Route 66 was the US highway that ran from Chicago to LA, made famous in song and in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. But over the last few decades, a crumbling road through small towns has been superseded by new highways to get you where you're going as quickly as possible. Stretches of the old road have been subsumed into others and renumbered. Route 66 is now a collection of bits and bobs of road, as near as can be identified. In places there are signs on the side of the road, or even painted on the tarmac, to let you know that 66 once ran there.
In LA, 'Route 66' is actually streets famous in their own right, following parts of Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. California doesn't make great play of the road, and in some ways it is not particularly interesting - outside LA it runs mostly parallel to the modern interstate and the railroad (amazing long freight trains pulled by 3-5 locomotives), so you're driving more slowly along a worse road surface than on the new road and seeing mostly the same things. But the scenery itself is very nice - the Mojave desert is greener and more mountainous than you expect a desert to be - and occasionally you run past a very small town (like Amboy, home to Roy's Café, which from the outside at least looks just like it should), or adverts painted onto the side of unused vehicles, or abandoned buildings.
We stayed the night in Barstow - Lilly pulled us off the road when she saw signs for an outlet mall, and that was us done for the day. The modern face of Americana. I learned that if you find a sale section in an outlet store, it is ridiculously cheap, and Lilly was actually outshopped by me. Which is a bad idea. There will be retribution. There always is. I foresee a lot more shops in our future...
Barstow is not a big place, but is a popular overnight stop due to its location. We picked a motel from the side of the road - Motel 66, it had a nice neon sign and a bit of quirkiness, and Lilly expected us to be murdered in our beds but amazingly we weren't. Barstow's other point of interest is a strange McDonald's, in a building that also houses souvenir shops and radio stations, and you can eat in old train carriages fixed to the sides of the building.
On into Arizona, and immediately the road changes into a better-maintained snake coiling around hillsides and past a working goldmine, and eventually, slowly, to Oatman, which you will picture if you think of an old frontier town, now dedicated to selling tat to tourists. Makes for a few fun photos though, and the road gets better after here. This is the longest surviving stretch of the old highway. Unfortunately it's not the most interesting, for either scenery or roadside attractions. But we do see occasional tumbleweeds for the first time in our lives. They resolutely refuse to appear when I tell jokes.
Through Seligman, with more photogenic roadside attractions;Kingman, where we just get into its Route 66 Museum before closing time (turns out 10 minutes is enough) and stop off at the Quality Inn to see the unadvertised memorabilia on display in its lobby; and one last stop for dinner in Williams, at Cruisers Cafe 66, a classic auto-themed diner with its own micro-brewery - hard to imagine a place more in keeping with want you want from 66.
We then pushed on to Flagstaff for two nights, and a day at the Grand Canyon in between (which I'll report on separately). Flagstaff is probably the biggest town we'll see for a week, which isn't saying much - basically, you can tell you're in a big town when it has more than one street. It has a little historical centre which is quite pleasant. We had dinner in Granny's Cabin, which used to be the proud owner of two giant lumberjack statues until it donated them to the local university*, and granny still makes the apple pies.**
* There are a lot of uni sports teams photos on the walls, and on one of them three tiers of sportsmen are towered over by a lumberjack. The effect is good enough to make me wish that all sports team photos were posed in front of giant lumberjacks.
** We didn't have one. We had already reach our fruit pie quota for the day at lunch, 'the best pie on the river'.
The last chunk of Route 66 for us came on Saturday, through Twin Arrows and its presumably more modern neighbour Two Guns, and on to Meteor Crater, with its own radio station (disappointingly just a pre-recorded 3-minute loop), where we stopped to see the visitor centre. The crater is 550 ft deep and 2.4 miles in circumference and looks very impressive in photos - slightly less so in person because it's hard to get a sense of scale. To help with this, they have put a 6-foot cardboard cut-out astronaut at the bottom - but you can't really make it out with the naked eye so I'm not sure it helps. The guided tour around part of the rim is quite interesting (you can't go into the crater). NASA trained Apollo astronauts here from 1964 to 1972. The guide to the violence of the impact is that anything that isn't red rock was thrown up from hundreds of feet underground - so the sandstone rocks the size of a house on the rim are quite impressive. The crater stands in a vast swathe of flatness almost as far as the eye can see, barring the odd mountain on the horizon, so perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that up on the rim (150 ft above the plain) they frequently get 100+ mph winds. Not today - it's calm and baking hot. I wouldn't like to be here in August.
Now, if we had to name one song that we've heard again and again around the world, it would be The Eagles' 'Take It Easy', which features the line "Standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona". There doesn't seem to be much left of Winslow, but there is a dedicated corner complete with sign, statue and painted backdrop, and two of the three shops in town are dedicated to appropriate souvenirs.
Next up is the Jackrabbit Trading Post, whose sign - 'Here it is' - is (they clearly hope) iconic - they've printed it on enough T-shirts in their shop to clothe most of Arizona, which looks to me a touch optimistic.
Finally, we pass through Holbrook, home to a motel with concrete teepees and to many a dinosaur model. Just up the road is the 'painted desert' and petrified forest, and everybody wants to sell you some rock, i.e. petrified wood. Um... I'm okay, thanks.
A really enjoyable few days of driving (apart from the half hour we somehow spent driving in a giant circle in LA because it's hard to get decent directions driving 66 eastbound). We've notched up 925 miles on and around Route 66 and I kind of wish we were doing the whole thing. Maybe another time.
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