Route 66 at 100: The Weird Stuff Is the Reason to Go

Someone will tell you Route 66 does not exist anymore, and the irritating thing is that they are technically correct. The road was decertified on June 27, 1985, when the last segment near Williams, Arizona was pulled out of the federal highway system. No federal shield, no official designation. Nothing to look up in a highway atlas under that number.

Here is the part those people leave out. Roughly 85% of the original alignment is still there and still drivable, in a normal car, with normal tires, by a normal driver who has not done anything braver than parallel parking. The original commissioned length was about 2,448 miles, today's version runs to roughly 2,400 from Chicago to Santa Monica, and it still crosses eight states in the same order it always did: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California.

What you get is a patchwork of original pavement, frontage roads and stretches where you have no choice but to join the interstate for a while. That is the honest answer, and none of it is the point, because the reason to drive this thing was never the road surface. It is the 80-foot concrete whale.

The missing 15%, named

Jericho Gap in Texas and the Glenrio-to-Bard stretch in New Mexico are unpaved, which is a polite way of saying do not attempt them in a rental sedan and a spirit of adventure. A segment south of Salt Creek in Lincoln, Illinois is permanently closed, and permanently means permanently. Everywhere else the missing mileage is less dramatic than it sounds: the interstate ate the alignment, and you drive parallel to your own nostalgia for twenty minutes before dropping back onto the old road.

Kansas gets the funniest statistic of the eight states. Its entire run of Route 66 is 13.2 miles through Cherokee County, from Galena to Baxter Springs by way of Riverton. You can drive the whole of one state's share of the Mother Road in less time than it takes to decide where to have lunch.

The good stuff is the weird stuff

Cadillac Ranch is the one everybody photographs, and it is fine. Ten Cadillacs planted nose-first in the dirt near Amarillo since 1974, repainted so relentlessly by visitors that the paint is now a geological feature. Its virtue is that it changes every week and nobody is precious about it. Its flaw is that it has been fully absorbed into the brand, gift shop and all.

The Blue Whale of Catoosa is the one that still surprises people. It is 80 feet of grinning concrete whale sitting in a pond in Oklahoma, built by a zoologist named Hugh Davis and open since 1972. It started out as a swimming hole for his family, nothing grander than that. A man built his relatives a whale. Every other attraction out here is trying to be an attraction. This one was trying to be a diving board and became beloved by accident.

Then there is the Gemini Giant, a 28-foot fiberglass spaceman outside the Launching Pad Drive-In in Wilmington, Illinois, holding a rocket and radiating the confidence of a statue that has never once been told to tone it down. The drive-in behind him spent years closed before reopening in 2019, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A giant spaceman outside a shuttered building is a sad photograph. A giant spaceman outside an open one is a stop.

For pure absurdist commitment, nothing beats the Route 66 Red Rocker in Fanning, Missouri. It is a rocking chair 42 feet and 4 inches tall, built in 2008, and it held the Guinness title for the world's largest rocking chair until 2015, when it lost to a chair in Casey, Illinois. Sit with that. Somewhere in Illinois, a town looked at Missouri's enormous chair and decided to go bigger. The Red Rocker is now a colossal monument to second place, which is somehow more charming than winning would have been.

Not all of it is fiberglass, either. The Coleman Theatre in Miami, Oklahoma opened in 1929, Spanish Colonial Revival outside and a Louis XV interior in, a reminder that these towns were built by people with actual money and a specific, gloriously terrible sense of style. If the weather turns, the National Route 66 & Transportation Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma covers all eight states under one roof.

For sleeping arrangements with a sense of humour, the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino is one of only three surviving Wigwam Villages left, alongside ones in Holbrook, Arizona and Cave City, Kentucky. The concept dates to Frank Redford in 1933, back when the roadside was still working out what it wanted to be. It went with concrete tepees. Nobody out here was being subtle in 1933 and nobody is being subtle now.

Some of this does not wait

Here is the argument for going sooner rather than later, and it has nothing to do with birthdays.

The Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico was built in 1939 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, and its neon sign is one of the most photographed objects on the entire route. In May 2023, a hailstorm destroyed roughly 90% of that neon. The sign had already been updated in the 1950s and again in 2007, so it has survived being fussed over before, but that is not the same as being safe.

None of this is protected the way a national park is protected. It survives because a specific person keeps paying to repaint the whale, rewire the neon, reopen the drive-in. Weather or a bad quarter is all it takes. Going "someday" is a bet that somebody else keeps caring indefinitely.

Drive one stretch properly instead of all of it badly

The full run takes 10 to 16 days with actual stops. Eight or nine days is possible and unpleasant. Pure driving time, with nobody stopping for a whale, is about 36 hours, and if 36 hours of driving is the plan you have accidentally designed a commute.

Most people do not have two weeks. The realistic failure mode is trying to cram all 2,400 miles into six days and arriving at Santa Monica having seen a great deal of windshield and almost nothing else. Pick a stretch instead, and drive it slowly enough to pull over on impulse, which is the entire mechanic that makes this road work.

For a short trip, the New Mexico-Arizona-California run packs the most into the fewest miles, and if you want something tighter still, the Amarillo-to-Adrian cluster in Texas is the easiest self-contained bite on the whole route. Kansas is sitting right there too, if you have genuinely only got an afternoon: 13.2 miles, start to finish.

When to go, and which direction

The two good windows are mid-April to mid-May and mid-September to mid-October. The second one opens in a few weeks, which is a convenient accident of timing.

Avoid high summer with some enthusiasm. Past Oklahoma City, temperatures regularly go over 105°F, and July into early September is monsoon season across New Mexico, Arizona and California. That combination turns a leisurely drive into a sequence of dashes between air-conditioned buildings.

On direction: east to west is the classic, following the Dust Bowl migration, gaining time zones as you go and finishing at the Pacific. Driving it in reverse is entirely legitimate and some guides prefer it. But finishing at an ocean beats finishing in Illinois traffic, and a road trip should end with something that feels like an ending.

You will have company out there. One widely reported survey of this autumn's US travellers found 62% planning a road trip, so expect the good motels and the small-town diners to be doing brisk business.

The clock, not the subject

The road was commissioned on November 11, 1926, so it turns 100 on November 11, 2026. The 25th International Route 66 Mother Road Festival lands in Springfield, Illinois on September 25-27, sitting neatly inside the good-weather window if you want a fixed point in the trip.

But the anniversary only supplies the deadline. Nothing about the whale or the spaceman improves because the road hits a round number. What the centennial does is convert someday into a date, and someday-lists have a way of quietly outliving the things on them.

Choose one stretch of road. Put a week in late September on the calendar. Then walk up to the 28-foot fiberglass spaceman and grin at him without irony.