I recalled a long forgotten feeling when I started my journey on the legendary Route 66.
The one that you feel when you enjoy being on the road instead of searching for touristy sights. By the end, I finally I received a lot more than this. I never imagined that you could fall in love with a road. When I finished my journey, however, I was in tears.
When I was a child we used to take small weekend road trips with our sky-blue East-German Trabant. I climbed onto the backseat, with my parents sitting in the front, and we hit the road without any specific purpose. It did not matter where we here heading, the only thing that was important was to get out of the city, to look around while on the road, to walk a little and eat our home-made sandwiches in a parking lot.
It’s not about the destination but the journey itself
With the spread of motorways, this feeling has sadly vanished. You don’t drive across sweet little villages any more, you don’t hear the sound of church bells, you don’t stop for coffee at small town bars and you cannot stop at the side of the road when you see something interesting.
You don’t feel the road itself anymore, you only rush from A to B.
When it flourished, Route 66 embodied this childhood feeling, and now when it starts to awake once again, its fans wish to re-experience the journey and the spirit of being on the road.
Along Route 66 there are no sights of world-wide importance. Only the starting point of the road, Chicago and the endpoint, Los Angeles offer famous sights. Crossing the country you almost only roll along with a smile.
The famous points along the road serve a nostalgic purpose: old, closed down, rebuilt or decaying gas stations, retro neon lights of motels, sites of former drive-in movies, shops that have been operating for decades or abandoned for just a while. But people obsessed with Route 66, are interested in exactly this, and they search for the stories and persons behind the sights.
It is like a pilgrimage
The drive is dedicated almost as much to conversations, as the points of interest.
When I entered an iconic motel or shop, people knew right away that I was “on the road” and they were happy to tell stories about the history of the place, their own experiences and plans. On several occasions I stayed somewhere longer than planned, because we got carried away in heated conversations with the owner.
But friendships or acquaintances are also made easily among travelers. It reminded me of past walks in the forests, where strangers greet and help each other to find their way and it makes you quickly feel like a member of a community. The same happens with the pilgrims of Route 66. When a car stopped while I was taking a photo of a desolate gas station, I almost always started a conversation with the passengers.
We shared at least where we were from, how long we had been on the road and what our favorite places were. We spent days together with two Scottish guys because we were proceeding at the same pace and reserved accommodation in the same towns. On the first day, we only nodded to say hello, but the next day, we started to talk to each other and then we had lunch together. We still keep in touch via email, even months after our trip.
But what is this famous Route 66?
In the early 20th century, there were a lot of bad quality roads in the US including dust roads that were spreading along the country. At that time, most people travelled by train or horse-drawn carriage so there was not so much demand for better roads.
However, when car production started, and roughly after 1910 when cars became available to the public, demand rose for better quality and longer roads.
In the beginning, concrete roads were built on a local level but in 1926, the roads became connected to each other and the nationwide ones were provided with numbers. The roads connecting the coasts got round numbers (this practice remains until the present).
The road between Chicago and Los Angeles was given the number 66. The official “birthday” of Road 66 is November 11th 1926, when they connected 2448 miles (3940 km) of pre-existing road sections. The paving of the entire road did not end until 1938.
In the 1930s, thousands of people relocated from the hot, Mid-Western Sates to California to seek employment in its booming agricultural sector.
The road had its golden age in the ’40s and ’50s, when both business and leisure travelers used it a lot. To serve them, a number of small motels, restaurants, gas stations, shops were established. This was the era when Americans started to travel for fun. Route 66 became an attractive route in itself but, to entertain the public, they made several natural caves accessible to visitors, and opened even some small zoos.
The revival of the legend
John Steinbeck called the road “the mother road, the road of flight” in his novel “The Grapes of Wrath”, that was published in 1939. This was the beginning of the artistic career of the legendary Route 66 in dozens of books, movies and songs.
The most famous is probably the song “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”, which over the years has been covered by dozens of musicians.
By 1970, during the great construction period – parallel to almost every segment of Route 66 – modern, four-lane highways were built. This made traveling much faster and enabled cars to consume less fuel, but also made the road more boring.
In 1985, Route 66 was officially shut down and the popular road signs were all removed. The legendary Route 66 began to decline, leading related businesses into bankruptcy.
In 1990, the states concerned began to realize that they should not let the longest, oldest and most crowded road of all times decay, given its historical value. They started renovations, put out “historic Route 66” signs along the way, and painted Route 66 on the asphalt to assist motorists looking for the original route.
They re-opened the service stations, the motels, the post offices and drive-in movie theatres. Tourism began to flourish again, and Route 66 was restored as a state highway (US Route). Although you can’t travel along the entire old route, many sections can be found if you are equipped with maps and guidebooks.
Driving on 66 is like getting in an old movie
The first few days were the most difficult ones, until I managed to find old road sections. The reason was that the GPS could not be programmed to take me to Route 66, it always wanted to divert me to the highway. However, as the days passed I acquired more and more routine, and I found out the tricks and techniques of how to track down sections of the legendary road.
I also realized that, whenever possible, I should support Route 66 based companies. No matter how hungry I was, I did not stop at traditional fast food restaurants, I waited until I found one of the legendary old ones, as they see much lower traffic than the modern buffet chains built along the highways. It is often a great challenge for their owners to maintain these lovely little cafés, but they do it anyway, because of sheer enthusiasm.
Sometimes it seemed totally pointless to bother that much finding the old road while I had easy access to the highway. But when I was driving along one of the long, well maintained sections of the Route, I felt childlike joy.
While the new highways were built as straight lines into the landscape, the old roads were winding. It was a bit like riding a bumpy roller coaster, but at the same time I saw much more of the world. I heard the noise of the towns along the road, I could smell the scent of the fields and I could stop any time whenever I wanted to take pictures of the beautiful scenery.
It was also touching to pass by shooting locations of legendary films. You could see the location of ‘Bagdad Café’ (a 1987 German comedy, also called ‘Out of Rosenheim’) or even the motel where the Easy Riders were refused a room.
I do not think there are people who could not get emotional at the end of such a trip. It was not only me who wept, everyone I encountered along the way, considered this road trip as a great life experience. It was a lot more different from a normal ride, we had become part of a legend that is kept alive by fans of the road and we got a taste of an era which we never experienced, yet for which we felt nostalgia.
If you want to see the entire journey compressed into 8.5 minutes, here you go: