This past summer, the United States of America celebrated 250 years of independence. But for a great many Americana-lovers around the world, this year also brings another, even more resonant date: the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Route 66. In the months leading up to November 11th, the official birthday of what John Steinbeck dubbed the “Mother Road,” tourists both foreign and domestic have seized the occasion to make the 2,448-mile drive of which they’ve long dreamed. Running from Grant Park in Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier, Route 66 reveals a great swath of America’s big cities, small towns, historic sites, vast open spaces, natural wonders, and — most important for any enthusiast — pieces of roadside kitsch.
You’ll see plenty of all that in the video at the top of the post from Chris Attrell, one of the YouTubers who’s marked Route 66’s centennial year by driving it all and making a video along the way. He seems to have had less than ideal luck in reaching the attractions on his more than 100 stops during business hours, but in the true American spirit, he expresses optimism about getting back to them next time.
There are a host of schools of thought on which direction is best to drive the whole of Route 66, but Attrell heads inland from the coast, as travel vlogger Josh McNair did with his father for his channel Through My Lens a few years before. They take only two weeks to do so, a fairly rapid clip at which to cross seven states, or eight if you count the tiny segment that passes through the southeast corner of Kansas.
httpv:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0bA72fjHMQ
There are, no doubt, Route 66 purists who would insist that no stretch, no matter how short, can be bypassed — or at least no stretch of the 85 percent of the original highway that remains drivable today. Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985, nearly three decades after the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System began making it obsolete. But it wasn’t long thereafter that efforts began to preserve as much of it as possible as Historic Route 66, an enterprise that may have initially been driven by nostalgia, but increasingly trades in the exoticism of the once-ordinary. It’s easy to over-romanticize the days of pre-Interstate automobile travel, but as the aesthetics and rhythms of life in that period pass out of living memory, their remains become all the more compelling, even in total desuetude.
Anyone in search of total desuetude can hardly find more vivid examples, at least in my experience, than the Route 66 ghost towns (and, as Attrell calls them, “semi-ghost towns”) that the freeways passed by. For example, the strip of mostly hollowed-out lodgings that is Tucumcari, New Mexico has been a photographer’s dream for so long that a non-clichéd shot of the place can now be hard to come by. But for all the books published about it — and indeed, all the videos made about it — Route 66 is less a subject than an experience, a pilgrimage through an America of neon signs, period-accurate gas stations, memorabilia shops, eccentric artworks, hot dogs on sticks, Muffler Man statues, diners both operating and abandoned, and, of course, wigwam motels. May it endure to the United States’ quincentennial.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.