In 1926, the numbered Federal highway system was started; Route 66 was formed at that time, mostly from a network of already existing roads. The highway ran southwest from Chicago, across eight states and 2,448 miles of hills, plains, desert, and orange groves, until it ended at the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles.

Known as the "Mother Road" from John Steinbeck's 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath", it began to decline in the late 1950s when a new set of cross-country limited-access freeways were built. These new multi-lane highways functionally replaced Route 66, and the Mother Road was decertified as a Federal highway in 1985. Today, more than half of the original road still exists, often just yards from the freeway that replaced it, and many of the original motels, gas stations, and other business still stand.

Route 66 is the Mother Road, the Glory Road, and Depression-era families in dilapidated trucks fleeing the Dust Bowl. It's Mom, Dad, and three kids in a wood-paneled station wagon, out to see the Petrified Forest. It's America's Main Street, a 1960s TV show, and a song. It's motor courts, gas stations, curio shops, dinosaurs, giant rabbits, huge arrows, and many other strange wayside attractions.

Kitsch: excessively garish or sentimental art, usually considered in bad taste. You can certainly Get Your Kitsch on Route 66; it is famous for its funky man-made attractions to lure the traveler — the motels, trading posts, diners, oversized signs and statues, and the many attractions that sprouted along the side of the highway like so much 20th-century folk art.




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