Travel is not really about the destination or even the points of interest along the way. It is about the road itself. On Route 66 in particular, It is not the great monuments or the great attractions that matter, but the ever unfolding view, the thousand tiny attractions, a miscellany that slowly reveals its unity. There is much that is eccentric along the route, but it is, for the most part, the eccentricity of ordinary people, both those who built it and those who preserve and memorialize it.
Route 66 is a museum to ordinary eccentricity. On Route 66 you are doing what everyone who ever drove it was doing. You are driving to a real destination. You are following the Mother Road for real. No other museum gives you the opportunity to do the thing for real the way Route 66 does.
This is an account of the transcontinental road trip that my wife, Anna, and I took in the spring of 2018 and of a second trip that we took the following year. We found much of what Route 66 and the other roads we took go through is ordinary. Some of it is goofy. Some of it is kitschy. Some of it is blatantly commercial. Some of it is gorgeous. Some of it is ugly. All of which makes it human: a human artifact and a human place, a place of ordinary eccentricity.