My Route 66
I’m not a morning person but when I’m on a Route 66 trip, I can’t help but not be. At first light, I wake up in some wonderful old motel — the kind where you park right outside your door — and I hear vehicles going by and they are all saying, ‘‘Come on Bub, join us!’’ And I do! I love a cafe breakfast but sometimes the wanderlust is too strong; the road trip is calling. It’s coffee to go and I go.
Journey Route 66
It’s the defining American road trip: Route 66. Dubbed the Mother Road by John Steinbeck, this string of small-town main streets and country byways first connected Chicago and its big ambitions with the waving palm trees of Los Angeles and the blue Pacific in 1926. Once an escape to a better life, today it offers a nostalgic escape to the past, a window on natural beauty and wide-open spaces, an introduction to characterful small towns and even some very good pie.
The road to authenticity
With businesses at freeway interchanges stripped bare of originality, travel on Route 66 grows more popular each year for its authenticity.
With the T-shirt you’re wearing unlikely to survive more than a few washes before the seams unravel and the vehicle you are driving prone to crumple at the slightest contact with another, the durability of Route 66 offers a bedrock of delight when much of life seems ephemeral.
The mere idea that you can set off on a 3862km journey and encounter a constant stream of surprises, beauty, creativity, idiosyncrasy, wonder and so much more is a delight and even a source of wonder in today’s world.
Hello America
Driving America’s Main St is a roller-coaster ride of real-world adventure, without the queasiness in your stomach except maybe on the way to Oatman in Arizona! But it is not all fun times and feel-good fluff either. Just under the surface of your experience is an awareness of the legions of travellers during Route 66’s heyday, when, from the 1930s to the 1960s, this was an escape from despair, a route of hopes and dreams.
Dig deeper and you’ll find every complexity of American history, from the Trail of Tears to segregation to the Tulsa Massacre to the range wars of the Old West and much more, because the Mother Road is a real road that spans two-thirds of a country with a turbulent past. After all, the beloved moniker, Mother Road, comes from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a novel about class, poverty, the Dust Bowl and Route 66.
Timeless design
One discovery you’ll make on Route 66 is generational shifts in attitudes that strike wistful chords today. In the many restored gas stations found in all eight states, the buildings were designed as pieces of architecture bordering on the exquisite. Even the gas pumps were crafted with artistic flair.
This craftsmanship extends to other mundane structures such as roadhouses, where weary travellers could stock up on groceries and refreshments. Built solidly from local materials such as rocks and adobe, even the abandoned ones still stand proudly, decades after the last block of ice left the premises. Popular oddities such as the giant Muffler Men used for promotional purposes have weathered the decades well. Compare them with today’s equivalent: an unctuous inflatable figure flopping around until the plug is pulled on its blower.
The question of where to spend the night inspired hundreds of owner-operators to build motels that showed a pride of place and catered to the needs of newly mobile Route 66 travellers. In Missouri, beautiful auto courts (collections of units usually arranged in a U-shape) were created from the local river stone by talented local stonemasons. In the Southwest, designers drew on local architecture traditions to craft tiny flat-roofed palaces in adobe.
As always, promotional considerations inspired visual artistry. Flashy neon signs are found all along Route 66, starting in Chicago, and are so popular that the National Park Service funds their restoration.
Small-town USA
Like a good landscape photo, there’s also the bigger picture. The route is dotted with scores of appealing small towns. Some so tiny yet alluring that you’ll decide to make an unplanned stop, and others with such great appeal, that you’ll stop for the night.
Unlike the interstate, where trying to explore a town requires you to quit cruise control, exit the highway and penetrate a shield of chains before undertaking a potentially longish drive in search of civilisation, on Route 66, towns simply appear dead ahead in your windshield.
Each is enticingly different, some cruising along prosperously in the 21st century, such as Claremore, Oklahoma, or barely one big blow away from vanishing, such as Glenrio, Texas , or using every possible trick to hang on to their survival on Route 66 such as Seligman, Arizona.
On the open road
Away from towns, the natural beauty you encounter is also core to the drive. The open spaces are legendary. But a sweeping view as you round a bend offers its own flash of loveliness.
With the Mother Road’s centennial in 2026, celebrations are under way along all 3800-plus of its kilometres and this journey of discovery of the good, the bad and the ugly, but also the goofy and the fabulous will get even more acclaim. There's no reason to delay, so hit the road today.
The book
Lonely Planet: Journey Route 66, RRP $36.99.
— Ryan Ver Berkmoes, a writer for Lonely Planet guidebooks, has driven Route 66 at least 25 times.
