Jack Kerouac, where are you?

I’m sure that you are all familiar with the scene in the movie Cars, when Lightning McQueen gets lost off of the Interstate (I-40), and winds up in the little town of ‘Radiator Springs’ whose main road through town was the old Route 66.  

          I am here to tell you that Cars is a true story.

          Maybe not the Lightning McQueen part is true 😊 but the ‘Radiator Springs’ part is definitely true.

          We drove through there.

          On Route 66.

          There isn’t another road in the Country, maybe even the world that is as iconic (and I don’t use that word lightly) as U.S. Route 66. Immortalized in song, verse, and film, this road has always captured the imaginations of past and present travelers.

          In the mid-20^th Century, it was the way west, out to Los Angeles, when freedom was just around the next bend. Back in the day, before President Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System, there were major U.S. highways that bisected the Country from North to South, and East to West.

          Route 66 was the Queen.

           We left Lake Havasu City, and drove north to take Interstate Route 40 towards points east and eventually back to Texas.

          Then, there it was.

          Route 66, the Mother Road.

           I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.

           We were about 30 miles into this leg when we came upon the town of Kingman, and a big exit sign read Historic Route 66. Kingman is one of the towns mentioned in the song, (Get you kicks on) Route 66 and the start of a section of Route 66 that is still in existence. Route 66 was ‘decommissioned’ and finally stripped of its title in 1985, after the last section in Williams, Arizona was finally made obsolete by I-40. It had served its purpose and was no longer needed to convey travelers back and forth.     

The Interstate did that more efficiently.

          But not better

          At Kingman, the highway diverges from I-40 and winds its way up and through some of the prettiest nothingness scenery anywhere.

          And through this nothingness, a few little towns spring up just because, that’s where they were formed. We were happy to be on the actual road but there was a small price to pay in mileage, time, and a slight case of the melancholies.

          I can not help but wonder what these small oasis’s separated only by miles, were like back when they were thriving outposts, places where, that weary traveler would stop and fill up both their stomachs, and their tanks before proceeding on their way. Many of the buildings are still there, vestiges of their former selves, preserved by the desert, as only it can.

          Think ghost towns.

          Back then, they did not know that they would someday be labeled iconic, all they knew was that they existed, like the rest of their contemporaries, to do a job, take care of customers, raise the kids, and hopefully save a few bucks for themselves.

          They were real.

          Today, these places are either abandoned, or the lucky ones have been rehabilitated to serve as a second generation of their ancestors, giving travelers a place to stop, not necessarily to fill their bellies and tanks, but more so, to fill the gaps left from before, when, the Interstate robbed us of all our local flavor.

          Before the homogenization of America.