Route 66 fans, rejoice. The National Park Service has put up a mother lode of information about the historic Mother Road that stretches across two-thirds of America, from Los Angeles to Chicago.
The nostalgic Route 66 site (http://tinyurl.com/yeaaqfk) includes maps, essays, photos, histories of landmarks and a resource list with links to fan sites, museums, tourist bureaus, official documents and more.
It’s enough to make you pull off the road and open your laptop. You’ll learn about the quirky Aztec Hotel, one of the few Maya-styled buildings left in the U.S., in Monrovia, Calif.; the Milk Bottle Grocery, a shop improbably topped by a super-sized dairy bottle in Oklahoma City; the iconic Blue Swallow Motel, with its charming neon signs, in Tucumcari, N.M.; and other roadside nostalgia.
Beyond the oddities, you can glean a lot of history not only about Route 66, which grew from the 1926 launch of the first federal highway system, but also about this nation’s heart and soul: the effect of monumental events such as the Depression and World War II; the myriad mom-and-pop businesses that catered to travelers before big chains took over; and, above all, America’s passionate affair with the open road.
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