Route 66 at 100 kicks off Santa Monica caravan

About 70 drivers gathered outside the shuttered Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for a 2,448-mile, 20-day caravan to Chicago, celebrating Route 66’s centennial even as gas prices and travel uncertainty hang over the road.

Around 7 a.m. Saturday, in a parking lot beside the shuttered Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a curious mix of cars and trucks began to assemble. Three Model A’s. A couple of ’60 convertibles. A 1964 Chevrolet Impala station wagon. And, on trailer wheels, a big bull.

“Am I in the right place?” asked a man in one of the Model A’s. Nearby, a guy in a white Denali checked his own route: “Going to Chicago?”

Not everyone was sure what the full trip would look like once the cars hit the real traffic of Los Angeles. Joe Hernandez of Pasadena, standing near the gathering with a wistful expression, said, “I wish I could do the whole thing.”

This was the starting line for roughly 70 drivers taking part in a 2,448-mile, 20-day caravan to Chicago. Most had traveled from outside California to share what they call an adventure with fellow “roadies. ” while also boosting awareness of the classic scenery and independent businesses along the eight-state route.

But the uncertainty is real. Soaring gas prices and hesitant international travelers have added stress to a trip that was always going to be logistically challenging.

The drive’s first day alone reads like a stress test for anyone used to moving through L.A. by commute routine: from the Pacific to Pasadena by surface streets, including miles on Santa Monica and Colorado boulevards. “I don’t know how it’s all going to happen,” said Gary Daggett, president of the Old Route 66 Assn. of Texas. He didn’t talk like a person who planned to quit. He and his wife. Stephanie. have been doing this long enough to know Route 66 is as much about the people as the pavement.

“This is our 30th trip over 20 years,” Daggett said. “You can’t see everything. There’s so much…. You start meeting the people, you get hooked on the people.”

Minutes before the scheduled 8:30 departure, organizer Rhys Martin gathered drivers for instructions. Martin. who is part of the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership. is president of the Oklahoma Route 66 Assn. and serves as manager of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preserve Route 66 initiative.

Martin will drive a ’64 Chevy Impala station wagon with a GPS unit inside so armchair travelers can follow his journey online.

“Leaving here is going to be a little complicated,” Martin told the group. He is part of the crew that has learned, the hard way, that a road trip like this doesn’t behave like a parade with a single, tidy line.

“It’s going to be impossible to keep everybody together,” Martin said. “We’re encouraging people to spread out and support independent businesses rather than all going to one place and demolishing the kitchen.”

The caravan will travel in the opposite direction from the route’s usual cultural storyline. In song and literature, Route 66 is celebrated as an east-to-west journey. This group will head from California through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri to Illinois.

From Santa Monica, Day 1’s schedule took drivers to Beverly Hills City Hall, Grand Central Market downtown for lunch, the Chicken Boy statue and Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Highland Park, then an overnight in Pasadena.

Day 2 brings the group from Pasadena to Barstow. Day 3 runs from Barstow to Needles. The caravan is due to arrive in downtown Chicago on June 25.

A core group of 15 cars will lead the loose procession, including representatives of all eight states on the route. But because anyone can join or leave at any time, the number of vehicles varies by the hour.

Over decades, Route 66 has become more than an American artifact. It has turned into a global symbol of small-town Americana, and many merchants, restaurateurs and hoteliers along 66 say their summer customers are often travelers from abroad, especially Europe.

One of the caravan drivers, in a rented pickup truck, is Dries Bessels, co-founder of the Dutch Route 66 Assn.

Still, the caravan’s most attention-grabbing piece isn’t a classic engine. It’s a fiberglass bull tied to the Amarillo-based Big Texan Steak Ranch restaurant—one of the event’s sponsors.

“It’s the same one my dad brought home in ’71. His name is Big Moo,” said Danny Lee, who co-owns the restaurant with his brother, Bobby Lee. “He’s 12 and a half feet high. About 500 pounds. It’s all fiberglass.”

Across 21 cities on the drive, the Big Texan team plans to stage nightly steak-eating contests, offering free dinners to anyone who can eat 72 ounces of steak, a baked potato, three shrimp, a side salad and a roll in 60 minutes.

Even before the caravan left town, it hit the kind of real-world complications Route 66 enthusiasts know to expect.

The first challenge arrived at the Santa Monica Pier. where there wasn’t room for the cars because of a construction project. World Cup preparations and a Children’s Hospital fundraiser. Instead, the caravan gathered by the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Drivers strolled over the pier for a photo opportunity, then returned to their cars.

“Herding cats,” said George Kulakowski of Huntington Beach, driving a 1931 Ford Model A Panel Delivery truck.

Another challenge waited in West Hollywood, where Santa Monica Boulevard—also known as Route 66—was crowded for the city’s WeHo Pride Street Fair. Under plans laid ahead of time, most caravan vehicles detoured around the event while select caravan cars followed a police escort through the action.

That approach matters to Martin because it reshapes what the trip means locally. “This way, another community along Route 66 gets to share its identity with the community at large,” he said.

By 11:15 a.m., Martin’s car had reached Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.

While he was moving through that stretch, other parades and caravans were traveling Route 66 in other states this year, most of them focusing on short segments.

By 12:45 p.m., caravaners had met the mayor of Beverly Hills and rolled through West Hollywood’s Pride festivities, arriving at Grand Central Market slightly ahead of schedule.

The Route 66 centennial isn’t just being celebrated along the main route. On May 30. an estimated 3. 596 classic cars joined a “Capital Cruise” on Route 66 in Tulsa. Okla. setting a Guinness Book of World Records holder for the largest parade of classic cars. Organizers drew an estimated 100,000 spectators and overwhelmed local traffic.

In Arizona, the Williams Historic Route 66 Car Show was set for Friday and Saturday. In Texas, the Amarillo-based Texas Route 66 Festival is running Thursday through June 13.

For many drivers, the caravan is also a way to see the road as it is now—stopping where hotels and motels range from vintage neon to road food to shifts in local politics. The route’s summer landscape includes “blue states, red states and purple states.”

As a package of Times stories described in May, some landmarks along the highway date to its days as a scene of Depression desperation in the 1930s, while others point to its giddy postwar years in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

Route 66 was created in 1926 as a highway stitching together hundreds of local roads. It earned nicknames from its boosters—“the Main Street of America”—and from John Steinbeck. who called it “the Mother Road” in “The Grapes of Wrath.” In 1946. it inspired Bobby Troup’s song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.”.

But economic life along Route 66 has been precarious since the late 1960s. when interstate highways and chain hotels began pulling travelers away from the older. slower road. After Route 66 was decommissioned as a highway in 1985. about 85% of the old route remained in use. often as small-town thoroughfares. country highways and frontage roads alongside Interstate 40.

Efforts to save and rebuild the route as a historic resource began in the late 1980s and gained momentum after the 2006 release of the Pixar/Disney animated features “Cars. ” which tells the story of the highway’s rise and fall. In towns such as Tucumcari, N.M., and Seligman, Ariz., the highway remains central to local identity and economy.

Back at the start, the caravan’s message feels practical rather than nostalgic. Martin framed the road’s centennial improvements as something that is meant to last.

“This year’s centennial improvements along the route ‘are things that are going to go into the future,’” Martin said. “The real impact is going to be next year and the years after.”

Route 66 centennial Santa Monica Civic Auditorium Chicago-bound caravan Old Route 66 Assn. of Texas Oklahoma Route 66 Assn. Preserve Route 66 Big Texan steak contest World Cup preparations WeHo Pride Street Fair Amtrak??