Route 66 builds monuments to businesses
An All-American Road across four states, fifteen units of public land, and a twelve-stop day out of Petersburg that covers three more miles than the three-stop one.
Historic Route 66 is an All-American Road running through Arizona, Illinois, New Mexico and Oklahoma. That list is the first surprise. Two of the four states are in the Midwest, and the designated road is as much a corn-country road as a desert one.
The clearest way to see what the road actually collects is to stop treating it as one line and look at a single day on it. Out of Petersburg, Illinois, the engine bakes two loops. The short one is a hundred and twenty miles and three stops. The long one is a hundred and twenty-three miles and twelve.
Four extra hours buys three extra miles and nine extra stops. On this road, time does not buy distance. It buys attention.
What twelve stops in central Illinois are
- Beacon of Endurance
- Fido With Bowtie
- Lincoln Home National Historic Site
- Margery Adams Wildlife Sanctuary
- Rail Splitter Rest Area - Northbound
- Elkhart Hill
- Pig-Hip Restaurant Memorial
- World's largest covered wagon
- The Tropics Restaurant Neon Sign
- J. H. Hawes Elevator
- Walnut Hill
- Ronald McDonald Statue
Read that list twice. One entry is a memorial to a restaurant. Another is a restaurant's neon sign, standing in the record as a place in its own right — not the restaurant, the sign. A third is a grain elevator. A fourth is recorded as the world's largest covered wagon.
Set it beside another All-American Road and the difference is the whole point. The Blue Ridge Parkway's four-hour loop out of Asheville is seven summits. Petersburg's is a president's house, a sign, and a memorial to a place that fed people.
Monuments to commerce
Most roads are lined with monuments to events — battles, crossings, treaties, disasters. Route 66 is lined with monuments to businesses. That is what makes it strange and what makes it worth driving. The things people chose to mark were the places you could buy a meal, fill a tank, or stop for the night, and the marker frequently outlasts the trade it was advertising.
It is not sentimental. A neon sign is a real object with a real location, and it is a better landmark than the building behind it ever was — you could see it from further away, which was the entire point of building it that tall.
The fifteen
Against the committed boundaries, the Route 66 corridor comes within reach of fifteen units of park and public land. Gateway Arch and Indiana Dunes at the eastern end. Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Illinois. Santa Fe, Cibola and Kaibab national forests, El Malpais, the Petrified Forest, Mojave Trails, and the Grand Canyon out west.
A word of caution about that number: it describes the whole road, not your afternoon. The Grand Canyon and Midewin are both genuinely on Route 66; one is in Arizona and the other is in Illinois. The destination pages only name what you could reach from where you are standing.
Twenty-seven overlooks are surfaced along it, and their names carry the same double life as the stops: Mississippi River Overlook and Petroglyph Overlook beside Seligman, Cross of the Martyrs Hill, and Ojito Wilderness Overlook.
The song
Volume 004 of the byway series is Nothing Out Here Is Finished. Drive the Illinois stretch and the title stops being a mood. A memorial to a restaurant is a finished thing that nobody agreed to finish.