Route 66, 🇺🇸 - Tara Romoff

Tara Romoff is an avid rambler and world explorer. She was born in England, lived in Portugal as a young child, and then moved to Toronto, Canada where she lived during her school years. After marrying her high-school sweetheart, she relocated to Chicago, USA and raised her two kids. She and her husband recently moved from Singapore to Atlanta.

Last year we embarked on the famous Route #66 road trip, also called The Mother Road. At the time, we lived in Chicago, home to the eastern end starting line for this famous route. Our endpoint was San Diego, where we had rented an Airbnb for two months. We were getting out of dodge and heading towards the land of sunshine and awesome sunsets.

We decided to drive because we went during the height of the pandemic and wanted to travel while remaining quarantined. Also, as with most road trips, the journey was the most essential part of the trip. We allotted ourselves a slow ten days to enjoy the journey. My husband was a point A to point B kind of guy whereas meandering is a common theme in my road trip lexicon. I was thrilled we were going to give ourselves enough time to deviate from the route if we felt like it.

We packed up our SUV with all the essentials, including votive candles, beach chairs, my favorite cheese board, our eight favorite kinds of mustard, and our Ninja air fryer. For those unfamiliar with this gadget, the Ninja is an air fryer and a grill.

This now famous small appliance seemed to find its way into all our friends' homes during the pandemic. Our BBQ and oven remained idle after we discovered the Ninja. Everything was thrown into the air fryer, and if you're my husband, all at the same time with chopped veggies and salmon being our favorite. He didn’t even peel the carrots.

Most of our road trips involve me being attentive for the first hour and then sawing logs for the duration with my head nestled comfortably in the pillow brought along for this purpose. My husband would often tell friends, “Of course she loves road trips, she gets a good sleep!” However, this trip was different. I researched the route ahead of time and made a list of points of interest along the way.

There are many websites and apps with much information. In addition, we brought along a paper map that provided context, which I find you don't really get using GPS. Something about turning the pages of a map and pinpointing where you want to go by intersecting the letters and numbers brings back fond memories of family road trips when you were a kid. 

Route #66 was something we had heard of, read about, sang the lyrics to songs about, and even seen movies about, and I was not going to sleep through this journey! For those who don't know, Route #66 is a famous route from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California, from yesteryear. 

 

It was a route traveled by salesmen before super highways were built. Traveling the road today fills one with nostalgia about what once was. The way isn't necessarily consistent, and you often have to deviate from following the old route, especially when searching for what are now are considered iconic Route #66 attractions along the way. 

It felt like a scavenger hunt in a car replete with sights of a bygone era. We were looking for the biggest concrete totem pole in the USA, the oversized sculpture of a blue whale given as an anniversary gift, many fiberglass figures known as Muffler Men, and endless unique old motels with photo-worthy vintage signs. The list was endless.

The most extraordinary and what became our favorite attraction was an art installation of ten Cadillacs half-buried nose down in a field, fully covered in graffiti. We pulled off the main route onto a service road after leaving Amarillo, Texas, searching for these upturned cars in a place that became to be known as Cadillac Ranch.

It was a gorgeous day, with not a cloud in sight. We could see the cars off in the distance across a field. No one else was around, which was typically the case at any of the sites we visited. A silver lining of Covid. 

As we made our way across the worn path, I noticed spray paint cans strewn to both sides of the path. Visitors brought spray paint to add their marks to the cars. We had none, and I was upset about potentially missing out on the fun until I casually picked up a can and discovered some of the cans still contained paint. 

Carrying as many cans as I could,  we found the cars and excitedly began to paint hearts, happy faces, and of course, our names on the roofs of the upturned cars. I had visions of our Christmas card design for the following year. 

Cadillac Ranch was created by a group of artists from San Francisco called Ant Farm and a Texas billionaire who supplied the land. Ten Cadillacs were half-buried with their nose down into the ground, and their tail fins up. When the cars were initially defaced, the group was not pleased but, over time, became tolerant and eventually encouraged it.

The vehicles are painted in specific colors on special occasions. When one of the original artists died, they were all sprayed black. Best to take photos of your artistic endeavors as they soon disappear with the next visitor's creations.

This was just one of the hundreds of iconic attractions along the route that were meant to promote and draw businesses to those initially traveling the road. Traveling the route today, one is reminded of the lonely life of the cross-country salesman and his time out on the road. It involved one stop after another and months of driving.

I couldn’t help but think of Dustin Hoffman in the movie version of the play; Death of a Salesman. With the advent of highways, life for the salesman changed drastically, and the route and all that came with it became obsolete. 

We also discovered a few ghost towns like GlenRio, Texas, where there were just shells of former buildings with a few decrepit walls and remnants of once neon signs which would formerly encourage travelers to stop for the night. These small towns suffered obscurity when new highways were built on the outskirts of the once frequented towns and the salesman no longer stopped en route for food, drinks, and accommodations. 

So if you have the time and the inclination to check out a barrage of kitschy promotional paraphernalia from a bygone era while making your way across the good ol' USA, get out there with a paper map and get your kicks on Route 66'!

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