Route 66 at Amboy in the Mohave Desert

If you’ve used the Google search engine today, you will have been reminded that this is the one hundredth anniversary of U.S. Route 66, the “Mother Road” that stretched from Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier two miles from where I live. Of course, now it’s California Route 2 between Centinela Boulevard and State Route 138 near Wrightwood.

As John Steinbeck wrote in Grapes of Wrath:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.

I have ridden three segments of the Mother Road. My favorite is in Arizona between Seligman and Oatman, where I visited Grand Canyon Caverns, which is run by the Hualapai Indian nation. The first time I took that road, I picked up a Hualapai hitchhiker who needed a lift to the Greyhound Bus Station in Kingman. We had a pleasant ride there until I discovered that the tribal police were waiting for him there to take him into custody. Apparently he had been to a wild party the previous night and did something to put him afoul of the law. I never did find out.

The other two segments were thus:

• A short stretch in California between the Amboy Road and Kelbaker Road through the now deserted crossroads of Amboy
• A very desolate stretch in New Mexico between Laguna Pueblo and I-25.

I don’t count the stretches of Route 66 that are coterminous with the Interstate system. It’s an entirely different feeling on the Interstate.