Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [6]
After the war, the road remained as busy as ever. Millions of Americans, among them thousands of soldiers and airmen who had done their military training out west, exchanged the harsh climate of the ‘snowbelt’ for the easy living of the ‘sunbelt’. With more leisure time on their hands, millions of others spent their vacations on road trips and sightseeing. Catering to the holiday traffic and migrating masses, the motels, campsites, cabins, diners, petrol stations, mechanics, tyre dealerships and souvenir shops multiplied. The most iconic Route 66 landmarks – those neon-lit diners, gas stations and motels that I love – all date from this period.
However, the Mother Road’s huge popularity sowed the seeds of its own downfall. Like many of the roads that were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, it was too narrow and structurally antiquated for the fin-tailed gas guzzlers and vast ‘humping to please’ trucks of the 1950s. President Eisen hower had been impressed by the German autobahn network he’d glimpsed during the war and his government decided that the nation needed a similar network of multi-lane highways, as much for military purposes (this was the height of the Cold War) as for use by commercial freight and private vehicles. So, starting in the late 1950s, sections of Route 66 were replaced by four-lane interstate highways until, by 1970, travellers could drive the entire distance from Chicago to Los Angeles along Interstates 55, 44 and 40 without ever coming into contact with small-town America. In fact, the interstates made it possible to drive coast to coast without even speaking to another human being. Stop, swipe your credit card, pump some gas, buy a snack, then floor the pedal to the metal until the next stop.
Life was slipping out of the Mother Road and in 1979 the Route 66 designation started to be removed from the hodgepodge of Main Streets, farm-to-market roads and rural highways that had once linked the two seaboards of America. Thousands of businesses that had relied on it withered and died. Some entire towns ceased to exist. The death knell for Route 66 itself finally sounded in 1985, when the Mother Road was officially decommissioned.
Yet Route 66 refused to die. Realising its social significance in America’s short history, a band of enthusiasts kept interest in the road alive. In 1990 the US Congress passed a law that recognised Route 66 as a ‘symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their legacy of seeking a better life’. A few years later an official preservation programme was enacted by the National Park Service, turning Route 66 into a de facto national monument.
Now it was my turn to set out on the legendary Mother Road and fulfil the dream of a lifetime. As I packed my bags and left home, my only hope was that I would experience proper emptiness – that sense of being the only human alive for tens or even hundreds of miles around. I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere, totally on my own, enveloped by silence, like those scenes in the movies when you see the homeward-bound GI step off the Greyhound bus into a vast empty plain beneath a big blue sky.
I had made it clear to Nicky Taylor, the show’s producer, that although I would obviously have a documentary crew in tow, I was determined to travel with no preconceptions about what was lying ahead of me. I told Nicky I wanted to keep the experience as pure as possible. Even if it drove the crew doolally, I wouldn’t allow myself to be barracked into visiting places that didn’t interest me. There was no way I was going to take part in stunts or make detours simply because