66at60: Route 66

What about Route 66? Well here it is.
This evocative two lane road linking Chicago with Los Angeles and passing through small towns and large cities was the only practical route linking the east coast and the mid-west with California and all places in between. Diners, gas stations, motor courts and tourist traps opened in some of the most isolated areas of America through the 30s and 40s until the newly built interstate highway system finally replaced it in the 1980s. The Department of Transportation finally rang the death knell for Route 66 when overnight on one night in 1984, all the Route 66 signs were taken down right along the route and only signs to the interstate system remained. Towns decayed and died and it is only in the last five or ten years that they have come back to life of sorts through the efforts of these towns to resurrect some of the memories of an America long gone that Route 66 now recalls.
To complicate things Route 66 took different directions at different times in the 30s and 40s as cities such as Santa Fe and Albuquerque in New Mexico, for instance, expanded. However with the use of a good guide book and the 'Historic Route 66' road signs throughout Arizona and New Mexico, we could recapture some of the magic of this archetypal road.
Interstate-40 in Arizona runs parallel to sections of Route 66 that still remain drivable and we first picked up it up through the town of Holbrook where one of the sites of Route 66 still remains in operation. The last WigWam Motel is on 66 as the road goes westwards out of the town.

These concrete wigwams are still in use though we decided against staying in one as the railroad runs just behind them and federal law obliges all trains to sound their horns as they approach crossings with roads whether it be day or night; their noise can be deafening.

We picked up the road again as it ran through Flagstaff then Williams of which more later then on through other towns, past isolated road stops such as the Hackberry general store,