Mountain Fan 
Ubique Epoque
Registration Date: 10-09-2003
Posts: 14,224
Location: NC, Alive and Kicking, BOBD
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cool story. reminds me of When Everyone Wore Hats
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http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/748472.html
Photos:
http://www.newsobserver.com/859/v-pop_ga...ery/748473.html
Dennis Rogers:
Published: Oct 25, 2007 12:00 AM
Modified: Oct 25, 2007 06:08 AM
The Route 66 pilgrims
They've all gone to look for America on the fabled road
Dennis Rogers, Staff Writer
Editor's note: Retired News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers and his wife, HollyAnn, are traveling across the nation in a motor home. This is his sixth report from the road.
They're out here. Right now, this minute, whether it's early in the morning or late at night, the searchers are out here on Route 66.
And so are we.
We see them every day. The trekkers stand in the middle of nowhere, squinting at the horizon. Or poking by the side of the road at night, looking for ... well, that's the hard part. But then, it's usually that way with pilgrims on a quest. The "why" is often not so important as the "Hell, why not?"
So they come, that's enough to know. They get off their duffs and, without telling people what they're doing because it might seem a little silly, they take off to look for America down some beat-up old road.
Maybe it's to see the giant neon cowboy they remember from their childhood. Could anything that gaudy and gigantic have been really, for honest, real? Could any roadside attraction have possibly been so big and bright? Or is it just a memory from a tattered old postcard that came in the mail from a traveling relative 50 years ago?
YES! There he is now, just like they remember from when they were kids and on vacation with their families. He's still riding high outside the Buckaroo Motel on a broken-down road in a broken-down New Mexico town with a funny name -- Tucumcari -- or 100 miles away in Amarillo at the Cowboy Motel in a grimy neighborhood where love and rooms can be had by the hour.
The neighborhoods may have seen better days, but the neon cowboys by the side of Route 66 are as beautiful as ever, especially at dusk when the western sky is splashed with paint from God's own palette. Maybe even better because this time we're in the front seat with the air conditioning, GPS and satellite radio to amuse ourselves, not cramped in the back of the station wagon with the luggage and that bratty brother or sister who wouldn't stay on their side of the car and cheated when we counted cars.
Route 66 has been glamorized to the point of absurdity. It is not the oldest nor the longest highway ever built in this country, but no hit songs were ever written about U.S. 301 through Eastern North Carolina. Nobody called U.S. 1 through the Sandhills anything but "the bypass." How many TV shows were set on the old Lincoln Highway? Truth be told, much of the 2,400 mile-long Route 66 was a dangerous trip on a narrow, twisting and poorly maintained road through some pretty tough country. In some places, it still is.
Shared memories
So why was I standing in the middle of a forgotten stretch of the crumbling old road in Arizona, tears welling up as I thought of the more than 200,000 desperate Americans who fled drought, greedy bankers and failed lives during the Depression to go west on this very road? They came here, past the spot where I stood, seeking sanctuary and salvation in sunny California. The deep emotion I felt was for them, I guess, for those who made it to California to find jobs and win World War II and come home to live a sunshine life in paradise. And it was for those who didn't make it and now lie in forgotten graves along the route. Sometimes the "Mother Road," as author John Steinbeck first called it in "The Grapes of Wrath," could be a cold and unfeeling killer.
Route 66 is partly about shared cultural memories. I never was an Okie, but as a barefoot farm boy in Columbus County I felt a kinship. I heard Nat King Cole sing about getting your kicks on Route 66 at a time when I seriously needed some kicks. Jack Kerouac took me there in spirit when I read "On The Road" as a teenager and the '60s TV show about those two groovy cats in a very hot Corvette showed me pictures of things I needed to see.
So we came, HollyAnn and I, as have untold others. The big news is, Route 66 has gone from being an all-but-forgotten old road bypassed by modern freeways to an immensely popular American icon. Route 66 travelers these days may be motorcycle or classic car clubs, elderly couples retracing an earlier vacation with the kids, World War II vets remembering how they drove across the country when they came home from the war, bus tours of well-off senior citizens looking for something different to do, baby boomers with the time to indulge their memories and fantasies and tattooed hipsters digging the past. We've seen them all in recent weeks.
Route 66, heaven help us, has become cool again.
Foreigners visit
That's why Fran Houser, a former New Englander who now runs the Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, Texas, has learned to speak Finnish. And Japanese. And Italian. Just a smattering, mind you, mostly "Hello" and "Thank you" but she's trying.
Excuse me, did you say Finnish? In Adrian by-God Texas, which brags that it is exactly half way between Chi-town and L.A., hence the name and lure of Fran's dead-on-perfect roadside diner where the pie is a slice of happy? Think Fran's joint isn't hip? The writers, producers and animators for the Pixar hit movie "Cars" came here to do research. And she is listed in the credits.
"We have a tour operator who last year brought 14 groups of motorcycle riders from Finland through here," she said. "He told me last week that he has booked 10 additional tours for next year. This summer we were overrun with Italians. Every time the travel channel in some European country does a special on Route 66, the people there start coming. The Japanese really love us. And the Irish, too."
Route 66 has become the trendy vacation spot for free-spending and in-the-know European and Asian tourists bored with yet another weekend at the Louvre, I suppose, or perhaps they're jaded Eurotrash fleeing the wave of camera-toting Americans who know next to nothing about their own country but feel deprived unless they've toured the continent. Or maybe these foreigners understand even better than we do what this magnificent land has to offer.
"We've had the best summer we've had in years," said Betty Callens, who with husband Mike, has run the iconic Teepee Curios in Tucumcari for 22 years. "Most of our customers were from Europe. Yesterday, we had people in here all day but just one couple from the United States. Europeans care more about our history, I guess."
Prayers and eats
Holly and I have traveled parts of the Mother Road in Illinois, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. We've stopped to say a private prayer at the sweet statue of the Virgin Mary south of Springfield, Ill. She's known as "Our Lady of the Highways" or "Queen of the Road," and local church kids raised the money in 1959 to pay for the marble figure. Farmer Francis Marten donated part of his cornfield. Today the Marten children still maintain the shrine and invite Route 66 travelers to spend a quiet moment there. The plaque on her pedestal reads, "Mary, loving mother of Jesus, protect us on the highway." It is a tranquil and restorative place and you'll feel better if you stop.
We've eaten fine Texas barbecue and fried catfish from a roadside diner on Route 66 in Amarillo. We've spent the night parked in the court yard of the long-closed, spooky and genuinely weird former Cactus Motel in Tucumcari. But we made up for it the next day by scarfing down some great Mexican food at Joseph's Restaurant in Santa Rosa, N.M. Santa Rosa is where we did a little innocent trespassing to discover and drive a well-hidden strip of Route 66 that's been closed to the public since 1937. We even found boulders that had once been used as natural billboards more than 70 years ago. That's the kind of thing that just tickles the tar out of Route 66 pilgrims.
Along the way we've seen some fabulous examples of neon art. We've passed through all-but-deserted towns like Cuervo, N.M. We've cheered for stubborn folks like Fran Houser and the Callenses who won't give up on this gritty part of Americana. And we have saluted the generous private groups, progressive corporations like the Hampton Inn motel chain and government agencies like the National Park Service for helping fund and promote the protection and restoration of important sites along the road.
Route 66 is not for everybody. It can be a slow and rough ride at times. But if you want to touch a part of our national psyche, the part about how Americans like the Okies never give up and the part about how when we succeed, we do it with flash, style and winking, blinking irreverence, the real Mother Road is better than any book, song or television show.
For the traveler, there are only two roads that really matter, the road that takes you away from home and the road that brings back.
For America, Route 66 goes both ways.
__________________
Got a few miles left ...
Make sure you have heard a Kind Word! 
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