Route 66

Today we drove 650 miles across parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Much of the way, the old Route 66 Historic highway, a two lane road, was alongside Interstate 40. Current highway speed limit is 75 mph and Route 66 is now 55 mph. The experience causes one to wax nostalgic as we passed old decrepit gas stations, diners, and roadside motels

The perspective below was copied from a display at a Texas Welcome center.

"You may be driving a modern Interstate, but you are also driving right through the heart of American History. You are traveling along the route of old Route 66, the narrow two-lane ribbon of concrete that reached from Chicago to Los Angeles, bringing millions westward in pursuit of the American dream. It was completed in the 1920s, at a time when our country was first enjoying its romance with the automobile. It was a time, when for the first time, America was on the move.

Along this way came a huge cast of real and fictional characters in search of adventure or a new chance in life. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, a quarter of a million people headed west on this legendary road. They came in the flashiest new creations of Detroit and in old trucks laboring beneath the weight of furniture and household goods, families with absolute conviction that things could be better. In the 1940s millions of World War II veterans headed for California, toward the sun, toward the ocean, and the population of Los Angeles doubled. By the end of the 1950s, the highway system began to bypass the small Route 66 towns, and some sections of the road were abandoned. In 1985, the old historic road was officially decommissioned.

Here, too, was The Great American Roadside, scattered communities of small family businesses created to serve the needs of a nation on the move. Diners and tourist courts and filling stations and souvenir shops grew like tumbleweeds along the way. It became the world's longest Main Street, an avenue across America that John Steinbeck called "the Mother Road".

Route 66 lasted for merely fifty years, but it has become a symbol of what is best in the American character. Here is the romance of the open road, the promise of freedom, the lure of what can be found the horizon, the love affair with the automobile that has shaped us as a nation and a people. the old road is gone now. But the legend lives on."