GET YOUR KICKS ON ROUTE Travelling on the Mother Road


“America’s Main Street”, “Queen of Highways” or


“Mother Road” – Route 66, America’s most famous road has many names and a mythical ring associated with Harleys and Classic Cars, with vast distances and with the setting sun. Although it was offi cially decommissioned in 1985 and swallowed up by the modern highway system, 640 km of the “Mother of all Roads” can still be found in Oklahoma, with another short section in southeast Kansas.


Nowadays it is not easy to imagine the signifi cance of this simple country road but even in the early 20th century there were only a few fully constructed roads in the centre of the USA; instead there were dusty tracks such as the Santa Fe, Oregon, California and Mormon Pioneer Trails. It was not until 1915 that a road connected the East and West coasts, running for 5400 km between New York and San Francisco: the Lincoln Highway. Inspired by this, from 1927 Cyrus Avery from Tulsa and John Woodruff from Missouri planned the almost 4000km route between Chicago and Los Angeles. The aim was not to fi nd the shortest way, but to connect as many settlements as possible into the road system. In 1938, the route was fully surfaced, the traffi c increased steadily and an infrastructure developed with motels, diners, petrol stations and workshops and also symbolic fi gures sending a strong advertising message - today these roadside attractions and historical sights at the side of the road draw many visitors.


In 1939, the winner of the Nobel prize for Literature, John Steinbeck (1902-1968) described Route 66 in “The Grapes of Wrath” as “a long concrete path through the country,” as the “path of a people in fl ight” and called it the “Mother Road” for the fi rst time. During the economic crisis and the “Dust Bowl”, a natural catastrophe of the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of farmers and cowboys packed their meager possessions into rickety pick-up trucks and left the Mid-West for the “Promised Land” – California – to make a new start.


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