I learned, via a TV report, that Wednesday marked the 100th anniversary of Route 66. It put me into a nostalgic mood. Making a trip through a route known as the “Mother Road’’ and “Main Street of America,’’ was high on my bucket list upon my retirement in 2010.
It became the first major travel-writing project for Joy and me, though the route was officially removed from the U.S. Highway System in 1985. About 84 percent of the original highway is still in use and has plenty of attractions left from the good old days when Route 66 was the first major route connecting the Eastern United States with California.
Starting in Chicago we made the roughly 6,000-mile drive through eight states – Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California – in about a month and then wrote a book, “Our Route 66 Adventure’’ — about our journey. The trip was educational and filled with lots of good memories that surfaced when we browsed through the book today.
One little-known tidbit: A popular TV show supposedly set on Route 66 was actually filmed largely in Canada. Still, our trip started us on a sometimes profitable but always enjoyable travel writing gig that – like the “Mother Road’’ itself – is still going today.