Illinois 1

I had imagined that I would start at the beginning of Route 66 and blog along in order. Here is a map showing just a sample of the towns it goes through.

 

It turns out the experience is more impressionistic than that. Like America itself, Route 66 is not monolithic. The route was re-aligned over the decades that it was an official highway, and there are many options along the way, some rougher than others. Doing this road trip involves many choices. If you drove literally every mile that was ever part of Route 66, including dead ends and barely drivable surfaces, you would cover nearly double the mileage of simply getting from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California.

 

As the principal navigator (guess who’s the principal driver?) I took responsibility for researching options and suggesting what I thought would be the most interesting ones. Of course, we both did research and participate in making the choices. But generally speaking, things work best when Trish concentrates on the right side of the road and that terror to Europeans, the all-way stop, while I keep an eye on the turn-by-turn directions and all the interesting things that we might want to stop or just keep an eye out for.

 

T. on Michigan Ave. It was empty because the Chicago Sky (WNBA champions) were coming along on parade.

In my arsenal, by which I mean my lap, I have three tools for navigation. The first is a standard road atlas of the United States. This in fact rarely leaves the glove compartment, as it mostly covers freeways and is not designed to faithfully follow Route 66. It is handy, though, when we’re in a big city or if I want to see where the Route connects to another highway, crosses an interstate, etc.

 

The second tool, which almost everyone doing this road trip must have, is Jerry McClanahan’s EZ66 Guide for Travelers. This mentions virtually everything that anyone traveling the Route might be interested in, including side trips off the main route, plus options whenever the Route diverged historically, as is frequently the case. “McJerry” also provides “EZ” turn-by-turn directions and maps for all of these. A person could certainly navigate the whole trip just with EZ66, and that’s what I thought I was going to have to do.

 

But it turns out that just a year or two ago, a couple of Slovakian enthusiasts who had traveled Route 66 repeatedly (by motorcycle and car) invented a phone app. Their reasoning was that it’s difficult in a car, and I would think impossible on a motorcycle, to drive while following instructions in a spiral-bound book. It also involves the navigator keeping her head in said book, when it would be more fun to look out for the next giant Coke bottle (Route 66 has a lot of these). Jerry McClanahan reckons his book of directions has saved marriages. I am sure the Route 66 Navigation app has saved ours.

 

The Berghoff on Adams still has its classic neon sign, of which there are lots on the Route.

Trish likes the app because she can glance at the moving map and see exactly where the turn is coming up, without relying on hearing the directions. I like it because it confirms what I’ve already marked in the book. Before we set out, I downloaded all the maps and set it up to navigate from each place that we expected to stay, to each next place. Now, all these directions are available to us offline, without spending money on data (not that many parts of Route 66 have service anyway). The app even flags up many places of interest, though it’s not always obvious what those are. And some of the most interesting are places we find ourselves anyway.

 

To do this trip, you have to accept that you are not going to see everything. You will not make every interesting turn or option; even if you never miss a turn, there could be an equally interesting bit on an earlier or later alignment of the Route. Even more important is accepting that Route 66 navigation is not like following your phone’s regular Google Maps or whatever. There is no telling what time you’re going to get there. The number of miles means very little. If you wanted to get from Chicago to Los Angeles quickly, after all, you would just fly.

 

We did, of course, have to fly to start the trip in Chicago. We had a wonderful week at Auntie Janet and Uncle Bob’s, catching up with old friends and seeing my favorite American city.

 

The "L" above the 606, a walkable trail along Bloomingdale Avenue

University of Chicago football homecoming

Ann Sather's cinnamon rolls. Stretching our stomachs for the road trip to come

Then we picked up our car at the airport. When the woman who assisted us, Lucy, saw that we were dropping the car off in LA, she said, “Are you doing Route 66? You’re my first Route 66 since before COVID!” 

 

Willis (Sears) Tower. When I went to the top, it was the tallest building in the world.

Before we even left downtown Chicago, I was confronted with the multifariousness of Route 66. Where does it begin? There is not even one sign marking the start, on Adams Street between Michigan and Wabash Avenues; there are two!

 

And neither of these marks the original beginning of Route 66, because in 1926, it started at Michigan Avenue and Jackson Street. But since the 1950s, Jackson has been part of a one-way system of downtown streets. You can only drive eastbound on it now, so westbound travel starts at Adams.

 

We turned onto Ogden Avenue and made our first stop on Route 66: Lulu’s Hot Dogs.

 

As the Chicago skyline receded behind us,

Chicago viewed from Promontory Point, Hyde Park

we entered the western suburb of Cicero. Like many towns in Illinois, Cicero was once a “sundown town,” where black Americans were not welcome after sundown (or any other time, for that matter). Plans by Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead a march for fair housing in Cicero in 1966 were met with plans to call out the National Guard.

 

Where my late grandmother-in-law, Millie, used to live

 

The many alignments of Route 66 parallel the many stories of America, which run on different tracks. Depending on where you were, the hot dogs and neon signs were not for everybody. Sometimes the different stories meet, and sometimes they collide.

 

Joliet, Illinois is supposed to be a good welcome point to the Route experience, but the only place we could find open was an ice cream stand. The 1926 Rialto Square Theatre, diner, and museum were all closed that day.

 

Our sense that we were really on Route 66 came down the road in Wilmington, where T. spotted the first of the Muffler Men that once adorned the roadside along many parts of the Route. This is the Gemini Giant at the Launching Pad Drive In, once closed, now (since 2017) under new management. The proprietor was so glad to see us! He asked where we were from, and when I said we lived in England, marveled that T. had been allowed to come. “I’m not sure they’ll let me back in,” she joked. Normally, they have many visitors each year and most are from outside the U.S.

 

We were to hear this a lot on the road. Travel, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it, has been devastated by the pandemic, and they have been so excited to see us back. We tell them that international travel is opening up again from next month, that there should be many more people coming up behind us. I feel like we’re out here spreading the good news.

Map 1 from Jerry McClanahan's EZ66

We've come to look for America

     What is Route (“root”) 66 and why do people want to travel on it?

     From 1926, there was a U.S. highway numbered 66. Early alignments were dirt roads—sometimes mud, sometimes dust, as when the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath drove them to California. Many people fled the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma for dreams of out west on the “Mother Road.” 

     Later, in the 1950s and ’60s, Route 66 and its many roadside attractions became a vacation destination in itself. Americans, at least a lot of them, were in love with the automobile and wanted to do everything in their cars, even eat at restaurants and go to the movies. Route 66 catered to this dream, too. There was also a television show based on the Route, and of course, a famous song.

     This very popularity led to the Route’s demise. The interstate highway system is often touted as a good example of federal government money spent on a big project that's widely popular. At the same time, the interstates bypassed towns, whereas Route 66 in many cases went right down their main streets. Suddenly, all those mom-and-pop businesses were endangered. The last section of Route 66 to be bypassed by an interstate was around Kingman, Arizona, a few years before I first traveled out west. By 1985, the Route was officially decommissioned as a U.S. highway.

     Yet almost immediately, Americans started forming associations to preserve this unique road and the places it goes through. Because Route 66 is unique. Unlike interstates that run east to west or north to south, the Route runs diagonally, from Chicago southwest to Los Angeles. It crosses eight states. In some areas, such as in Missouri, it follows the frontage or “outer road,” sometimes right alongside the interstate, then veers off into farmland or woods. In others, as in Illinois, it goes through seemingly every town—the places that, if they are lucky, are marked at “exits” on the interstate highway.

Amber waves of grain

     When we started meeting people along Route 66, they told us that most who travel the Route today are foreign visitors. This road trip is legendary around the world, and people come here to discover the real America, perhaps even to dispel their prejudices. Because of COVID-19 and its associated travel bans, those visitors all but disappeared in the past two years. But T. thinks that every American should travel Route 66. It is our birthright.

     She’s wanted to take this ultimate road trip since before she met me. For my part, I’m both American by birth and an international visitor. I was intrigued by this slice of Americana that, it is fair to say, many of my fellow citizens know little or nothing about. To see the States in a different way from blocks of red or blue on an election map. Most pertinently, to slow down, stopping at the places other people pass, driving through the places others fly over.

Bathtub complete with chipped paint, just like growing up

     Route 66 is a road of contrasts, and in that way, it truly represents the U.S.A. It is the Route 66 of motels with pools, drive-in movie theatres, and TV shows, and it is Steinbeck’s Mother Road of Dust Bowl desperation. It has two of the three biggest cities in the U.S. and towns with populations in the hundreds, even ghost towns. It is the white stripe snaking through states both red and blue.

     Like many international travelers, our demand to get moving again has been pent up. It has been an ugly past few years and for Americans especially, that ugliness has meant ceasing to talk to each other, to even try to understand. We see each other through social media memes and news stories slanted in both directions. The country seems to be divided rather than united, and as Frankie Goes to Hollywood sang: “When two tribes go to war, one is all that you can score.”

     I have no illusions that a Route 66 road trip can solve America or the world’s problems. It does, however, give a different perspective. It is easy for humans to be contemptuous of one another in groups, or as labeled movements. It is different when you meet individuals and they smile (if the smile isn’t masked), or look you in the eye.

That ribbon of highway

   As in the song by John Mellencamp, I grew up in a small town. There are values with which I was raised there that I treasure, as well as things I now think are wrong and have moved away from (as have many other people from small towns). I understand why people living in those places feel forgotten. I refuse to believe that we have to throw away the values of friendliness in order to confront the parts of our nation that are still in desperate need of healing.

     And people are friendly. I cannot speak to everyone’s experience but everywhere we have gone in the world, never mind this country, people are happy to see us. They are welcoming. They want to help.

     Come with us and see.