Get Some Kicks: 100 Years
of Route 66

One road. Eight US states. Just under 4,000 kilometres. Countless dreams. Some fulfilled, some shattered. Route 66 is longing turned into tarmac. And today it celebrates its 100th birthday. To be precise: its 100th ‘name day’. For on 11 November 1926, the American Association of State Highway Officials adopted the numbered US highway system. Route 66 is one of them. But by far the best known. For it is the ‘Mother Road’, the mother of all roads. That’s what John Steinbeck called it. The American journalist and writer immortalised it in his 1939 novel *The Grapes of Wrath*. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it was adapted for the screen in 1940 by John Ford, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.

Many of the film’s shots are reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, she documented the refugee convoys of desperate migrant workers from the Dust Bowl region in the southern Great Plains. A massive wave of violent dust storms drove them westwards, to California, the land of promise. Hardship and misery travelled with them. That changed abruptly after the Second World War.

There was a sense of new beginnings in the air. The car had come to symbolise leisure and holidays. And the soundtrack was just right for the occasion. That was in 1946. Nat King Cole sang Bobby Troup’s ‘(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66’. A swinging invitation, like a travel brochure set to music. With this song – covered by countless artists, from Chuck Berry to The Manhattan Transfer, the Rolling Stones and even Depeche Mode – Route 66 became the iconic road of longing that we know today.

To grasp its cultural and historical significance, it helps to look at what Paul McCartney told the British music journalist Paul Du Noyer for the book of interviews *Conversations with McCartney* (2015, Hodder & Stoughton): ‘It’s always Route 66. How many songs mention Carlisle? And Birmingham – mind you, not Birmingham, Alabama.’ McCartney solved this annoyance in his own way by writing the song ‘Helen Wheels’, named after his Land Rover. In it, he gets his kicks on the drive from Glasgow via the M6 to London. For him, it’s the British Route 66, so to speak. And a hint that one’s longings can be fulfilled not only in the western United States.

But it’s particularly good there. It’s a favourite setting in films, time and again. Naturally, in the 1969 film *Easy Rider*, another cultural and historical landmark. But *Thelma & Louise* also travelled through here, Monte Hellman’s *Two-Lane Blacktop* was filmed here, and *Little Miss Sunshine* stopped off along the route in its yellow Volkswagen camper van.

What all these films capture can still be experienced today. Just past Chicago, in Wilmington, Illinois, stands the Gemini Giant, a fibreglass astronaut about nine metres tall, complete with a rocket. To the west of Amarillo, ten Cadillacs are stuck upside down in the ground at the Cadillac Ranch. In Adrian, Texas, the Midpoint Café marks the halfway point of the journey: it is 1,139 miles – just over 1,830 kilometres – from here to both Chicago and Santa Monica. Next come the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, and the Bagdad Café in the Mojave Desert. And right at the very end, on the Santa Monica Pier, stands the ‘End of the Trail’ sign, perfect for a souvenir photo. On the way there, travellers experience what McCartney loves so much about the M6: watching the landscape change. On Route 66, this journey takes you from the fields of the Midwest, across the vast plains of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, into the deserts of Arizona and California, and finally to the Pacific Ocean. Thrills? They’ve been standard fare since at least 1946.