We drove the Mother Road
If you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way, take the highway that‘s the best
Get your kicks on Route 66
It winds from Chicago to LA
More than 2000 miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66
You go through St Louie, Joplin, Missouri
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty
You‘ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New mexico.
Flagstaff Arizona, don‘t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino.
Won‘t you get hip to this timely tip
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66.
Route 66 is actually 2448 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles. It crosses eight states and three time zones.
In 1927 only 800 miles of the road were paved. in 1985 it was decommissioned. I was told that it was the first road that went from the east coast to the west, it obviously isn‘t. I was told that if you wanted to go west back in the early days of the twentieth century, you took 66. That may be true but quite why you would go to Chicago on the way west , I don‘t know.
It‘s not featured on many maps, in fact my map book shows it running through Arizona but nowhere else, but there is still a lot of the original road out there. It just takes some finding. The words of the song are as good a clue as you need to the road‘s path, but there are any number of websites dedicated to the Mother Road.
When first I studied the map to see if driving to the Grand Canyon was a viable proposition, I was struck by the famous number 66 alongside one of the smaller roads along the way. A small amount of research proved that this was indeed the Route 66, made famous to me by the Rolling Stones many years ago. The song had done nothing for me back then and the idea of the road didn‘t immediately do anything for me at the moment that I first saw it on the map, but that was to change.
Simply because we were going to be in the area, I wanted to drive Route 66. Just to say that I had. So we did.
Checking on one of the sites dedicated to 66 showed me that we‘d already driven on the road in Flagstaff. While we were driving up and down looking for FH89 out of town, we were in fact on Route 66, although even if I‘d known that I wouldn‘t have been satisfied. I knew the stretch I wanted to go on and that was where we were headed on that Sunday morning as we left Williams. Of course we left Williams on Route 66, in fact our motel was on the road itself, but we didn‘t know or care at that stage.
Back on I40 heading west this time. We immediately started seeing signs reading "Los Angeles 326" or something like that, decreasing anyway, which fed our wanderlust somewhat.
One of the 'downsides' to this particular holiday was that it was planned with almost military precision. Everything had been planned to the day, if not the hour, and no time had been allowed for rushing off at tangents, and that is what we normally like to do. If we‘d simply hired a car for the duration of our stay, with no plans as to destination, we‘d have been on LA by sundown.
The ache was strong.
I had a strong ache to leave I40 and drive the Mother Road west through Peach Springs and Truxton but two things stopped me.
The I40 way to Kingman was about 70 miles which is around the hour at interstate speeds, R66 looked likely to turn that into a hundred miles of which none would be at interstate speeds and the first fifty miles looked to be no more than dirt track. So that was one reason I stayed on the interstate. Reason two? I missed the turn off.
There aren‘t that many exits off I40 and they kind of spring up on you quite suddenly, so I was ill prepared for the Ash Fork ramp when it flashed by, but even had I been wide awake and eagle eyed, I would have missed the pathetic "Route 66 - Historic road" badge stuck on the sign at the bottom of the ramp. Come on you Americans, advertise your history with more vigour, please.
The miles soon passed and we arrived at a truck stop just short of Kingman where we gassed up and fed on pancakes and toast, eschewing the possible delights of the Iron Skillet for a scruffy diner out back of the gas station. This place had the twin advantages of being cheap and empty. The food was very passable too.
Once the eating ritual was over and done with it was off up 66. Take the Kingman exit off I40 and you drive straight onto the road in question. We‘d been there before as well. This was where we stopped for lunch two days before so we had already driven the 'Historical Road' three times.
Well we were going to do it in earnest this time.
If you are going to drive an historical road, you really must have your photo taken alongside some evidence that you have done so, so that was the plan. Route 66 may be historic but from Kingman heading north east it‘s straight. Now, I‘ve said how straight roads fascinate me, but that because I want to know what‘s at the end. That wasn‘t an option here, I was only looking for a sign to take pictures of and I would turn back.
The road heads straight towards the Grand Canyon but a along way west of where we had been the day before, and it was to turn east a long time before it ever got near. I guess that what looked like mountains in the distance that we were driving towards, were in fact the craggy stuff that makes up the canyon, but I have no way of knowing. All I know is, they never got any nearer.
As we drove and drove in search of a sign, the image before me never once changed, except when the longest train in the whole world passed by on the railway track that parallels the road. This beast had three locomotives, all pulling together, at the head of an enormous number of freight wagons. It seemed to go on forever, but it didn‘t and when it had passed, the scenery returned to the same old road and mountain view that had been before.
Eventually it became obvious that the road bent round to the right away in the distance and we agreed that that bend was as far as we were going, and that‘s where we found our sign. Just round the curve there was a Route 66 sign, just made for us. We did the photography bit and headed back. I checked the mileage.
Seventeen miles.
We had driven seventeen miles to find the first Route 66 sign that had not been stolen by 'tourists'. We worked this out because on the way back we could identify the poles that the 66 signs had been taken from. On the way out they were just poles, but on the way back....
The seventeen miles back to Kingman was enlivened by an inordinate number of motorcycles coming towards us from the direction of the town. Obviously they were out for a bit of Route 66, just as we were, but our Ford seemed lacking in the style necessary for the journey into history. These growling, shiny, beautiful machines were the right way to do it. Jealousy was my middle name for a while there.
Envy hit me in spades when we got back onto I40 for the three miles to where SR93 turned off, the interstate was alive with motorcycles. Before we‘d turned off, it had been noticeable that there were a lot of bikes about and I really think they may have run into thousands, streaming along the Interstate, but back on after our diversion, there seemed to be a solid mass of machinery on both lanes. It was exhilarating and intimidating.
It was great fun.
The image of all that chrome, paint and noise of the motorcycles, mixing in with the chrome, paint and noise of Jimmys, Peters and Kennys, filling the road with a moving glitter 'fest' will stay with me for a long time. Only in America could it work so well. Only in America......
We were told later that a huge 20,000 bike rally was held in Laughlin and since the Laughlin road meets the interstate and the Mother Road at that one point, it‘s not surprising that we saw a few. 93 was backed up solid with traffic, mostly bikes, for seven miles back towards Las Vegas. It was an awesome sight that I would have loved to just park on the shoulder and watched, but the car had to be back on time, so....
On the way down we paused briefly at the Hoover Dam, briefly because we thought we‘d look on the way back. This was a bad mistake, as it turned out , since every American citizen who wasn‘t stuck in that seven mile queue, was visiting the dam on that Sunday. This isn‘t quite accurate, there an awful lot of people queuing in their cars to get through the dam, either to escape the queues at Kingman, or to join it.
I kid you not about the number of people already visiting the dam or riding pleasure boats on Lake Mead. I began to imagine ice cream sellers on the beaches of Florida scratching their heads and wondering where everyone was.
We hit the traffic about the top of the hill overlooking the dam so we pulled into the car park that Arizona State had kindly provided for us, to wait for it to clear. We found a spot of shade to sit in and watch what was going on on the road below, and that was precisely nothing. The traffic stretched back as far towards Las Vegas as it was possible to see and a quick glance showed that in a very short time the queue was way back down the way we had just come. Nothing moved. A buzzard circled.
I thought perhaps an eighteen wheeler had got stuck round the tight bend coming down the Vegas side and that once that was sorted everything would clear. Wrong. The traffic moved, then the traffic stopped. Then it did it all over again. I realised that it was simply the volume of vehicles trying to wend it‘s way round the windy bits to and away from the dam, that was causing the hold up. It wasn‘t going to clear in my lifetime, so the decision to join the overheating throng and crawl our way through was made. Thank heaven for air conditioning.
Some three quarters of an hour later we were out of what was no more than a mile and half queue. We were home free. I never saw that much of the dam and if there is a moral to this it undoubtedly is; Don‘t do tourist stuff on Sunday. Americans do tourist stuff on Sunday and obviously expect tourists to do it during the week.
Quite suddenly we were back. We crested a rise and there were the high bits of Las Vegas soaring up out of the heat haze, smog, both, whatever. It looked amazing. We had the return route pinpointed and very soon we were back at the Thrifty car lot and quite suddenly we were without transport. I asked the question at the desk. No, Thrifty do not run a shuttle downtown. Take the shuttle to the airport and pick up a downtown shuttle bus. Sounds fine in principle, sounds slightly scary when your new in town. Anyway that‘s exactly what we did.
Before we knew it, we were tucked up nicely in the Four Queens and part one of the Great Trip was over.
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