Holiday on Route 66
Cowboys and Indians
Don’t you ever wish you were back in the Fifties, cruising across the wild west of America to find the California sun? It’s not such wishful thinking – you can do it for real in the 21st century, well almost. Route 66, as the song says, winds from Chicago to LA more than 2,000 miles all the way, with classic rock’n’roll blasting out of Wurlitzer jukeboxes in the neon-lit diners, drive-ins and roadhouses en route. We let someone else do the driving – taking our seats on the Archers Direct coach.
The Mother Road, as John Steinbeck called the 1920s-built highway in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, is the ultimate dream road trip, made by countless millions – from poor Oklahomans during the Great Depression fleeing the dustbowl disaster, to freedom-loving hippies in VW campers and Easy Riders on Harleys. And it was the trip of a lifetime for many on our coach too – from a car-obsessed couple from Norwich, to 80-year-old Winnie from Wolverhampton, who found what she was looking for: high-adrenalin adventures (yes, really) and nostalgia galore.
While travelling through Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California we saw cowboys driving their steers across the wide open plains, Native Americans in their 1,000-year-old “sky city” on a 500ft mesa rock, Jesse James’s cave hideout, mile-long freight trains trundling along at a tortoise’s pace, vast deserts, breathtaking canyons, the flashing lights of Las Vegas and the famous pavement stars of Hollywood. Over 14 days, we really lived the dream. And, with the dollar pegged at almost two to the pound, our cash went a long way.
The Lost Highway
Route 66 is now history, though. The slow death of the 2,000-mile-long ribbon of asphalt, concrete and mud began in the Fifties when the interstate highways programme got underway. By the mid-1980s, Route 66 had been decommissioned out of existence. But in the last decade or so, eccentric individuals along the crumbling lost highway, determined to keep the dream alive to save their livelihoods, and to stop their dusty settlements turning into ghost towns, have campaigned to revive interest and to preserve what was left standing.
Icons of America
It’s impossible to travel pedantically the whole route – parts of it have been obliterated, and other stretches are in such a bad state you need a 4X4. But, following the traffic jam-free interstates, there are plenty of places to turn off and find yourself in a time-warp, surrounded by the legendary icons of Americana, and one-of-a-kind sights left over from decades gone by, placed by the side of the road to break the monotony of a long, slow journey.
A Forgotten Road
In the USA’s third biggest city, Chicago, Route 66 is almost forgotten, apart from the sign on State Street marking the start of the world’s most famous highway, which wasn’t the real start but is now because of the one-way system. You can’t fail to be awestruck at the impressive modern sculptures and staggering array of lofty skyscrapers, the highest being the Sears Tower – it was the tallest in the world until it was overtaken by the Malaysians.
Smelly Onions!
Our friendly Archers Direct tour director, Tammy, wasn’t hard to spot with her bright orange bouffant at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and she got us smoothly transferred to our hotel right in the middle of Downtown Chicago, a block from the Magnificent Mile where all the biggest and glitziest shops are. We learnt that Chicago is a Native American word for smelly onion fields and the settlement was founded in 1779 by a black Haitian man called Jean Baptiste du Sable. The great stone lion outside the Chicago Art Center is meant to roar when a virgin walks by. Not a peep. But it’s easy to see why Sinatra sang that Chicago was his ‘kind of town’.
A Lucky Brass Nose
After a day exploring, the next morning we left Chicago behind, cruising past the industrial suburbs and the cornfields and prairies of rural Illinois. We left the interstate at Wilmington to see the first of numerous unique Route 66 curiosities on the side of the road, the Gemini Giant – a 20ft-high fibre-glass rocket man which once advertised car mufflers. Then we moved on to Illinois’ state capital Springfield, to the tomb of Abe Lincoln, rubbing the brass nose of his statue outside for luck, and then checked out the revered president’s humble home near the centre of the city, a block away from the old Route 66.
Gas Station Museum
There are a dozen or so dedicated Route 66 museums along the 2,000-mile highway, but the Gas Station Museum is one of the most eccentric. With silly signs such as “entrepreneurs should mind their own business”, and a shack crammed full of rusty oil cans, car parts, gas pumps and loads of other things, as well as the oldest gas station in the state from 1910, which was transported here wholesale, it is a crazy stop-off. Three generations of the Shea family man the museum, collecting things from road warriors. The oldest family member, Bill, shows off his nine-year-old great-granddaughter’s birthday present – a gas pump with her nickname, Bean, inscribed on it. “It’ll go in her room with all the other stuff,” he said.
Monument to a Dream
Later on, we crossed the great Mississippi into St Louis, another fine, centuries-old city, with Meet Me In St Louis, Bessie Smith’s St Louis Blues and Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer (the father of ragtime wrote his best-known ditties in the Missouri city) ringing in our ears. Guggenheim’s 630ft-high steel arch, Monument To A Dream, built in the 1960s to mark the gateway to the west, dominates the cityscape. The next morning, we nervously stepped into a claustrophobic carriage which clunked its way inside the arch right up to the top. The view was staggering, or would have been on a clear day.
Gleaming Fifties Kitsch
Route 66 went right by the cathedral, which rivals some of Europe’s finest in splendour. The inside is decorated with the largest mosaic in the world – 41.5 million pieces of pink, gold, green and red glass.
Buffalo Bill strikes again
Missouri seemed to be one great forest, and it’s unsurprising this was where all the best outlaws, such as Frank and Jesse James, plied their trade. We were headed for Branson, some way south of Route 66 but showbiz nostalgia central. The place is almost like a modern-day lawless frontier town with an unplanned, narrow road system and motels and theaters springing up everywhere. Here you can catch shows for breakfast, lunch and dinner - there’s Andy Williams’ Moon River Grill and the Osmonds’ new base and 100 other venues. Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, however, is a temple of Fifties kitsch, where we were shown around an immaculate showroom of mint-condition, gleaming 1957 automobiles, and watched a slickly produced show starring Fabian, Bobby Vee, The Chiffons and Brian Hyland. As we arrived back at our motel-style hotel, an impressive thunderstorm came from nowhere, with tornados threatening to cause havoc along our route. They’d already passed, though, when we left the next morning.
The way to Amarillo
Neighbouring Oklahoma is Cherokee country, though Nathan ‘Ed’ Galloway was an Irish-American self-taught artist who decided to build the world’s tallest tepee out of concrete in 1948, simply to give people something to look at. Will Rogers, we learnt at the fantastic museum dedicated to him in the town of Claremore, wasn’t just a lasso ace touring the world with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the turn of the century, but also a prolific journalist, broadcaster, political satirist, film star, humorist and most proud of his quarter-Cherokee bloodline. His epitaph is “I never met a man I didn’t like”, and he seemed a nice fella himself.
Quirky Albuquerque
In Oklahoma City we learnt about many more western stars at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. There’s a recreated wild west town at dusk, a room dedicated to gun inventor Samuel Colt, and another featuring 1,300 types of barbed wire. But the museum doesn’t shy away from recounting the massive injustices done to Native Americans, as well as celebrating John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and the singing cowboy Gene Autry. And I never realised cowboys originated in Ireland, circa 1000AD.
Western Stars
The vast pastures of Oklahoma gave way to the endless plains of the Texas northern panhandle, and signs showed us the way to Amarillo, our stop for the night. The next morning we stopped off at the Cadillac Ranch, where a dozen battered cars are plunged upright into the ground, and we were issued with spray-paint and urged to go crazy with graffiti. There didn’t seem to be a lot else to do in these parts.The next day we passed Route 66’s midpoint, marked with a diner serving great apple pie or cobblers, and crossed from Texas to New Mexico. Plateaux and jagged ridges started rising from the pancake-flat plains. Tucumcari, a Comanche word for ambush, is the town to cruise through at night to see Route 66 in its full neon glory, the Blue Swallow and Apache motels and some of Main Street’s most iconic sights, but our timing was out.
A Grand detour
Albuquerque’s old town is 300 years old, and the restored buildings are made of adobe mud-bricks. It also houses some great Mexican restaurants, notably Casa de Fiesta. We got a two-day break here, and boredom wasn’t an option – particularly with the Rattlesnake Museum and buzzing nightlife of Downtown. Leaving this fascinating city, we drove past the Pueblo city of Laguna to reach the Akoma Sky City. The city itself, balanced on a 500ft sheer mesa (or rock bluff) claims to be America’s oldest continuously inhabited settlement, dating back to at least 1000AD.
Soon we reached Gallup, the location for countless classic Westerns. The Hotel El Rancho was where everyone from Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster to Mae West and Doris Day stayed and partied, and has been lovingly restored with signed photographs of the stars filling the walls.
Welcome to the Hotel California
The Archers Direct tour makes an irresistible diversion from the old Route 66 to visit the Grand Canyon in Arizona – as massive and spectacular as it appears in all the photographs and films - and then to Las Vegas in Nevada, where even if you’re averse to gambling, you can’t fail to be dazzled by the light shows and water and firework spectaculars along the Strip. Gambling’s a loser’s game, as everyone knows deep down, but I managed to be $10 up at the end of the night, and to check out a classy show, Jubilee, at Bally’s along the Strip, in the lavish Moulin Rouge style.
Leaving Las Vegas, we crossed the Mojave Desert and San Bernadino mountains of California, eventually arriving at Santa Monica, now part of the Los Angeles metropolis. Inexplicably, Route 66 ended eight blocks away from the coast, but the 1902 pier is the evocative finishing point, close to the Hotel California of Eagles fame.
It was a real pea-souper smog that enveloped the coast, so our first glimpse of the Pacific was a dim one, but our epic adventure was almost at an end. Only Hollywood awaited, and for us the star-lined boulevard was not one of broken dreams for so many aspiring actors, but a sense that we’d experienced the classic adventure of a lifetime. On Route 66, we’d got our kicks, big time.
