at the corner of Lake Shore Drive and Jackson Boulevard in Chicago and continues to the corner of Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard in California. There have been many changes and realignments to R66 and the beginning is one of them.
What's the advantage of taking an old road where there are super interstate highways, one might ask?
To travel Route 66 is to take a trip through an older America and through less-than-affluent parts of the country. It's the not-so-rich part of America. If Route 66 is America's Main Street then, while driving the route, one might conclude that America is going bust.
Many businesses along the highway have closed, including some of the establishments singled out as treasures of the old road. In fact, some whole towns have been abandoned. At Two Guns, Arizona, for example, there's no one there at all. Years ago, according to one account that I’d read, the town consisted of three saloons and six houses of ill repute. Now it's an abandoned gas station and RV park.
Route 66 linked innumerable small towns before the introduction of the interstate highways brought its demise. Gas stations, restaurants and motels grew into cities once the highway opened and towns such as Amarillo and Flagstaff became immortalized in “Get Your Kicks on Route 66," the perennially popular song. Later, the interstates took most of it away.
Such a trip is not to everyone's taste. If getting from here to there quickly is the objective, you will not get your kicks on Route 66. Nor is it the best possible route for beauty, natural or manmade. It's simply a trip through the past, without opulent accommodation or gourmet dining.
One thing is certain; you can't be in a hurry. Route 66 goes right through almost every town along its way, run down as they may be today. That takes time.
But it is better for the nerves than is travel on the interstates. Naturally, you're going slower and so is everyone else. Few big ten and eighteen wheel trucks zooming past; you can open your window and breathe unpolluted country air. You can feel America down to your pores on Route 66.
I believe the real reason Route 66 retains a hold on America is because it symbolizes "the road," and the open road is the soul of America. It spells out our freedom. When things get tough in America, you take a drive. Try Route 66, or what’s left of it, the next time you are driving to the East or to the West. And as I mentioned last week, you can fly Thai Airways to LA, pick up your rent-a-car and drive all the way to New York City where you can join your THAI flight to Asia, and part of that drive can be Route 66. If you wait until 2008, you might see Ed Boden chugging along in the Model A Ford. Take his photo and we’ll print it.
Next week I will be taking guest on an over night river trip aboard a converted rice barge.
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Route 66, once the most famous highway in the US.
The half way mark between LA and Chicago Photos by Ed Boden
Route map (red) of Route 66
It begins in Los Angeles Photo by Robert Stedman
The last stretch of brick Road in America Photo by Ed Boden
It may be old and broken but no traffic
Photo by Ed Boden
West of McLean, TX, Ed found this abandoned Texaco
service station
Photo b y Ed Boden
Junk cars become Art Deco
Photo by Ed Boden
Each state has its own 66 sign
You can even discover a crater along 66
Photo by Ed Boden
What you can't escape are the junk yards
Missions are common in the west
Photo Robert Stedman
At Atlanta, IL, a very picturesque water tower
painted
bright yellow and with a very happy 'smiley face'
Photo by Ed Boden
In New Mexico Route 66 becomes historical
Insight Guides has some fine description of the west
John Steinbeck made 66 known in Grapes of Wrath
Jack Kerouac's classic On The Road centered on
66
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