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17 Photographing Monument Valley

27 48 Hours in Las Vegas

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Motoring the Mother Road: Route 66

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WHY GO Blast the oldies mix, roll down the roof and relive the golden days of road tripping kicking it down Route 66, the Mother Road of motoring. From kitsch to scuba, tumbleweeds to mom-and-pop milkshake shops, driving Route 66 across Arizona and New Mexico is a safari into nostalgic Americana’s heart and soul.

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TIME

10 days

DISTANCE

700 miles

BEST TIME TO GO

Apr – Jun

START

Arizona/California border

END

Las Vegas, NM

ALSO GOOD FOR

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Never has a road been so symbolic as Route 66. Snaking across the belly of America, linking Chicago and Los Angeles, it is the original highway of dreams leading to the Promised Land and was constructed in 1926. Along the route are old motor-court hotels that haven’t changed a bit since the country’s 1950s motoring heyday. First called the “Mother Road” in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, over the last 80-odd years the road has become the subject of countless novels, books, songs and photographs.

Route 66 came into its own during the Depression years, when hundreds of thousands of migrants escaping the Dust Bowl slogged west in beat-up jalopies painted with “California or bust” signs. Meanwhile unemployed young men were hired to pave the final stretches of muddy road. They completed the job, as it turns out, just in time for WWII. Hitchhiking soldiers and factory workers rode the road next. Then, amid the jubilant postwar boom, Americans took their newfound optimism and wealth on the road, essentially inventing the modern driving vacation. And so the era of “getting your kicks on Route 66” was born. Traffic flowed busily in both directions. But just as the Mother Road hit her stride, President Dwight Eisenhower, inspired by the German autobahn, proposed a new interstate system for the USA. Slowly but surely, each of Route 66’s 2200 miles was bypassed. Towns became ghosts and traffic ground nearly to a halt. By 1984, the road was history.

Heading east from California, Route 66 enters Arizona near the 20-mile Topock Gorge, a dramatic walled canyon that’s one of the prettiest sections of the Colorado River. Continue north through Golden Shores, where you can refuel before the rugged 20-mile trip to the terrifically crusty former gold mining town of Oatman cupped by pinnacles and craggy hills. Since the veins of ore ran dry in 1942, the little settlement has reinvented itself as a movie set and unapologetic Wild West tourist trap, complete with staged gun fights (daily at noon) and gift stores named Fast Fanny’s Place and the Classy Ass. And speaking of asses, there are plenty of them (the four-legged kind, that is) roaming the streets and shamelessly begging for carrots (sold at $1 per bag). Stupid and endearing, they’re descendents from pack animals left behind by the early miners. Squeezed among the shops is the 1902 Oatman Hotel, a surprisingly modest shack where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their wedding night in 1939. Clark apparently returned quite frequently to play cards with the miners in the downstairs saloon, which is awash in one-dollar bills (some $40,000 worth, by the barmaid’s estimate). You can no longer stay the night, but you can still grab a couple tacos and a beer in the musky old saloon smelling of yesteryear’s sweat, grease and cigarettes. Look for it on the first floor.

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SAVE THE MOTHER ROAD!

A movement for preservation of the Mother Road resulted in the National Historic Route 66 Association (www.national66.com), a nonprofit alliance of federal, state and private interests. Every year another landmark goes up for sale, but more are rescued from ruin.

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Leaving Oatman keep your wits about you as the road twists and turns past tumbleweeds, saguaro cacti and falling rocks as it travels over Sitgreaves Pass (3523ft) then corkscrews into the rugged Black Mountains and through a claustrophobic