The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The best way to understand America? It’s still Route 66
The Mother Road is racing into the future while helping to preserve its past, says Jacqui Agate
Alife-sized statue of Marilyn Monroe stood outside the Polk-ADot Drive In in Braidwood, Illinois – one hand pressed to her face; the other wrangling a blush-pink dress, whipped up by the wind. On her left, James Dean donned a fur-lined jacket and a furrowed brow. To her right, Elvis Presley crooned into a microphone. A sign rimmed with pink neon promised malts, hot dogs and sodas.
This kind of gloriously over-the-top smack of Americana is exactly what I’d expected from Route 66. I had eased out of Chicago, the road’s official starting point, a few hours earlier and I’d already faced Joliet’s 24ft “Gigantar” – the world’s largest handmade guitar sculpture, outside the new Illinois Rock and Roll Museum – and one of the route’s iconic “muffler men”, a hulking fibreglass giant wielding a silver rocketship. Given that I was following the historic road all the way to sun-drenched Santa Monica, I was expecting plenty more of the same.
Route 66 dates back to 1926, when America’s first federal highway system was established. Earning the nickname the “Main Street of America”, the 2,400-plus-mile road swooped from Chicago, Illinois – via Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona – to Santa Monica, California, and was billed as the most convenient way to travel cross-country.
Automobile ownership boomed in the 1920s and infrastructure sprang up along the nascent Route 66: gas stations, rest stops, motels drenched in winking neon. The road also became a fixture of popular culture: its enduring moniker, “the Mother Road”, was coined in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath and, by 1946, Nat King Cole was singing about getting “Your Kicks on Route 66”. This was more than a road: it was an oilslicked, diner-stitched symbol of a nation on the move.
But the writing was on the wall by the 1950s. After a visit to Germany,
President Eisenhower was so impressed by the whizzing Autobahn that he dreamt up America’s Interstate Highway System, characterised by the mega, multi-lane motorways that still charge across the country today. The construction of interstates chewed up the Mother Road and it was decommissioned in 1985. By 2018, the route was placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of Most Endangered Historic Places.
But now, the fabled route is in the grip of a renaissance. As it gears up for its centennial in 2026, states are preparing for an influx of international travellers with new museums and revamped motels. Meanwhile, millions of dollars are being pumped into repairing historic neon signs and resurfacing roads.
Change is in full gear in Springfield, Illinois’s history-rich capital. I motored in and beelined for Ace Sign Co, a historic sign business that’s been operated by the same family for more than eight decades. Now part-manufacturing facility, part-museum, it offers public tours.
“After Route 66 was decommissioned, some of the smaller towns along the route dried up,” said my guide and former Ace president Dennis Bringuet, as we wandered between twinkling neon signs. “But the Mother Road will remain if we cast a new future for it.”
Indeed, Ace Sign Co has a firm hand in the route’s future here. They’re the brains behind the recently opened Illinois Route 66 Experience at Illinois State Fairground. The alfresco museum features a collection of towering replica neon signs alongside exhibitions about Illinois’s must-visit Route 66 stops, from drive-in theatres to cheerful roadside attractions. I explored the outdoor displays before driving over to Route History, another new museum along the route. This one is dedicated to black history and, according to co-owner Dr Stacy Grundy, nothing else like it exists.
“There was that ethos of ‘getting your kicks on Route 66’ – but for the black traveller, things looked very different,” she explained. “That was a time of segregation: where black travellers could eat, sleep and get gasoline was all dictated by Jim Crow laws.”
The small museum is filled with displays discussing the Green Book (a crucial guide listing businesses that would accommodate black travellers during the Jim Crow era) and pivotal local history events – but the highlight is a virtual reality experience of immersive stories following African-American characters as they journey on Route 66.
“If we don’t tell these stories, they’ll be lost,” Grundy said. “And sometimes, stories are all we have left.”
Motoring west from Springfield, Illinois faded in my rear-view mirror. And as I sank into Missouri’s Ozarks, I delighted in how the flat, barn-specked fields at the roadside morphed into rippling, redbud-covered crags. Across the entire route, the original two-lane highway was elusive, playing out in scattered fragments. Occasionally, I ran into a dead end and was forced back on the raging highway. Signage was inconsistent too: I got by with a combination of verbal directions and paper maps and by setting my navigation app to “avoid motorways”. It routinely told me that this was the slow way – and that, I realised, was the point.
Eventually, St Louis’s gargantuan Gateway Arch, a long-time symbol of western movement, rose before me like a mirage. I spent a few days soaking-in the city’s energy – queueing at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard and wandering Maplewood, a hip Route 66 district with microbreweries and bookshops – before continuing southwest.
The road inches through a sliver of Kansas, before curling into Oklahoma, where I visited the Cherokee Nation Anna Mitchell Cultural and Welcome Center in Vinita. The Cherokee were among the Native tribes forcibly removed from their homelands to so-called “Indian Country” (now Oklahoma) on the Trail of Tears from 1830.
Around 1,372 miles of Route 66 slice through Indigenous land, but representations of Native culture along the road are often hamfisted – from garishly painted teepees hawking curios to neon effigies of Native chiefs used to advertise white-owned motels.
But this Indigenous-run centre, opened in 2022, is dedicated to preserving a piece of Native Cherokee heritage: ancient pottery techniques that were all but lost, before they were revived by artist Anna Mitchell. Her work – mostly vessels in rich earthy colours – is displayed in glass cases alongside historical displays relating to Route 66.
“It’s saying: ‘we are here’,” Cherokee potter Carrie Lind told me.
Beyond the new museums and thoughtful cultural attractions, the route’s classic gas stations and retro motels have also been getting an update.
In Tulsa, I met Mary Beth Babock, the owner of Buck Atom’s Cosmic Curios on 66, amid a sea of bright sci-fi art prints and handmade jewellery. Babock told me that her store, opened in 2018 in an old 1950s gas station, supports some 60 local artisans. Her business was one of the earliest to emerge in the now-trendy Meadow Gold District, which runs along historic 66 in a haze of galleries and cafés.
I headed farther west, and soon the roadside was blanketed in snow. I climbed into the mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona, where the renovated Americana Motor Hotel, a reimagining of an existing 1960s motor lodge, opened in 2023: another exercise in modern nostalgia. Disco balls hang in the guest rooms and the lobby is bedecked in popping orange and grass green, as if plucked straight from the mid-century. Just down the road, the Galaxy Diner serves up burgers and shakes as it has for six decades.
But my final push, through western Arizona and into eastern California, reminded me once again what the route is all about. The best landscapes were saved until last, the sky-skimming red peaks a precious secret that the road had been keeping all along.
Eventually the high-rises of Downtown Los Angeles burst into view and I knew my final destination – the sands of Santa Monica – were in kissing distance. I watched the sun set over the Santa Monica Pier and reflected on an epic journey – on a road to the past with an eye to the future. The ultimate new nostalgia trip.