Snyder - Route 66 Travelers Guide and Roadside Companion

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You will notice a few advertisements from the 1930s scattered throughout this guide. Although none of these businesses are to be found along the highway today, the ads provide something of the charm and allure of way-back-then travel over Route 66.

Further, in unsettled times, many small businesses both on and off Route 66 are struggling for survival and renovation projects have been slowed or halted, while others have not yet begun. As a result, it cannot be stated with certainty which of these will be part of your journey. Where an attraction is in doubt, youll find its present circumstances noted in the book. So discover all you can and keep a good thought for those who carry on.

This one is for Roger

This latest edition of the Route 66 Travelers Guide and Roadside Companion benefited from the foresight and unflagging support of its editor, Daniela Rapp, and of the stand-up crews in art and production at St. Martins Press. All have helped the work live up to its subject.

When all-new digital maps were needed, Dr. Jill Saligoe-Simmel, codeveloper of Ortelius, the mapping software used here, lent her technical and personal support to an author struggling with details. Jim Powell provided exhaustive information about Route 66. And when a new digital master was also needed, Jim was our go-to guy, delivering a scanned and formatted version of the last edition in a matter of hours.

Thanks go also to those road warriors who contributed time and mileage, phone-camera images, and information about the road from Chicago to Santa Monica. They suggestedand weve all agreedthat this edition should recognize individuals who have supported the renaissance of Route 66 for over twenty years. So here we credit those who have gone before as well as those who soldier on, making every bend in the road more exciting and homecomings all the warmer.

At the close of World War II, Jack Rittenhouse and Bobby Troup both crossed the country, each contributing his version of a guide to Route 66. Forty years later, a new chapter opened for a national icon that some intended to bury. Author Michael Wallis wrote the first luggage-size book about the road and packed it with colorful landscapes and characters.

Yet, well before the rest of us showed up, Bart Ripp of The Albuquerque Tribune was writing the history of the road, its calamities, and enduring value. Partners Jim Ross and Jerry McClanahan were early to document the highway, as was writer Tom Teague. Author-photographer Shellee Graham embroidered the Route 66 experience in her intimate portraits, Donna Tamburelli of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials served up the factual basis of the roads many alignments, and Richard Weingroff of the Federal Highway Administration was an invaluable source of research, articles, and road facts.

Early on, Jim Powell founded the Route 66 Association of Missouri and began creating a detailed history of the road, while Freeman McCullah of the Missouri Department of Transportation showed what could be accomplished with the leadership of state highway officials. Mike Pitel brought New Mexicos beauty and breadth to the forefront for travelers seeking the spirit of Route 66 in the American West.

Some served the road as critical needs arose. During a lengthy changing of the guard at the Santa Fe Railways La Posada property in Winslow, Arizonanow one of the most celebrated of all the Harvey HousesJanice Griffith of the Old Trails Museum once strung together five hundred feet of garden hose, reaching from her home all the way down to the landscaping of the then-battered hotel, to keep it green until help arrived in the form of Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion, who not only restored the hotel but managed to bring it to a state surpassing its former glory.

Still others became part of the Route 66 legend. Travelers experience was made more special by Ramona Lehman, who preserved and is constantly upgrading the Munger Moss Motel in Lebanon, Missouri. Fran Hauser and Joann Harwell have saved the Midpoint Caf in Adrian, Texas, from certain doom and made it an apple-pie centerpiece for Route 66 today.

None of this could have been done without the able cheerleading abilities of road fans such as Angel Delgadillo, Bob Waldmire, and Winslows golden girl, Diane Patterson. Whether traveling the highway or welcoming others in from it, they turned a dim future into light.

Through their constant hearts, all the gentle people mentioned here have championed the roads future and helped secure it so you can enjoy your journey, and writer-producer and Oscar nominee John Lasseter could one day create Cars, a brilliant story through which the road and its special places reached a whole new generation of Route 66 fans.

Thank you all.

An iconic old highwayone that represents what is good about Americais in your debt.

Traveling is about seeing new places and about pointing a camera at squinting people or objects that usually turn out to be too far away.

Traveling is about spending money on stuff youd never dream of buying at home. Its about discovering the different and occasionally the bizarreabout finding something adventurous, daring, and even romantic in yourself. Its about widening your horizons along with the changing view beyond the windshield.

Traveling is like racy lingerie, trashy magazines, kitchen gadgets, and auto accessories. None of these are necessary, but they all make life a little more interesting, a little spicier than it might otherwise be. Old Route 66 is like that. No longer necessary to efficient cross-country travel, the road has been replaced by seamless interstate highways with no stoplights, no places of special interest, no appealing monstrositiesjust mile-by-mile progress. After a time the ordinariness of it all is like watching a computer screen saver.

But Route 66? Ah, Route 66 was never ordinary. From its commissioning in 1926, as the first highway to link Chicago with Los Angeles, US 66 was, to townspeople along the route and travelers alike, something special. Soon it was even being called the most magical road in all the world. And by any standard, thats what it became.

Swinging southwest by west from Lake Michigan, US 66 crossed the rivers, plains, mountains, deserts, and canyons of eight states and several Native American nations before ending2,448 miles lateron a corner near the Pacific. Yet like most American highways of the day, the original roadway remained little more than a dusty transcontinental rut that usually filled with water and mud at the least occasion of rain. Records make it clear that Lindberghs 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic was easier than a cross-country trek by automobile in the same year. Travelers who made it as far as the Great Mojave paid dearly to load their vehicles onto railroad flatcars rather than risk a breakdown out on the vast desert.

Still, the road that became the Main Street of America was nothing if not commercially inspired. As a result of an intense lobbying effort by the U.S. 66 Highway Association, a patchwork of farm-to-market roads and old trails was transformed into a single all-weather highway. More important, the association transformed Route 66 into something else as well: an extraordinary experience a destination in itself . A few days travel on Route 66 became a tour of the highway and the excitement of being on the road became as important as any destination. In advertising terms, thats when the sizzle caught up with the steak.