Road Tripping on Route 66
Part 1: General thoughts
Into The Blue is about finding joy in simple pleasures. One of those pleasures is a good road trip.
“This highway, if you just think about it, is peppered with hope, it is peppered with tears.”
Angel Delgadillo, barber, businessman, “guardian angel” of Route 66
Route 66 is a portrait of America. The America that was, the America that is, and the America that could be. America the good, and America the bad. Creative people, glorious vistas, hope and adventure. Grinding poverty, ghost towns, despair and loss.
If your eyes are open, you will experience all of these Americas on a Route 66 road trip. We certainly did, cruising in our van over four weeks down the length of 66 this spring. It was a learning journey.
I’d like to share that trip with you here on Into The Blue. It was such an epic adventure that I’m going to take it in parts. I’ll dedicate one post per month through years end to different pieces. I’ll start here with some musings (of a raving mad man), followed next month with practical information, and then discussion of different route segments.
Route 66 is known as the Mother Road, and it is sort of the mother of all road trips. I left home thinking it would be an immersion in Happy Days nostalgia. There was plenty of that, but it was so much more. It was a wonderful (and sobering) adventure.
I highly commend it to you. In fact, next year is the Route 66 centennial, and there are special events and celebrations planned all along the highway. That would be a great time to go. You could get a great feel for it even by just doing one section over a week, although two to three weeks would be ideal.
Route 66 is America
If you’re like me, perhaps you have only the vaguest idea of what Route 66 is. Or perhaps you’ve never heard of it at all. Well, let me pass on what I learned along the way.
Established in 1926, Route 66 was one of the first extended stretches of paved highway in the US, connecting the Midwest to the West and serving as a major route for migration, transport, and tourism. The route spanned over 2,400 miles from Chicago to LA. It runs through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Route 66 meant different things to different people at different times. But perhaps the storied highway’s overarching theme is hope, the desire to realize and celebrate the American dream of freedom and a better life. And if that is so, it is also true that 66’s second theme is the dashing of those hopes and aspirations for many. In this way, Route 66 is a mirror of America itself.
Route 66 has many strata. In the 1930’s, it was the pathway of a vast migration of those devastated by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression seeking work, dignity, and a new life in California. In the 1940’s, it was the conduit of men and materiel mobilized for world war. In the 1950’s, it was the route of the newly prosperous on vacation. In the 1960’s, it was a passageway of the hippie movement.
Yet, a growing America needed more robust infrastructure. By the late 1950’s, Route 66 itself became a congested nightmare in places. And so, the new national interstate highway system was constructed, facilitating commerce and travel but choking out the bypassed small towns. Route 66 slowly died. It was decommissioned in 1985. Officially speaking, it no longer exists.
But the idea of Route 66, an idea that inspired books and songs and shows and films, refused to die. People fought for it. People like Angel Delgadillo from Seligman, Arizona, who helped found associations and initiatives to promote and preserve the Mother Road. And people like Bob Waldmire, from Springfield, Illinois, who dedicated his life to travelling the highway and making art that celebrated it.
Because of such people, Route 66 lives on, revitalized in many places and visited by thousands every year. When we traveled the highway, we met locals full of passion about it. We met tourists from all over the US and all over the world who were entranced by it. We counted ourselves among them, a community of hope inspired by what has been, and looking forward to what might be.
The Good
If you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way, the highway that’s the best
Get your kicks on Route 66
Bobby Troup, (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66
The booming Route 66 of the 1950’s is the one that perhaps most captures the imagination. Leisure, freedom, adventure. Diners, soda shops, hot dog stands, drive-in theatres, old timey gas stations, quirky motels and tourist traps. Cornfields, open plains, rocky deserts, meteor craters, pine-covered mountains, fertile valleys.
You can still see and experience all of these things, whether restored vintage or dilapidated ruins or preserved in museums. Imaginative and innovative souls are taking the story forward with new Route 66-inspired art and murals, walking and biking tours and trails, craft breweries, memorials and monuments, and so on. Take time to talk to and learn from these folks along the way. I promise they will inspire you.
Beyond all this, I was moved by the great shifts in landscape and climate and culture, bound by the common spirit and aspiration of the people. I finished with a sense of America as a vast expanse, beautiful and varied, in places tamed and others wild, populated by people with those same characteristics. Yet all of this expanse, all of these people, are one nation, full of potential, full of possibilities.
The Bad
66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunders of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds…, from the floods... From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
As this life is never just glory but also suffering, so it is with Route 66. To simply hide in the nostalgia is to miss the richness. But if you prefer fantasy to reality, let me caution you not to do as I did and read The Grapes of Wrath on the journey. For if you do, it will open your eyes to see not just the tragedy of days past but of our days as well.
If you had travelled 66 in the 1930’s, you would have seen migrant masses fleeing west in desperate hope, only to be despised, rejected, and exploited by compatriots too hardhearted, fearful, or greedy to recognize their common humanity. Today, for every revitalized town, you will find 10 that never recovered after the interstate passed them by. In spots, you will see a 66 plagued by the scourge of homelessness. And if you are a vanlifer or RVer, you are likely to find yourself overnighting at times where many around you are living in their vehicles out of desperation, not leisure.
This too is Route 66, and this too is America. When I call to mind all the obvious potential, all the obvious possibilities, I have to ask. Can’t we do better?
Tomorrow
Actually, it is Angel Delgadillo, the “guardian angel” of 66 who answered that question. In a wonderful 4-minute interview, available here on YouTube, he spoke of the revitalization of the Mother Road that he and other passionate, committed people have already accomplished. His words, his deeds speak to what is yet possible:
“It’s incredible what we the people have done for the people… We humans can do so much for our neighbors. We can do so much for our own families. We humans. This is what I have learned.”
Well said, Angel. The joy sparkling in your eyes makes me smile and gives me hope.
A Short Meditation
The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
Jesus was a poor, at-risk child migrant (Matthew 2:13-23). “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” he taught (Matthew 25:40).
God’s heart is so close to those on the margins—poor, desperate, far from home—that he took on flesh and became a refugee himself. This is deeply convicting to me as I cling to my comfort. Where is my heart? Where is yours?