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Representing freedom, migration and the empty loneliness of the American heartland, Route 66 is one of the essential icons of America – not just for Americans, but for anyone who, like me, is fascinated by the United States. Snaking across eight states, its concrete and asphalt was a ribbon that tied the nation together and enticed millions of Americans with a romantic ideal of adventure and an exodus to a better life.

To some, it’s the ‘Mother Road’ immortalised by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath – an escape route for thousands of farmers and poverty-stricken families fleeing the barren dust bowl of Oklahoma and Kansas for the promised land of California during the Great Depression. To others – me included – just the mention of its name always evokes the birth of rock’n’roll and Chuck Berry urging us to ‘get our kicks’. To the beatniks and hipsters, it epitomises the great American open road eulogised by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. To the generation of baby-boom Americans that I know, it will always be associated with a 1960s television series, called Route 66, in which two young men travelled across America, seeking adventure and getting caught up in the struggles of the people they met. And, like my grandson, many of today’s youngsters know it from Cars, the Pixar animated film that was conceived as a way of making a documentary about the road and which features several businesses and residents along the route.

When I thought about it, it struck me that in many ways, roads like Route 66 are as significant to American culture and social history as cathedrals and palaces are to European history. For a young nation founded on exploration and migration west, these great arteries of transportation became a major agent of social transformation. They did more than just move people; they changed America. Among all those highways, Route 66 was the everyman’s road that connected Middle America with southern California, a strip of hardtop that led to the birth of those icons of Americana I like so much: diners, motels and road food. Route 66’s 2,278 meandering miles inspired thousands of cross-country road trips. And what fun it must have been to travel its length. Taking its travellers from Chicago on Lake Michigan to Santa Monica on the Pacific Ocean (and vice versa), it traversed prairie, open plains, desert, mountains, valleys and countless rivers and creeks. What a trip.

Now that much of it has been bypassed by faster, cleaner and more sterile interstate highways, the Mother Road has become, for me and countless others, a historically significant relic of America’s past. To those of us for whom it was once small-town America’s Main Street, Route 66 represents a simpler time when family businesses, not corporate franchises, dominated the landscape and neon motel signs were icons of a mobile nation on the road.

One of the things that fascinates me is that by following the rutted paths of Native American trails in some parts, Route 66 could even be said to pre-date the arrival of white colonists in the New World. And the road as we know it today can trace its origins to the great migration west beyond the Mississippi in the nineteenth century. When I set off from Chicago, I’d be riding along a route with a pre-history that began in 1853, when the American government commissioned a survey to build a transcontinental railway for military and civilian use. But when the survey was complete, rather than investing in steel tracks, the wise guys in Washington chose to construct a network of wagon trails. Even in those days, it seems to me that the American instinct was to empower the individual to make his or her own way in life. In 1857 a wagon trail costing $200,000 was extended from the New Mexico–Arizona border along a line close to the 35th parallel as far as the Colorado River and linked into other trails to create a route between the Arkansas River in Missouri and the furthest reaches of American expansion