« Hotel-review site Oyster.com launches Oahu pages; more Hawaii coming soon | Home | Bag a 2-for-1 deal on a luxury African safari in Botswana »

Get your kicks with Route 66 itinerary from National Park Service

Route 66 fans, rejoice. The National Park Service has put up a mother lode of info about the historic Mother Road that stretches across two-thirds of America, from Los Angeles to Chicago.

The nostalgic Route 66 microsite offers maps, essays, photos, histories of landmarks and an awesome resource list with hyperlinks to fan sites, museums, tourist bureaus, official documents and more.

It’s enough to make you pull off the road and open your laptop. You’ll learn about the quirky Aztec Hotel, one of the few Mayan-styled buildings left in the U.S., in Monrovia, Calif.; the Milk Bottle Grocery, a tiny shop improbably topped by a super-sized dairy bottle in Oklahoma City; the iconic Blue Swallow Motel, with its charming neon signs, in Tucumcari, N.M.; and other roadside nostalgia.

Beyond the oddities, you can glean a lot of history, not only about Route 66, which grew from the 1926 launch of the first federal highway system, but also about this nation’s heart and soul: the effect of monumental events such as the Depression and World War II; the myriad mom-and-pop businesses that catered to travelers before big chains took over; and, above all, America’s passionate affair with the open road.

Definitely worth a stop.

— Jane Engle, assistant Los Angeles Times Travel editor

Photo: Historic Route 66 passes through downtown Needles, Calif. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Photo gallery:
Stops along Route 66

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 5:56 am by Jane Engle and is filed under Arizona, Arts & Culture, California, Midwestern States, National Parks, New Mexico, News, Tips & Advice, Road trips, Southern States, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

One Comment on “Get your kicks with Route 66 itinerary from National Park Service”

John Paget Says:
September 24th, 2009 at 6:34 am
This is a great development - and the NPS list of sites includes many of the same attractions featured in my documentary “Route 66: Return to the Road with Martin Milner.”