(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

If you’re a Route 66 purist, you’re already angry, because throughout the road’s life from 1926 to its decommissioning in 1985, Navy Pier was never on the official route.

But it’s worth a look. Built in 1916, redone in the 1990s and 2010s after many lean years, the pier covers 50 acres and stretches 3,040 feet into Lake Michigan. Besides its many restaurants and shops, it houses a hotel, Ferris wheel, amusement park, Chicago Children’s Museum and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. If the weather is right, it’s a great place for a long walk and offers brilliant views of the Chicago skyline at sunset.

Now Chicago’s City Council is encouraging people to think of this pier as the symbolic northeastern end of Route 66. That might seem like a bald-faced bid to attract tourist dollars, and it is, but it also makes a kind of sense. At the southwest end of the road, the Santa Monica Pier was never an official part of the route, either. Yet that pier added a Route 66 “end of the trail” sign in 2009.

Who doesn’t like a large body of water at the start and end of a long journey?

Out at Navy Pier’s end, you’ll find an empty bronze couch and a bronze man sitting next to it in an armchair. Not Richard Daley or Mike Ditka, not Muddy Waters or Mike Royko or Barack Obama (whose presidential library and museum are due to open nine miles away in June). It’s the late Chicago-bred comedian Bob Newhart, whose 1970s series “The Bob Newhart Show” was set in the city.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Opened in 2004 on the site of a former railyard, Millennium Park is a 24-acre urban haven in the heart of downtown Chicago. Apart from great views of the surrounding skyscrapers, an outdoor performance venue and great foliage in fall, it’s got two prime landmarks, both far younger than Route 66.

One is the beloved polish steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor known as the Bean. Its official title is Cloud Gate. Half of the fun there is watching other admirers move around and beneath its shiny surface.

The other must-see is Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, which includes a reflecting pool between a pair of 50-foot glass-block towers where LED displays show the faces of assorted Chicagoans. It’s mesmerizing.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The Art Institute of Chicago, one of the country’s top art museums, stands on Michigan Avenue, just across from the Route 66 starting-point sign.

Inside the museum, wonders await. Along with plenty of masterpieces from Europe and beyond, you’ll find such homegrown classics as Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942), Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” (1930) and a Norman Rockwell painting that only arrived in February — a 1948 painting called “The Dugout,” which shows dejected Cubs players seated in ignominy as the opposing team’s fans cheer wildly.

You’ll also come across several works by Georgia O’Keeffe, she of the cattle skulls, sexy flowers and desert vistas. O’Keeffe studied at the Art Institute in 1905-06 and had her first retrospective exhibition there in 1943. As a northern New Mexico resident from 1929 to 1986, she no doubt covered many a mile on the Mother Road.

Lodging tip: If you can afford $220 a night and up (much higher in summer), the Chicago Athletic Assn. Hotel, two blocks from the museum on Michigan Avenue, is a great traveler’s secret, housed in a Venetian Gothic building that goes back to 1893 and is open to all. Just don’t park there — it’s $84 a night.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Lou Mitchell’s was a fixture on Jackson Boulevard even before the makers of Route 66 decided to run their highway down that street. And even though the route later shifted (and Jackson became a one-way street), Lou Mitchell’s remains an iconic stop, a block from Union Station.

It opened in 1923, and staffers have been handing out free doughnut holes since 1958. Stepping in, you pass beneath a vintage neon sign and face a choice: belly up to the zigzag counter or hope for one of the old-school booths. Ownership has changed over the decades and the price of a cup of coffee has crept up to $3.95, but the road-trip vibe is unmistakable.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

On your first day of driving westbound on Route 66, you see downtown Chicago dwindle into suburbs, and then the suburbs dwindle into midsize towns.

Right about that time, in Normal, Ill., you’ll have a chance to pause at a 1930-31 two-story Tudor Revival service station and meet a true road scholar.

Ryburn Place Gifts and Gab, formerly Sprague’s Super Service, is the headquarters of historian and shopkeeper Terri Ryburn, who wrote a 419-page doctoral dissertation on Route 66 and its role in local history.

“They come from all over,” Ryburn said of her customers. “I had a couple the other day from French Polynesia. International people know a whole lot more about us than we know about them.”

She sells route-related books and souvenirs, no gas, but on a busy summer day, Ryburn gets 100 people, typically about 20% international. Ryburn, who earned her PhD at Illinois State University in 1999, keeps a copy of her dissertation near the cash register. She didn’t truly enter the daily life of the road until 2006, when she and her late husband bought the old service station and starting restoring it.

Since then, Ryburn has sold the station to the town of Normal. But she still lives upstairs, presides over the shop and drives a car whose license plate reads DOCTR66.

“Everybody who comes through that door is happy,” Ryburn said. “Have you ever had a job like that?”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

You can’t miss the American Giants Museum. Just look for the 20-foot-tall fiberglass man who wears the Texaco star.

The museum, born in 2024 on a former gas station site in the tiny town of Atlanta, Ill., is devoted to the roadside fiberglass figures known as Muffler Men, Bunyan Giants and Uniroyal Gals.

They were first produced as roadside promotional gimmicks by the Venice-based International Fiberglass Co. in the 1960s. In recent years, collectors and specialists have started restoring and displaying them. Many show up along Route 66, but Atlanta bills itself as “the Muffler Man capital of the Mother Road.” (Tulsa, Okla., might disagree.)

The museum, founded by collector-historian Joel Baker, is free and open April through October (but because the giants stand in the open air, you can ogle them any time). Besides the jumpsuit-wearing Texaco service attendant, three more giants stand by the museum building at Arch and Vine streets, one wearing a viking helmet, another a cowboy hat and a third (known as Mortimer Snerd) wearing a goofy expression worthy of Mad magazine. There’s also a giant Paul Bunyan down the street, holding a vast hot dog; and yet another, Lumi the Uniroyal Gal, standing by the Country Aire restaurant on South Street.

American Giants Museum stands along a 1926 alignment of 66 in a part of Illinois that’s peppered with grain elevators, water towers and small towns. I arrived in Atlanta around sunset, so I beheld these giants in dramatic light with billowing clouds behind them, a train rumbling past and birds chittering in the dense stand of trees.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

This is the only presidential museum along the Route 66 corridor (although the Obama museum is due to open in June in Jackson Park, Chicago).

Until walking through Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill., I never quite grasped how much happened in the last five months of Lincoln’s life. He wins reelection, signs the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery), gives the “malice towards none” speech, survives a kidnapping plot, visits the conquered Confederate capital (Richmond, Va.) and is assassinated, all between Nov. 1 and April 15 of 1865.

The story starts with a log cabin, of course, and deals at length with slavery and the rise of the abolition movement. The late newsman Tim Russert is featured in a faux broadcast account on the 1860 presidential election, which Russert calls “the most dangerously regional and divisive election in American history.”

Besides top-notch exhibits, I saw retired teacher Mike Anderson demonstrate the dulcimer for a fascinated family. A clerk told me the biggest sellers in the Lincoln museum gift shop are top hats and shirts that say “I miss Abe.”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

I can’t say for sure that Cozy Dog in Springfield, Ill., is the true birthplace of the hot dog on a stick. But I can endorse the Cozy Dog version. Besides, it’s just $3.40 for a pork hot dog dipped in cornmeal batter with a little bowl of coleslaw on the side.

The tale begins with Ed Waldmire Jr., who co-created the recipe in 1946, founded the business in 1949 and died in 1993. It’s still in the family. Though the current restaurant has only been in this location since the 1990s, versions of it have done business on Route 66 since 1949. Inside, beyond the Formica table tops, there are plenty of souvenirs for sale and board games and doodads to amuse kids. There’s also an Edwin Waldmire Memorial Library (look, don’t touch), made by Waldmire’s son Bob to celebrate his late father’s book collection.

Fun fact: The Waldmires are doubly famous among roadies. As an artist, nomad and avowed hippie, Bob Waldmire spent years traveling on 66, sleeping in his VW, making maps, postcards and posters. He ran a quirky general store and visitor center in Hackberry, Ariz., and inspired the character Fillmore (voiced by George Carlin) in the movie “Cars.” Though Bob Waldmire died at 64 in 2009, his postcards, dense with pen-and-ink text and fine details, are still sold in many spots along 66, including the Cozy Dog.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Cars are central to history and myths of Route 66, whether you’re thinking of the Fords that carried the first auto tourists in the 1920s, the jalopies that rumbled west during the Dust Bowl years, the Corvettes driven by Tod and Buz in the 1960s TV show “Route 66” or Lightning McQueen, the four-wheeled hero of the 2006 animated feature “Cars.” So it’s no surprise that there are several car collections along the route. And this is one of the largest.

Open since 2016, the museum showcases the collection of owner Guy Mace, who has acquired more than 75 classic and celebrity cars, as old as 1907 (an REO Model G Runabout with 8 horsepower). There are Fords of assorted vintages, Packards, Nashes, a Hudson, a Pierce Arrow, a 1950 Jaguar Mark V, a three-wheeled 1976 Citroen, a DeLorean, a couple of Rolls-Royces and replicas of the Batmobile and the 1991 “Ghostbusters” ECTO-1. Mace, who is in his 80s, wasn’t around on the day I dropped by, but can tell stories about every one of them.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

After a long day of driving, the green letters of the Rockwood Motor Court’s neon sign in Springfield, Mo., were a relief to see.

The 10-unit lodging, which dates to 1929, might be the oldest operating motor court on the route. It is run by Phyllis Ferguson, a big Route 66 booster and former City Council member who bought the property in 2019 and has done plenty of renovation and restoration since then. The exterior is a combination of red brick and sandstone that looks a bit like wood — which may explain the name. Once, the property featured a cafe and gas station, now converted to other uses.

Rooms rent for $79 to $135. My room was #1, a snug space with a checkerboard floor, framed postcards on the walls, no desk and a tiny TV. The heating system rattled a little and I had trouble with the Wi-Fi, but Ferguson’s hospitality, which gets high marks on Tripadvisor, was warm. She shared a boatload of highway history and pointed me toward a great breakfast spot: Gailey’s Breakfast Cafe in downtown Springfield, where I recommend the sweet potato hash browns.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

is a filling station where you can’t get gas. So why stop? For the conversation. The old station, surrounded by handsome farmland, now serves as a souvenir stand, snack bar, selfie stop and welcome center, not necessarily in that order.

The 2.5-acre yard is full of flowers and road-trip artifacts from decades past. By longstanding tradition, hosts Barbara Turner and George Bowick, who live in a 1941 home on site, offer free watermelon and ice cream (with a bucket out for donations).

When Turner’s father, Gary Turner, took over from other relatives in about 2003, his goal was to build a nostalgic scene around a replica 1930 Sinclair service station, giving travelers a place to pull over and gab. Having been a Knott’s Berry Farm performer and used-car dealer in Southern California, he was a standout at chewing the fat and won over

among the “roadies” who travel portions of the highway every year. “Paul McCartney visited when my dad was here,” Turner said. “You just never know who’s going to show up.”

After her parents died in 2015, Turner and Bowick moved in from Charleston, S.C., and took over, fulfilling a promise to her dad.

Some visitors sit and chat. Some buy souvenirs, and many roam the colorful property with their phones in camera mode. “There is no such thing as a 15-minute visit to Gay Parita, with or without Gary,” wrote Nick Gerlich in Route magazine.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

This is a sleekly restored Art Deco motel a few blocks from a charming small-town square. Even if you’re not sleeping over, you might want to make a stop.

If you arrive at dusk, you can’t miss the neon piping along the roofline. The front building is from 1939, the back one from 1946, with 13 guest rooms in all. (At opening, those rooms went for $2.50 nightly. Now rates are $125 to $145.)

In 2011, local preservationists bought the motel and began restoration efforts. In 2021, a local nonprofit took over. The restored motel reopened in 2023. Next door stands a former service station, now outfitted as a visitor center and gift shop. Four RV hookups, a grassy area and gazebo are scheduled for completion in time for summer.

On the Sunday of my visit, Jason Shelfer, 52, was manning the visitor center, which also served as front desk for the motel. He showed me around the motel, which had every detail in place, covering its history and celebrity imprimatur. Clark Gable “stayed in Room 6 in 1942 and Room 10 in 1947,” Shelfer said, adding that many visitors now are from overseas — far more than he expected.

“It wasn’t until I came to work here that I realized [Route 66’s] reach. When people from Brazil come to Carthage, Missouri, something magical is happening.”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

It’s been 58 years since Mickey Mantle played his last baseball game, but his name lingers, especially in this corner of Oklahoma.

Before he starred for the New York Yankees for 18 years, Mantle (1931-1995) grew up in this modest white house, part of a large family and son of a miner named Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, who taught him to be the most powerful switch-hitter to play the game.

The surrounding neighborhood is blue-collar and sleepy. There’s a statue of Mantle at Commerce High School and an atmospheric old Conoco station (built in 1929 or 1930) on Main Street. A few blocks from there, and 10 short residential blocks off Route 66, stands the Mantle home, locked up tight around the clock. Next to it, there’s a tin shack that served as backdrop when Mr. Mantle lobbed pitches to his son.

There’s nothing to buy and no museum inside the idle building (although that would be a nice thing for the absentee owners to do). But it is fun to picture that boy dreaming of greatness, then getting there.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

On the outskirts of Vinita, Okla., within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, Beth and Alan Hilburn run the Hi-Way Cafe and Western Motel, hoping to lure travelers with food, shelter, eye-catching neon signs, a 1963 Rambler covered with 60,066 stickers and a growing family of Muffler Men.

“We’re a little bit of Vegas out here in the middle of Oklahoma,” said Beth Hilburn, whose late parents used to run the place.

The cafe dates to 1963. In 2022, the Hilburns added Big Bill, a 21-foot-tall Muffler Man who now stands with a suitcase near the motel. (He’s named after Beth’s late father.) In 2023, they added the Big Indian, a warrior with headdress and spear, as “a cool tribute to Native heritage,” said Hilburn, whose heritage includes Cherokee and Delaware ancestors. (That giant previously stood by a gift shop in Massachusetts.)

In March came the arrival of yet another giant, Big Al, formerly of Springfield, Mo. Big Al stands by the restaurant with a big fork and spatula.

The cafe is open for breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday, and for dinner on the first Saturday of every month. The Route 66 Burger (bacon, cheese, onions, mushrooms) is $9.99.

(Mike Simons / For The Times)

This way, ladies and gentlemen, to the best-loved whale in the state of Oklahoma. Back when this semirural spot was private property, a Tulsa zookeeper named Hugh Davis and his wife, Zelta, built an 80-foot-long concrete whale (and slide and neighboring pond) as a swimming, fishing and picnicking haven for their grandchildren. They finished in 1972. In part because of its location right along 66, the whale attracted swimmers and admirers from far beyond the family, but the Davises closed it to the public in 1988. The site has had ups and downs since then.

Nowadays, the whale and site are owned by the city of Catoosa, which banned swimming and closed the site in order to build a visitor center. Local officials plan to reopen and unveil the visitor center on May 30, which means this summer’s visitors will get a better view than I did, and will be able to fish.

If you get there, keep this earlier history in mind: Before the Davises built the whale, they ran the 14-acre site as Nature’s Acres, featuring a snake pit and reptile “ark.” According to

historical accounts, Zelta Davis “would often wrap her body in live snakes” during shows, and she once saved her husband’s life by cutting open his arm and bleeding out poison after a snake-milking mishap.

(Mike Simons / For The Times)

One of the busiest bits of Route 66 in Tulsa is the stretch of 11th Street known as the Meadow Gold District. That’s where, under the benign majesty of an old neon sign, a new crop of shops and restaurants has taken root between Peoria and Utica avenues.

The Meadow Gold sign was first lit in 1934, then stored, relocated and relighted in 2009. The businesses and murals below it celebrate Route 66, but they also add a modern spin that has made the district big with people in their teens and 20s.

At center stage is Buck Atom’s Cosmic Curios on 66, a gift shop flanked by Buck and Stella Atom (a 19-foot-tall space cowboy/cowgirl combo, both made of fiberglass). Nearby you will find Meadow Gold Mack’s Route 66 Outpost, where dozens of vendors sell locally made and vintage goods, and Buck’s Vintage.

Within a few blocks stand Joseph Gierek Fine Art, the Sky Gallery, Decopolis, Josey Records, Southwest Trading Co., Ike’s Chili, Red Light Chicken, Howdy Burger and Empire Slice Shop. In November, a big, Insta-friendly “Greetings from Route 66” mural joined the scene on the side of Meadow Gold Mack’s.

They all play a role in the revival of Tulsa’s 11th Street, a.k.a. Route 66, an effort fueled in part by grants from the city of Tulsa and assorted public and private agencies. And the giants keep coming. An oversize Rosie the Riveter appeared at the nearby Pearl Shops in late 2025.

(Mike Simons / For The Times)

(Mike Simons / For The Times)

Hang around enough ballparks and you will hear Abner Doubleday’s name. Hang around Route 66, especially in Tulsa, and you will hear Cyrus Avery’s.

He’s the Tulsa businessman and civic leader who basically made the route happen. As a member of a federal board creating some of the first interstate highways in the 1920s, he made sure one highly promising route ran through Tulsa. He also cut the deal that labeled it Route 66. (If that deal had gone differently, the road might be known as Route 60 or Route 62. But Avery liked the sound of 66.) Avery is also the one who first proclaimed that this long, rugged series of roads — still two-thirds unpaved at the time — would become “the Main Street of America.”

Thus, when you roll westward through downtown Tulsa and you’re about to cross the Arkansas River, you’ll see Cyrus Avery Centennial Plaza, dominated by a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of a Motel T Ford confronting a horse-drawn carriage. In the sculpture, “East Meets West” by Robert Summers, the eastbound carriage has a lone man at the reins, the two horses reared up in alarm. The oncoming Model T, occupied by a family, is heading west, into the future. On the west side of the river — and much easier to see in dim light — are three neon signs, replicas celebrating Tulsa Auto Court, Will Rogers Motor Court and the Oil Capital Motel.

(Mike Simons / For The Times)

Arcadia’s round barn is a rebuilt old rural wonder, its gracefully curving dome and walls first built in 1898 and substantially restored in 1989. Boosters proclaim it “the only round barn on Route 66,” and they are not wrong.

It’s free, owned by the Arcadia Historical and Preservation Society, and makes a nice rustic counterpoint to the boldly modern Pops 66 Soda Ranch, less than a mile up the road to the east.

Back in the day (and still now), some people believed that round buildings are sturdier in hurricanes and tornadoes. This one is 60 feet in diameter and 43 feet tall. If you’ve spent time in the desert around Joshua Tree, the eerily echoing upstairs space under the Arcadia dome may remind you of the Integratron, famed for its sound baths. There are no sound baths here, just acoustic jam sessions on weekends and the occasional barn dance.

(Mike Simons / For The Times)

Behold the sleek, modern, rainbow-hued and sugar-driven Pops 66. Beneath a 66-foot-tall stylized soda bottle and straw, Pops offers all sorts of sodas and merch, along with a gas station. This scene is illuminated by lights of many colors — LEDs, but designed to evoke neon.

Though it changed hands in 2021, Pops goes back to 2007. Thanks to its bold design, it’s one of the few stops on 66 that seems to look back and forward with equal energy.

The menu is a caloric tsunami: all sorts of pop, including Frostie Blue Cream, W.T. Heck Dill Pickle and Toxic Waste Sour Soda. Besides pop there is ice cream, cheesecake, shakes and floats. Also: burgers, salads and such, because some people say there’s more to life than dessert.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Erick, Okla., is a small town getting smaller — fewer than 1,000 people. But it does have an old brick building on its main street with letters in front that say “City Meat Market.” Disregard those letters. There’s no meat here.

This is the Sandhills Curiosity Shop, where there are hundreds or thousands of vintage signs and nothing is for sale. If the outside feels familiar, that may be because it may have inspired the look of Lizzie’s curio shop in “Cars.”

Inside, on most days, visitors find proprietor Harley Russell, 80, wearing a long white beard, sitting in an irresistibly cluttered space, telling stories, making ribald jokes, playing guitar and accepting tips. When tour groups arrive, he gives them a patriotic set that includes the national anthem, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” and “Amarillo by Morning.”

“I came here from San Antonio, Texas, after my fourth divorce, April of 1986,” Russell told me.

For many years, Russell and his last wife, Annabelle, worked the curiosity shop as a musical duo. Since her death from cancer in 2014, Russell has been on his own.

He calls Erick “the redneck capital of the world,” but it’s a more worldly place than you might expect. As murals along the main drag attest, this is the hometown of Roger Miller (who wrote and sang “King of the Road”) and Sheb Wooley (who wrote and sang “The Purple People Eater”).

Already, Russell said, he has more than 100 tour groups booked to visit in 2026, most from overseas. I hope some of those tourists also head across the street to the Main Street Bakery and Cafe. Natalie Carpenter and her mother-in-law opened the place in early 2025, decorating with old photos and hunting trophies loaned by a neighbor.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

In 2,400 miles on this road, you won’t find a more beautiful building than the U-Drop Inn, pride of Shamrock, Texas.

Built as a service station and cafe in the ascendant Art Deco style of 1936, it’s now a visitor center and restaurant owned by the city of Shamrock. But most of all it’s just a gorgeous thing to look at (and be photographed in front of).

Designed by Texas architect Joseph C. Berry and restored to the nth degree in recent years, it inspired Ramon’s auto shop in the animated movie “Cars.” The textured walls feature glazed green ceramic tiles. A pair of towers bear the words “Conoco” and “Cafe,” and lime-green neon lines run here and there. Just note: You won’t get any gas out of the old-school pumps outside, but there are six Tesla chargers around back.

Since February of 2025, the cafe has been in the hands of Aldo and Lianne Halpern (who has family roots nearby and is a veteran of many Los Angeles restaurants). There’s a jukebox, a tin ceiling, a wall covered with vintage album covers, a horseshoe bar, a bunch of booths and a menu full of brisket, meatloaf and other American comfort foods.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The Big Texan is a palace of beef and kitsch where you can eat a 72-ounce steak for free if you finish the job in 60 minutes or less.

If you fail to finish in time, the tab is $72. But plenty of people manage it, including Earl Chavez, 37, of Ukiah, Calif., who was just finishing on the night I arrived.

“The inside was good,” said Chavez, who runs a barbecue catering business. “It’s the outside that wasn’t that great, flavor-wise. I had it medium. If I did it again, I’d go rarer.”

I went with an 8-ounce top sirloin. The 72-ounce steak challenge was born in 1962, two years after the restaurant opened along Route 66, when owner Bob “R.J.” Lee realized there were a lot of hungry, competitive cowboys in the dining room. Nowadays, the restaurant has relocated to a spot along Interstate 40 and the Big Texan is run by Lee’s sons Bobby and Danny.

In the vast dining room, animal heads stare from the walls, hunks of meat sizzle on the grill, an elevated central table is reserved for steak-challenge people. Strolling musicians strum and servers wear hats, jeans and badges.

Along with the steak ranch, the Big Texan compound also includes 54 motel rooms, a Texas-shaped pool, a beer garden, a brewery and a gift shop. Nearby there’s a Big Texan RV park with cabins.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Cadillac Ranch is a free art installation in an open Amarillo field — 10 vintage Cadillacs buried nose-first, so they look like a 20th century Stonehenge but in a straight line. It’s best to get there around sunset, when the light is dramatic.

But my experience actually began in a nearby AutoZone outlet, where I brought two cans of spray paint to the register.

“Someone’s going to Cadillac Ranch,” said a cashier.

That’s the other thing about Cadillac Ranch. At some point after 1974, when the art collective Ant Farm placed the cars on land owned by arts patron Stanley Marsh, visitors started spray-painting them. Instead of trying to forbid that, the property’s keepers gradually decided to make that part of the experience. Anyone can paint any of the cars. That practice continued after the Cadillac Ranch location was moved in the ’90s to its current spot alongside Interstate 40.

When I arrived just before sunset, a few dozen people were there ahead, some brandishing spray-paint cans, others buying merch or cans at a Cadillac Ranch truck. Still, at first I felt like an outlaw. But the way people engaged with the cars, the way layer upon layer of paint has changed the way we perceive them, the sense of temporary community — it all felt more like creation than destruction.

First, under “Burnout Nation” and above “Poopy Pookie 2025,” I wrote “Read the L.A. Times.” Then, still self-conscious, I changed the message to “Read Something.”

Violet Quintanilla, a local who was circling the cars, told me she likes to recycle bits of paint and metal from the cars to make jewelry. But when she sees young people leave behind cans and caps, she gives them hell. That got me thinking about the effects of all those spray-can emissions. Next time, I’m bringing a paintbrush.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Think of the Roadrunner Lodge as a late-stage Route 66 motel. It was born in 1964 as Leatherwood Manor. Thus, unlike most motels on the route, this one’s 24 guest rooms have been restored to evoke the ’60s, with music from that era piped in if you like.

The interiors are “Mad Men” perfect, with Googie vibes, Danish Modern furniture, tiki carvings and, in a few cases, “Magic Fingers” units to vibrate your mattress. An old Rambler is parked in the driveway. Around the firepit, guests compare road notes, often with varying accents.

What drove David Brenner to buy a Route 66 motel? “I did this for my ex-wife,” he said. He’d been working in IT in the Dallas area, but more than a decade ago, when she raised the idea of starting a business on Route 66, he studied it and saw the possibilities. So they bought the Roadrunner “and brought the place back from the dead. The wind would blow and parts of the roof would go with it.”

They got it into great shape. And then they divorced.

“Her dream became a nightmare. And I’m living her dream,” Brenner told me.

The motel’s reviews on Tripadvisor and Yelp are top-notch. Rates start at $104. Or, if you’d prefer to buy it all, the motel is for sale. It was offered for $1.45 million in early 2026.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Gar Engman said a cartoon changed his life.

We were standing inside his gift shop, Tee Pee Curios, which combines a concrete tepee shape with a blazing batch of neon lettering and bold painted figures. No matter what you think about the way roadside businesses in the Southwest take advantage of Native cultures, you’re likely to agree that this is one of the most striking buildings in Tucumcari or anywhere on the route. A kitsch classic.

Engman was in his 50s, having spent years as a commercial painter in Iowa, when “Cars” came out in 2006. Once he saw it, he said, “I started traveling Route 66 every year, and I just fell in love.”

Then in 2013, Engman had a chance to buy the shop in Tucumcari.

Nowadays, at 72, he works the counter and spins yarns about the history of the town and the building, which began life in the 1940s as a service station. When the highway was widened in 1959 and the station lost its pumps, somebody came up with the tepee design and souvenir-shop concept. (In the process, a longstanding discrepancy popped up: The paint on the building says “Tee Pee,” yet the neon sign spells it “tepee.” Copy editors, turn away.)

In the days before the interstate, Engman likes to say, rolling into Tucumcari was “like driving into a little Las Vegas,” with bright lights and beckoning motels all around. Now that the main drag has faded, “I know that some people think it looks junky, but I like the relics,” he said. “I like to see the remnants.”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Sitting beneath one of the most evocative neon signs on all of Route 66, the Blue Swallow Motel could probably get away with generic guest rooms. But that’s not the case. This 1939 motel’s insides are just as resonant as its exterior.

In those early days, Tucumcari was a bigger, busier town, fed by train traffic and Route 66. For miles, signs lined the highway saying “Tucumcari Tonite!” Then train service dwindled and the Interstate 40 bypass in 1981 lured away most motorists.

Yet if you need a stop between Amarillo and Albuquerque, overnight or otherwise, Tucumcari still makes sense. And its main drag is full of throwback signage and design, including Tee Pee Curios, the Motel Safari, the Roadrunner Lodge and the fallen Apache Motel sign. When I passed through, that sign was laid out in the Apache parking lot like a wounded soldier awaiting a medic.

The key to the Blue Swallow’s survival, current owner Robert Federico said, is “our matriarch,” Lillian Leigon Redman, who arrived in town as a child on a covered wagon in about 1915, grew up to marry the gas station owner next door and was given the motel as a wedding present. She ran it from the late ’50s into the 1990s. After several other owners, Robert and Dawn Federico arrived from Chicago soon after the pandemic hit.

The motel has 12 rooms, neighbored by tiny carports. The Federicos work hard to preserve and curate details (tilework, sinks, rotary phones that still work) while dealing with the region’s dramatic weather.

“Three years ago we had a hailstorm go through and 80% of my neon was on the ground. I learned a lot about neon that year,” Robert Federico told me.

When you arrive, don’t miss his introductory spiel, which takes you back through history, explains many motel details and adds a dimension to your stay. Settling in, I began to suspect Edward Hopper would step in with an easel and start painting any minute.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

This Mexican restaurant wears a coat of yellow paint beneath a big red stucco sombrero. La Cita goes back to 1940, which makes it one of the oldest Mexican eateries on the route, and it has been in this building since 1961. A green-lettered neon sign (also in the shape of a tall sombrero) stands next to the building and sometimes spins. The dining room is a hot spot for locals.

Sit down for lunch at this family-owned eatery, order a Frito pie and feel fully integrated into what’s happening in Tucumcari. (The Rotary Club meets here too.)

La Cita opens 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 7 a.m.-2:30 p.m. on Sundays. If you need an early breakfast, try Las Chaparritas on Main Street, which opens at 7 a.m. every day but Monday, and try the chimichangas.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Santa Rosa’s Blue Hole is a surprise — a deep, cool pool of water in the middle of miles of red-dirt high desert. And yes, you can swim there.

It’s an artesian well, 81 feet deep and 60 feet in diameter. The city of Santa Rosa, which owns the site, says the water renews itself every six hours and is always 61-62 degrees — about the same as the Pacific at any Southern California beach in May.

In the 1930s, the pool was used as a fish hatchery, but since the 1970s it’s been a swimming hole and training spot for scuba divers.

Enter the water at your own risk (it’s staffed with lifeguards in the summer only). The hole is fed by the same aquifer system as nearby Park Lake. You can buy a blue towel for $25 (and there’s other merch).

The swimming hole is open daily, 7 a.m.-7 p.m. When I showed up on a windy 80-degree afternoon, an RVing couple from Quebec were just jumping in.

“No shower for us today!” hollered Daniel Gamache.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Once Canyon Road was a 13th century footpath. Now, a Santa Fe visitor strolls among dozens of art galleries, along with a few shops and restaurants, including Cafe Canyon (opened in 2023). With their adobe-style walls and low ceilings, many galleries feel like homes, and it’s pleasant to walk among them on a rambling road that feels more residential than commercial. There are Santa Fe Pick-Up shuttle buses to minimize parking woes.

In the Kay Contemporary Art Gallery, I admired work of Kevin Box, whose playful steel, aluminum and bronze sculptures, often made with collaborators, take origami style in new directions and fetch prices anywhere from $500 to $50,000.

I’d also been hoping to browse the Dineh & Co. gallery, a rare Native-owned enterprise that opened in 2025, featuring artists like Diné metalsmith Milford Calamity. Alas, the gallery had closed early that day.

So I took solace in the three-year-old Desert Moss Vintage, where co-owner Esteban Rios y Torres showed me vintage jeans ($45 to $200), old matchbooks ($3), band T-shirts of many genres ($35 to $500 and beyond) and a Route 66 sign from the ’40s (not for sale).

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

From its first days in 1926, Route 66 ran through Santa Fe. But it didn’t last long.

The city was 300 years old before the first automobile showed up and was already beloved for its historic atmosphere, adobe walls and fusion of Native and Spanish cultures. The Route 66 “Santa Fe Loop” approached from the east by way of the Old Santa Fe Trail, then continued west on Cerrillos Road, heading toward Albuquerque via Santo Domingo, Algodones and Bernalillo.

But in the big picture, New Mexico Gov. A.T. Hannett decided, this stretch of the route didn’t make sense. So he directed engineers to straighten the path of 66, which cut Santa Fe out and shaved more than 90 miles off the trip from Tucumcari to Albuquerque.

As the history of Route 66 shows, plenty of towns bypassed by key roads end up withering. Not Santa Fe, which had history and reputation on its side, and still does. Visit now and you’ll see plenty of things that travelers saw in the 1920s.

Though the plaza itself is increasingly dominated by upscale jewelry shops, its neighbors include La Fonda hotel (

); the 1610 Palace of the Governors (where Native vendors lay out jewelry and other wares on the walkway each day); the New Mexico Museum of Art (whose spectacular 1917 Pueblo Revival building would be a draw even without the impressive collection inside); the

and the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, which was completed in 1887 on the site of multiple previous churches.

Finding good food is not a problem. This visit gave me a chance to visit a few longstanding casual favorites near the plaza, including the Shed (since 1960 in its current location), its sibling La Choza (since 1983); and a quick-casual place called Tres Colores (since 2018), which specializes in street food from Veracuz and Oaxaca.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

El Rey Court, born in 1936, stands three miles from the heart of Santa Fe on Cerrillos Road, a.k.a. Route 66 back in the day. You could say it’s removed from the action, but if you say that on a Friday night as travelers and locals are squeezing into the motel’s mezcal and tequila bar, you might look silly.

This busy lodging is actually the merger of two old motels — the original El Rey and the neighboring Alamo Court — which is why its 86 rooms are spread over five acres, along with a pool (closed in winter), a little greenhouse, hot tubs, the mezcal bar La Reina and a food truck.

This was all renovated in 2018 to give the property’s Pueblo Revival style a few notes of ’70s grooviness. As at El Vado Motel in Santa Fe, the motel’s old carport has been merged into guest rooms, giving them more room than you might expect. On the walls hangs western art, often with a contemporary twist.

Newcomers should bear in mind that this stretch of Cerrillos is a mostly unglamorous commercial strip, but there is a cool antique and vintage shop next door called Tru Treasures of Santa Fe. And next to that is the Pantry restaurant, a local comfort-food fixture since 1948.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Santa Fe’s Railyard district was born in the 1880s, when train service first arrived. But its new life began with a redevelopment effort in the early 2000s, and that effort has been gaining momentum for two decades now.

Besides serving as an embarkation point for sightseeing trains and Rail Runner service to Albuquerque, it has become a focal point for galleries, restaurants and public markets. And it’s a stone’s throw from the old alignment of Route 66 on Cerrillos Road.

The old water tower and Santa Fe Depot are key landmarks. At the Saturday morning Farmers Market, poet William Curius composed for me an ode to Route 66 (I thanked him with a hefty tip). In the neighboring Mercado de el Museo building, dozens of artisans and craft people offered their wares, which included plenty of silver and turquoise. The Santa Fe Artists Market also happens on Saturdays, March through December, and the Santa Fe Artisans Market happens on Sundays in the Farmers Market Pavilion.

In the nearby LewAllen Galleries, I checked out witty landscapes by Woody Gwyn of Big Sur and bright Modernist paintings by Herman Maril. I didn’t get to the popular contemporary art space known as SITE Santa Fe, but did get a look at the New Mexico Museum of Art’s Vladem Contemporary (opened in late 2023), which has great mountain views from upstairs. Of many dinner options in the area, I went with Paloma, which serves Mexican-inspired cuisine and brilliant desserts, including churros with caramel sauce and blood orange curd.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Route 66 follows Central Avenue through Albuquerque for 18 miles. It’s the route’s longest urban stretch outside of Los Angeles, and it has plenty of urban troubles. (When I passed the gorgeous 1927 KiMo Theatre sign, there were people sleeping on the sidewalk below.) But there are bright spots, and El Vado is one of them.

El Vado is a white-walled Pueblo Revival lodging from 1937 — the year that Route 66 was rerouted to Central Avenue — stylishly redone as part of a mixed-use redevelopment in 2018. The motel, lighted after dark by faux luminarias along the roofline, is neighbored by food pods and a few small retailers, all across the street from Albuquerque’s botanical gardens, an aquarium and the Rio Grande. The motel includes a pool and fountain, which helps mask traffic sounds from busy Central Avenue.

My room was more spacious than any 1937 traveler ever enjoyed, because, as part of redevelopment, the motel’s owners absorbed carport spaces into guest rooms. El Vado’s rates start at about $145 nightly.

From El Vado, you can walk half a mile to the city’s Old Town Plaza or settle down on site by a kiva fireplace in the motel’s taproom with a local beer. Or you could drive five miles to Nob Hill, another bright spot on Central Avenue, where a lively batch of businesses like the Two Fools Tavern, Organic Books and Hotel Zazz serve visitors and students from the nearby University of New Mexico.

By the way, if you’re sensing a trend in the conversion of basic roadside motels into snazzier boutique lodgings, you’re not wrong. The team behind El Vado, Oregon-based Palindrome Communities, has also redone Albuquerque’s Monterey and Imperial motels and the El Rey Court in Santa Fe.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Acoma makes 100 years of history look like small change. To get there, you veer south from old 66 for 14 miles at the tiny town of Paraje, about an hour west of Albuquerque.

Also known as Sky City, Acoma is a Native community of earthen homes perched atop a 357-foot-high mesa. It has been occupied for roughly 1,000 years by the Acoma Pueblo tribe, which is independent of the nearby Navajo, Zuni and Laguna, with its own language and about 5,000 enrolled members.

Thanks to revenues from their Sky City Casino and hotel along Interstate 40, the Acoma also have a large, handsome Haa’ku Museum and Sky City Cultural Center next to the historic mesa. There, outsiders can gather for escorted tours of 60 to 90 minutes, mostly walking. It’s $30 per adult. Photography, binoculars and note-taking are closely restricted, and outsiders are generally forbidden from the mesa except on tours.

My group of 18 travelers was led by guide Gail Toribio, 27. After a quick bus ride up a steep road built in the 1950s, we found ourselves on top of the mesa, facing one massive church, about 500 homes and several pottery stalls that materialize during tours. The views were spectacular, the pottery was full of painstaking detail, and it was fascinating to see the ancient and modern elements together in the hilltop homes. But the biggest thing and most astonishing story on the mesa is the San Estévan del Rey Mission.

When Spanish troops and missionaries showed up in the 16th century, they forced labor and Christianity upon Native groups, often slaughtering and maiming those who resisted, including many Acoma. By the 1640s, forced labor had produced the church on the mesa, its 40-foot-long ponderosa pine beams dragged from Mt. Taylor, more than 30 miles away. Somehow, when the area’s tribes rose up in the Pueblo Indian revolt of 1680 and killed most of the Catholic priests in New Mexico, the church endured. And over time, Toribio told us, most Acoma families settled into a sort of dual faith, combining their traditional beliefs with Catholic rituals, including Christmas.

After the church, we walked among two-story homes that were here long before the first Europeans showed up. (Only a handful of the homes are still occupied full time.)

“I was actually raised up there,” potter Gwen Patricio, 52, told me back at the visitor center. “No electricity, no running water. They asked the elders if they wanted electricity, but they said no.”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

This 1950 motel, bought by Ron Novak and Michelle Bush in 2024, has all the hallmarks of a Route 66 overnight spot — neon sign, location right on the road, room-adjacent parking and 24 well-kept rooms with rates that start at $75.

Besides its role as a stopover between Albuquerque and Gallup, the city of Grants puts travelers within an hour of the black-lava badlands of El Malpais National Monument and the geological oddity and roadside attraction Ice Cave (always 31 degrees) and Bandera Volcano. Even closer is the Grants-based New Mexico Mining Museum, which tells the tale of how Navajo sheepherder Paddy Martinez uncovered uranium at Haystack Mesa in 1950, prompting a surge in activity that turned Grants into “the uranium mining capital of the world” for three decades. Nowadays, the mining is done and uranium cleanup is a growing business, and the merchants of Grants are hoping to boost their role as a stop on 66.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

You might not expect “chopped cheese” — a New York bodega specialty with roots in Harlem — in the tiny town of Milan, N.M. But there it sits atop the menu at Now Thatz Good Eden.

That menu of “multicultural cuisine” also includes Haitian barbecue beef shank, Indian chickpea curry spaghetti, empanadas, a carne asada burrito and (this was my choice) southern fried fish with mixed greens, mac and cheese.

This operation, which grew out of an Albuquerque food truck, came to town in June 2025. It is open for lunch and dinner every day but Friday, serving many meals to go from its spot on Route 66. Owner Nakia Williams came to New Mexico from the East Coast, as did several staffers, including server Chelsea King, 22.

The dining room might be a former Dairy Queen, but King said the staff is aiming for a grandma’s house vibe.

“If you come here, you will have a good conversation,” King said.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

After many blocks of forgettable franchise clutter along 66 at the east end of Gallup, the three-story Hotel El Rancho suddenly looms — and blinks, if it’s after dark. This hotel and its busy neon lights go back to 1937, when movie theater owner R.E. Griffith got a big idea: Since Hollywood was making so many westerns, why not open a hotel for movie crews and tourists?

It didn’t hurt that R.E. Griffith’s brother was the director D.W. Griffith. Even if you’re not sleeping there, you’ll want to step past its plantation-style columns and throwback neon slogan (“charm of yesterday, convenience of tomorrow”) and stroll through its two-level lobby.

It’s a movie set, really — grand staircase, log columns, big stone fireplace, taxidermy, wagon-wheel chandeliers. There’s even a recently added hidden room that’s only accessible if you pull the right book from a nearby shelf. Alongside the western furnishings, the hotel has hung photos of 20th century stars who stayed there, scores of them, including John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Mae West and at least one who is still working, Jane Fonda. Guest rooms bear names of past star customers.

El Rancho, which has about 95 rooms and suites starting at about $125, is by far the best-known lodging in Gallup, having been rescued in the 1980s by the Ortega family (owners of many Arizona galleries and souvenir shops). Since the pandemic, the owners have renovated the hotel and 1970s El Rancho Motel next door, with improvements to the rooms, restaurant, bar and gift shop (which is enormous).

That said, my stay was not perfect. I was first assigned to room 220 (Barbara Payton), but it smelled musty and not quite right. (Among 16 lodgings I slept in along 66, this was the only one where I asked for a new room.) When I told the front desk clerk, she moved me to 111 (Gregory Peck). That room smelled fine, though its bathroom was so small that, well, picture Gregory Peck taking a seat and then, without leaving that seat, washing his hands and starting the shower.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The tidal pull of Richardson Trading Post, facing the tracks on Route 66 in Gallup, was too powerful to resist. The enterprise, fueled in part by pawn relationships with Navajo families, goes back to 1913.

Though patriarch Bill Richardson died at 98 in 2017, the family business continues and has gobbled up most of a city block. Inside you find a staggering selection of silver and turquoise jewelry, rugs (that’s a room in itself), pottery, paintings, belts, bolo ties and assorted surprises at all price points. Near the entrance stands a carved wooden Indian, female, with a bundle of cigars in her hands.

Under three buffalo heads, one counter in the store was marked DEAD-PAWN — items that were pawned and never redeemed are now on sale. (As stories in the Navajo Times and New York Times explain, the relationship between Native families and pawn shops over generations is more complex than many outsiders imagine.)

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The first thing I noticed on foot in downtown Gallup was the line outside Jerry’s Cafe. Jerry’s is on Coal Avenue, which runs parallel with 66 and the train tracks, and its takeout business seems to be just as popular as its old-school booths.

And I should admit this: Even if its New Mexican food was iffy, Jerry’s red, yellow and blue neon sign would be hard to resist. It looks like a remnant from the ’50s, but the family-owned restaurant wasn’t born until the 1970s.

Anyway, all the tables were full on this afternoon — the dining room is nothing but two-top and four-top booths — and I hadn’t eaten in many hours. So I ordered my meal to go and walked around downtown for 15 minutes.

That was time enough to count many Indian arts and crafts stores, pawn shops and social service agencies, to notice the throwback, divey vibe of the American Bar’s facade and to lament the location of downtown Gallup’s lone Muffler Man, a.k.a. Dude Man. He stands above a used-car lot, poorly positioned on a rooftop, so you can’t see him well or stand at his feet.

And then it was time to collect my meal and attack it in my car: Jerry’s Special, a burger patty with green chiles and salad. Tremendous.

Next time I’ll wait for a seat inside and try the beef enchiladas. Or the stuffed sopaipillas.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

For a certain species of traveler, this will be the most tempting trading post in all of the Southwest, even though it has nothing for sale.

The Painted Desert Trading Post, built in about 1940, stands in the rolling hills of northeastern Arizona. Except for a few displays, a fire extinguisher, a first aid kit and a jar for donations, its three rooms are empty.

The trading post prospered into the 1950s, selling gas, Navajo jewelry and rugs and sundries. Then the building slipped into dereliction. In 2018 the property came up for sale.

Enter the preservationists. That year, a nonprofit group of nine people known as the Route 66 Co-Op bought the 94-acre trading post property and restored the building’s exterior to look as it did in 1950, a spare tire leaning atmospherically against one of the two gas pumps. Thanks to their work and savvy, road-trippers like you and me can take exit 320 (Pinta Road) from I-40, drive 1.2 miles of dirt road to a locked gate, text an ID to the phone number on the gate and receive a code. (There’s a Youtube briefing.)

With that code, you can feel like a secret agent cowboy, open the gate and drive another 2.4 miles on a lonely, crumbling two-lane blacktop road that once was part of 66. It’s a journey through time and nearly empty space, which I happened to take on a day when clouds were racing across the sky like a time-lapse video. Once you open another gate, make sure there are no snakes around and enter the trading post, the journey is complete.

Outside, a stark, lonely cattle ranch sprawls. Inside, displays show the restoration effort and tell how Dotch Windsor ran the trading post from about 1940 to 1958. Once you’ve read through the history and scanned the panorama, you step away, leaving all as you found it. Last year, by the estimate of Holbrook-based co-op member John G. Jimenez, the trading post had about 40 visitors.

“It’s off the beaten path, and only true Route 66 travelers will see it. And we like it that way,” said Rich Dinkela, a member of the co-op and owner of the Shamrock Court in Sullivan, Mo., and Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba, Mo. “There’s a reward for those who take the time.”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

This is the only national park with a bit of Route 66 in it, and it’s just a little bit. You’re here for the jaw-dropping rocky vistas.

If you take the north entrance to the park off I-40, you’ll be entering its Painted Desert area, which is great driving and great hiking, all in a 5-mile-long loop just north of the interstate.

The visitor center and a gas station come up almost immediately after you enter ($25 per car). As you continue along that portion of Petrified Forest Road, you can stop, walk and admire the badlands from any number of spots, including Tiponi Point, the Painted Desert Rim Trail (a 1.6-mile round trip) and the Painted Desert Inn (which offers neither meals nor lodging these days, but is a chance to escape the sun and wind and stroll through an interesting piece of Pueblo Revival architecture). Hozho Point, Pintado Point and Lacey Point follow, all with epic views of rock in a thousand hues, often beneath dramatic clouds being pushed by stiff winds. A note of caution: Like the rest of northern Arizona, the park often sees dramatic summer thunderstorms.

After Lacey Point, you’ll see the body of a 1932 Studebaker, some old road bed and a line of telephone poles stretching into the distance. That’s Route 66’s oddly modest moment in the park. But bear in mind there is plenty more to the park farther south, including all sorts of fossils and petroglyphs.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

There’s no mistaking Holbrook’s Wigwam Motel (a.k.a. Wigwam Village #6) for any place else in town. Its guests sleep in 15 rentable cement tepees, which stand about 32 feet tall and are neighbored by about 20 vintage cars.

Arranged in U formation, the tepees date to 1950 and rent for $105-$115 nightly. Trains roll past just behind the property. Behind the lobby, the helpful desk clerk pointed out a back room with an enormous collection of petrified wood, most of it probably gathered before nearby Petrified Forest was declared a national park in 1962.

Nearby along 66 (which follows Navajo Boulevard and West Hopi Drive in Holbrook), you’ll see several eye-catching signs, including those for Joe & Aggie’s Cafe and the Globetrotter Lodge (both now closed) and Brad’s Desert Inn (alive, kicking and kitsch rich). The massive Pow Wow Trading Post sign, which once towered over a hotel and gift shop, now rises over Big Fella’s BBQ Lounge and the Petrified Smoke Shop.

But we were talking about the tepees. These were built by Chester Evert Lewis, joining six other “wigwam villages” in a national chain founded by Frank A. Redford of Kentucky. The Holbrook motel closed in the 1970s (around the time I-40 bypassed Holbrook), reopened in the 1980s and is still run by Lewis’ family.

Meanwhile, one Wigwam Village still operates in Cave City, Ky., and another Wigwam Motel lives on in San Bernardino, also on Route 66. (That one has a pool, grassy area and no train traffic. If I had to choose between Holbrook and San Bernardino tepees, I’d sleep there.)

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The Jack Rabbit Trading Post is a souvenir stand, yes. But it’s more than that. It’s where the highway’s beloved “Here It Is” sign stands. Yellow sign, red type, black rabbit.

If there were a roadside billboard hall of fame, that black rabbit would rank right up there with Burma-Shave’s rhyming sign sequences (replicas still visible on parts of 66 in Arizona).

The Jack Rabbit shop goes back to 1949, when Jim Taylor took over a building that once housed a snake farm and enlisted a partner to start putting up signs. Through the 1950s and early ’60s, from California to Illinois, the roadside of Route 66 was peppered with yellow billboards teasing motorists (and their children) with a silhouette bunny image and a mileage number — the distance from the souvenir stand. No explanation. It worked like a charm.

Alas, those signs came down in the late ’60s, victims of a Highway Beautification Act boosted by Lady Bird Johnson, then first lady. But in 2017, current Jack Rabbit owners Tony and Cindy Jaquez came up with an alternative. Along with “Here It Is” and Route 66 merch of all kinds, they now sell yellow-and-black replica signs, made to order with custom mileage numbers, for people and other businesses along the route. (So if you lived 500 miles from Jack Rabbit, your sign would say 500.)

“That’s our No. 1 item,” Cindy said. (Her grandfather took over the shop from Taylor in 1961 and the business has been in her family ever since.)

The main “Here It Is” sign is wood, not neon. But on the afternoon I arrived in Joseph City, it seemed to gleam, having been repainted in 2025 and freshly rinsed by rain.

Besides the shop and the two-faced sign — it looks east and west and is visible to passing trains — there’s a big bunny suitable for selfies.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Blame Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey. In 1972, as friendly neighbors on Laguna Avenue in Echo Park, they came up with a song called “Take It Easy” that helped launch Frey’s band, the Eagles, into stardom. The key line, of course, was the one about “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” while being eyed by “a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me.”

Fifty-four years later, the busiest corner in Winslow is Kinsley and East 2nd Street, the one that’s been redesigned around the song. There’s a bronze statue of a long-haired troubadour with a guitar, a mural featuring a girl in a Ford, and an actual flatbed Ford, bright red. There’s also a Route 66 shield painted on the blacktop, because 2nd Street is Route 66.

The “Take It Easy” installation is called Standin’ on the Corner Park and since the death of Frey in 2016, the park has added a sculpture of him as well.

Of course, you’ll need a photo. But be sure to stroll a few blocks of the pleasant town (population: about 9,000), which was bypassed by I-40 in the late 1970s. On 2nd Street, you’ll find Brown Mug Cafe (a Mexican eatery, big with locals, that dates to 1958 and sports a vintage neon sign). On 3rd Street you’ll see Earl’s Motor Court, a seven-room 1952 motel.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Back in 1930 when it was known as the Harvey House, this sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival complex was built to be the grandest railway hotel in the Southwest.

It was one of dozens of train-adjacent restaurants, hotels and shops designed by the much-admired architect Mary Colter for railroad hospitality maven Fred Harvey. But history took a turn. The 54-room hotel operated into the late 1950s, then fell into a long slumber after the Santa Fe Railway shut it down.

The hotel only lives now, as La Posada, because preservationist Allan Affeldt and his wife, artist Tina Mion, took over in 1997 and spent millions on restoration. Strolling the hotel’s stone floors today, you see grand arches, old photos, rooms of antiques, railroad artifacts and Mion’s artworks (also plentiful in the gift shop). There’s also a bookshop separate from the gift shop. The Affeldt Mion Museum stands next door in the old depot building.

I had a great shrimp pappardelle in La Posada’s restaurant, the Turquoise Room, and a deep sleep in Room 200 ($151), even though it was close to the train tracks. (The hotel offers earplugs.)

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The fun at Meteor Crater (a.k.a. Barringer Crater) begins with the approach road off I-40, about 45 miles east of Flagstaff.

“5 Miles to Impact!” warns a sign. As you continue up the lonely road, surrounded by flat prairie, gusts of wind flinging tumbleweeds across your path, the signs count down, mile by mile. At the parking lot, you find a series of sleek buildings at the edge of a big hole in the ground — a roadside attraction with NASA vibes.

Once you’ve paid ($29 for adults), the intro video describes the meteor that smashed down here about 50,000 years ago, going 26,000 mph or more, leaving a crater 700 feet deep and three-fourths of a mile across.

Then you might file through several rooms of historical and scientific displays or head straight up the stairs to walk on the crater rim. The view is memorable — like looking into a spent volcano (which many scientists thought this was for a long time).

Maybe the piped-in portentous music was a bit much. But the scientific displays bristle with remarkable facts: Apparently 99% of the meteor burned off on the way down, and still it made this epic divot.

The site’s modern history has its moments too. In 1903 a wealthy Philadelphia mining engineer, D. Moreau Barringer, bought rights to the crater, aiming to prove that it wasn’t volcanic and boost his fortune by mining for iron. The mining never worked out, but major scientific institutions agree that Barringer was right about the crater. And the Barringer family still owns it six generations later. The family built the visitor center (designed by star architect Philip Johnson) in 1961 and recently updated it. Instead of mining revenue, these Barringers collect admission fees.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

After a long day of driving and a few weeks of looking at remnants of the early 20th century, the Americana Motor Hotel’s 1960s-’70s design made me smile right away.

Groovy sign out front. Astronaut mannequin by the front door. A mirror ball in every guest room. Orange armchairs. After all those details, it was no surprise to learn that the hotel was built in 1962. In 1969, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and their crew stayed here while filming the 1969 road-trip movie “Easy Rider” (which had a lot of Route 66 in it). The Americana reopened after retro-retooling in 2023.

The hotel offers snacks, beer, wine and cocktails. For handy meals, there’s an IHOP next door.

By the way: Downtown Flagstaff is big fun, and while you can’t walk there from the Americana, you should drive and prowl around San Francisco Street and Aspen Avenue. Check out the neon signage and public rooms of the Hotel Monte Vista (built in 1926), especially the Rendezvous, a pleasant place for a snack or drink.

A few blocks from there, under another tall old sign, is the Motel DuBeau (1929), a brick-walled motor court that proudly notes its inclusion in the 1952 Green Book for Black travelers. Now positioning itself as a 19-room boutique motel, the DuBeau still offers rates as low as $94 and a kitchen that guests can share.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

For breakfast or diner food in Flagstaff, Miz Zip’s is a time-honored option, going back to 1952. Though ownership changed several years ago, the eatery still radiates old-school honest coffee shop vibes.

It has checkerboard floors, a big sign that says “Let’s Eat,” a wagon-wheel lamp, booths, a little counter with room for eight or nine people and a second dining room that was added in the 1960s. It sits right along 66. A display on the wall notes that I-40 bypassed Flagstaff in 1968.

I paid $3.79 for a cup of coffee. Talei Menninger, 22, the waitress who brought it, told me she used to come to Miz Zip’s with her grandfather when she was a kid. These days it’s open for breakfast and lunch every day, and for dinner Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.

And if you have a minute after your meal, drive half a mile northeast to 3404 E. Route 66 and pay respects to the Museum Club, a beloved log-cabin-style building that began life in 1931 as a taxidermy museum and evolved into a rowdy roadhouse that lasted for decades and landed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its nickname: the Zoo. Alas, the Zoo closed in late 2025 and the owner put the building up for sale. We can marvel at the history, admire the exterior and hope for a great next chapter.

(Mark Lipczynski / For The Times)

Yes, this is a road trip, not a rail journey. But if you haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, you might want to hop on a train for a day trip or an overnight.

Williams is the place for that. Since 1901, long before Route 66 was routed through town, the Grand Canyon Railway has carried travelers between Williams and the Grand Canyon, 65 miles to the north.

Back then, leaders of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad gambled that tourists would be willing to part with $3.95 each for a three-hour ride from Williams to the canyon’s South Rim. (The alternative was eight hours on a stagecoach.) For decades the math worked.

But just as the growth of high-speed car travel drew people from Route 66 to I-40, it also lured people away from trains. In 1968, the Santa Fe people killed their passenger service from Williams to the South Rim, casting a pall that lasted until 1989. That’s when Nebraska-bred crop-dusting moguls Max and Thelma Biegert took over and started the trains again. (They have since sold to Xanterra Travel Collections.)

Anyway, the train ride today is 2 hours and 15 minutes each way and your options are extensive: six different classes of travel, perhaps with an overnight on the South Rim or in Williams in the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel or the Grand Canyon Railway RV Park. From April to October, round-trip rates run from about $70 to $243 per adult. Besides the usual diesel locomotive service, there are occasional steam train journeys.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

I apologize. There should be more dive bars on this list. After a certain number of road miles, a grown-up person needs a few hours in a dark, well-worn place with a cool beverage and a few tolerant locals to share local legends.

Sultana Bar (a.k.a the World Famous Sultana) is such a place. For that matter, so is its sibling, the Canyon Club, a few blocks away.

But Sultana’s is where I had lunch and a beer. It had been recommended by someone at a bowling alley in Flagstaff. Stepping in at midday I could immediately see why.

Three drinkers, two pool tables and a bartender in their customary positions. Taxidermy all over and dollar bills pasted to the walls between the severed heads. Sometimes there’s live music. While most of downtown Williams is dominated by souvenir shops, from Colors of the West and its 300 kinds of T-shirts to the Poozeum (“#1 for fossilized #2”), Sultana’s is a retreat from all that.

The bar opened in 1912, when Williams had a railroad (but no highway) and Arizona was just gaining statehood. When the passenger train to the Grand Canyon stopped running for 21 years, the bar survived. When the last of the I-40 bypasses grabbed most Williams Route 66 traffic in 1984, the bar survived.

“This is the oldest liquor license in Arizona,” said Richard Valdez, sitting at the bar with a friend. Bartender Katrina Evans agreed (although there’s debate about this elsewhere) and showed me the theater space in back where once there were silent movies and now there’s line-dancing. (Occasionally, there is also dwarf wrestling at the Sultana, which I wish was not a thing.)

I had the lunch special — hamburger steak with mashed potatoes and salad, $12.99, more than adequate. Valdez and Evans told me about the tunnels beneath the town (now mostly blocked) that date to its early years. There are all sorts of stories.

“It’s creepy,” said Evans. “It’s a whole network underneath us.”

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

For so much of Route 66, a driver operates on full alert, hopping on and off I-40 and assorted state highways, savoring glimpses of history and trying to follow the frazzled thread of the old road.

Then, just west of Ash Fork, Ariz., you reach Exit 139 on I-40, Crookton Road. And for 158 miles, life gets easier.

From there on, through Seligman, Peach Springs, Kingman and Oatman to the California border at Topock, you have quality time with the longest remaining continuous chunk of the old road. (Just don’t miss the left turn after the Arizona Route 66 Museum in Kingman.)

It’s a blast.

First, on the way into Seligman, you get a series of rhyming Burma-Shave sign facsimiles. (“If hugging on highway/ is your sport/ trade in your car/ for a davenport.”)

Beyond Seligman the road runs through a handful of small towns. West of Truxton, the mesas and boulders multiply. At Cool Springs Station, you find an outpost souvenir stand and, even better, a great 1.2-mile round-trip hike that begins across the street from the souvenir stand and takes you to the top of a mesa.

Then comes the stretch of road known as the Arizona Sidewinder — 191 turns in the space of eight miles leading into Oatman. But before you reach Oatman, be sure to use the turnout at Sitgreaves Pass (3,586 feet above sea level) to enjoy the big views to the west.

At Topock, you run out of old road just a moment before running out of Arizona. Your old frenemy I-40 takes you across the Colorado River into California, where the highway-hopping will resume.

(Mark Lipczynski / For The Times)

In 1953, Juan Delgadillo hammered together a bunch of leftover lumber to build this drive-in burger-and-ice cream joint. Then, for decades, he presided over it with such playful hospitality that it became a travelers’ favorite along Route 66.

“Slightly used napkins and straws,” one sign promises.

“Dead chicken,” says another.

“Sorry, we’re drinking,” says yet another.

Though the founder died in 2004, his son John Delgadillo and daughter Cecelia continue the roadside cooking, kidding and kitsch. This includes spraying customers with a mustard bottle (but the mustard turns out to be yellow string).

The eatery typically closes in November and reopens in March. If you want to shop while waiting for your burger, it’s about 50 yards to Angel and Vilma Delgadillo’s Original Route 66 Gift Shop, founded by Juan Delgadillo’s brother Angel. You can’t go far in Seligman without running into a Delgadillo.

(Mark Lipczynski / For The Times)

There are many gift shops along Route 66, but experts say this was the first, thanks to the vision and persistence of Angel and Vilma Delgadillo. It’s also the only one with a barber’s chair.

Angel and Vilma’s Original Route 66 Gift Shop, formerly a barbershop and pool hall, is one of the busiest businesses in the very small town of Seligman (about 550 residents, who pronounce it Se-LIG-man).

Inside you’ll find coasters, key rings, hats, shirts, shot glasses, books, signs, purses, patches, pins and license plates. And if you’re hungry, you have the burgers and shakes of Delgadillo’s Snow Cap just two doors to the east.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

For those keeping score at home, Lilo’s counts as yet another immigrant contribution to the Route 66 experience. Born in Germany, Lilo Russell married an American, moved to Arizona in the early 1960s, worked for years in a Seligman restaurant, then opened West Side Lilo’s in 1996.

She ran it for 29 years until her death in 2025. Her daughter Brenda Bryant now owns and manages the restaurant, where German specialties (schnitzel!) stand alongside Mexican favorites and the carrot cake wins much praise (was that a pinch of cinnamon?). I loved my slice, and my green chile burrito. Beyond the tasty food, I might have paid just to eavesdrop on the banter between the two longtime waitresses and their other customers.

Interested in a nightcap? Step across the street to the Road Kill Cafe and O.K. Saloon, where the menu is amusing and the bar in back is full of interesting taxidermy.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

All those with serious claustrophobia, pass by.

For the rest of us, now is the time to nod in the direction of Walter Peck, who fell into a hole in 1927. As it turned out, Peck’s hole led to an enormous cavern complex, which the Peck family bought and built into a roadside attraction.

In the beginning, guides say, visitors paid a quarter to be lowered into the cavern by rope. Now there are restaurants above and below ground, a motel, an RV park and campground, and an Otis elevator that zooms down 200 feet from the gift shop to the caverns. The temperature underground is always 57 or 58. The most spacious portion, known as the Chapel of the Ages, has a 90-foot ceiling, but some passages may be narrow and dark enough to spook some people.

And I should mention that the current elevator was installed after another one broke down in 2022, briefly stranding several uninjured guests for a day. The caverns, which are now owned by the Hualapai tribe, reopened in June 2025. My rides down and up were easy, and my guided tour through the caves was fascinating.

Until recently, visitors could book an overnight suite in the cavern, up to six people, for $1,000. The Arizona Republic’s Michael Salerno called it “the world’s deepest, darkest and quietest hotel room.” But in March, management ended that option, citing the preservation of the caverns.

The standard tour is 45 minutes (covering about 3/4 mile) for $35.95 per adult. For a “deeper” experience, you can do a two- or three-hour itinerary, or add a meal in the underground Crystal Room restaurant.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

I chose not to stop at Bearizona, a drive-through animal park two miles east of Williams, Ariz., that’s been in business since 2010. But Keepers of the Wild seemed like, well, a different beast.

It’s a nonprofit animal sanctuary, tucked into the rocky desert hills on the edge of 66, 96 miles west of Williams.

“Right now there’s about 150 different animals here, 49 species,” said Sparky Knowlton at the front desk. “We have 11 tigers out there. I think five are from ‘Tiger King,’“ referring to Oklahoma’s shuttered “Tiger King” park, featured in a 2020 Netflix documentary.

Keepers of the Wild, founded in 1995 by former Las Vegas illusionist Jonathan Kraft, has been in this 175-acre location for 21 years.

I only spent about an hour there, but it was long enough to hear a tiger growl and a pack of coyotes howl. I saw two peccaries nuzzling each other, a pacing lion, several snoozing bobcats, a camel in repose, and a pair of Guinea Singing Dogs tearing into a chicken lunch delivered by a keeper. This is no slick roadside attraction. The enclosures are educationally labeled, but many paths are dirt, there’s a lot of chain-link fence and the gift shop is modest.

“Our facility does not buy, sell, trade, lease, breed or allow public interaction with the animals,” says the website.

The cost per adult is $35 for a guided safari in a golf cart, or $25 to walk unguided. It’s closed on Tuesdays.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Hackberry General Store, which dates to the 1930s, is a chance to get off a curvy mountain road for a few minutes, to browse a hefty souvenir inventory, to pet Charlie the gift shop cat, to inspect the hubcap collection, to meet owner Amy Franklin, to roam among cars and artifacts in the yard and — don’t miss this one — to inspect the Route 66 map painted on one wall. The man behind that map is the late Bob Waldmire, who owned the shop in the 1990s and roamed Route 66 for years in a VW bus, making maps and art.

Waldmire became such a Route 66 celebrity that he inspired the “Fillmore” character in “Cars.” Moreover, he had already been born into a Route 66 family: His father, Ed Waldmire, opened the beloved Cozy Dog Drive In along 66 in Springfield, Ill. The map he left behind is in an awkward position, but Franklin, who has owned the store since 2016, has made sure to keep it as visible as possible.

Once you’ve finished in Hackberry, head six miles west and keep an eye out for a green Easter Island head. That would be Giganticus Headicus, one of two eye-catching sculptures by Gregg Arnold that stand by the A-frame souvenir shop and land office at Antares Point.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

What could be more fitting on Route 66 than a night in an Airstream?

And the five Airstreams of Tin Can Alley, which date to the 1970s, are splendidly renewed with ample bathrooms, comfortable bedding, plush towels and cleverly compact kitchen/sitting areas. The well-tended property, which opened in summer 2025 and uses Airbnb to handle its reservations, is right on 66 with off-street room for your own car to park a few steps away. The trailers are 31 to 34 feet long and the headroom is fine if you’re under 6-foot-2.

The units are not cheap — I paid $185 for a night — and there’s no lobby or on-site host. But the grounds are spiffy and I didn’t see another Airstream spot like this between Chicago and Santa Monica. There are loaner bikes, an outdoor fireplace and the world’s most pristine cornhole court. Also, Tin Can Alley is neighbored on either side by sibling businesses, Mudd (selling coffee) and Scoops (selling ice cream). The train tracks are close and busy, so it’s good that the hosts provide earplugs. Several restaurants are within walking distance, as is the first-rate Arizona Route 66 Museum.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

There are too many museums along Route 66 for any sane traveler to see on one trip. But this one, freshly renovated, is a must.

The exhibits inside this 1911 powerhouse building lay out the road’s history with handsome graphics, photos and broader perspective than many museums manage, including a look at Native American trails and wagon roads that came long before the blacktop arrived.

On its walk-along timeline of Route 66’s development and elsewhere, the exhibit closely covers the Dust Bowl years, when the road was full of desperation. (It was John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath” who first called it “the Mother Road.”) Besides covering World War II and the postwar boom, the exhibits acknowledge segregation, pointing out that the 1954 Green Book guide for Black travelers listed just one hotel in all of Arizona, the White Rock Motel in Kingman. Meanwhile, an interactive video exhibit invites visitors to ask questions of Angel Delgadillo, the Seligman, Ariz., barber, now 99, who began campaigning in the 1980s to raise awareness of Route 66’s historic importance and tourism possibilities.

The museum, neighbored by a visitor center and a popular drive-through shield, is open daily, adult admission $10. With your entrance fee, you also get access to the adjacent Route 66 Electric Vehicle Museum and its 29 cars — perhaps a glimpse of the road’s future.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

In Oatman, unless you are wildly unlucky, you will find burros on Main Street. Up the slopes behind Main Street, you will also find a shapely set of mountains.

Those are the Black Mountains, made from volcanoes and responsible for Oatman’s gold mining history. In fact, the burros that hang around on Main Street are said to be descended from the pack animals used by prospectors.

Before I even got to downtown Oatman, I encountered a handful of burros. And then, when people from Phoenix in a nearby SUV opened their rear hatch, I saw two of those burros leap into action, fling out a piece of luggage and shove their noses into a bag full of cardboard boxes.

“Girl Scout cookies,” said David Cains, 53. (In town, merchants sell burro-safe alfalfa pellets for $1 to $3 per bag.)

This was a sunny Saturday, so downtown Oatman, which is full of rustic storefronts in Old West style, was bursting. Though the population is said to be about 100, I saw at least twice that many people. (Many of them were in line ahead of me for burgers at the Oatman Hotel, which is no longer a hotel but goes back to 1902 and is papered inside with dollar bills.) I didn’t see any faux gunfights — a common entertainment feature on weekends — but the street was full of creeping, rumbling bikes, trikes and off-road vehicles, heading for nearby dirt trails. The dirt lot where I parked look like a Jeep Rubicon convention. I asked Jeff Fizer, who was part of the Phoenix group, what brought him to town.

“The curves! The mountain curves!,” he said. “And of course the burros.”

One Main Street merchant stood in her doorway spraying donkeys with water to keep them out of her doorway.

“Annabelle!” said the merchant, speaking to one of the animals. “You gotta let people in the store!”

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

On a dark desert highway, midway between Needles and Barstow, a small team sustains Roy’s Motel and Cafe and its sign, which is a big red, blue, black and yellow lie.

Neither Roy’s motel nor the cafe has been open for at least 30 years. But that sign, raised in 1959 over the community of Amboy, remains one of the most admired commercial displays on Route 66. The Roy’s team lights it every night and people come from miles around, especially people on their way from Las Vegas to Joshua Tree, to bask in the idea of a Googie ghost town.

Roy’s sells them gas, souvenirs and snacks from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. daily (and hosts filming and special events). By day, some visitors head for nearby Amboy Crater (where you can hike up the side of a 250-foot volcanic cinder cone). Others head 57 miles west to the Bagdad Cafe, which lost its matriarch with the death of longtime owner Andrea Pruett in January, but remains beloved by devotees of the 1987 cult movie of the same name.

Still others plant themselves beneath the big Roy’s sign before sunset and wait to see the neon light up. (If you’re lucky, Roy’s store attendant Heather Russell might let you flip the switch yourself.)

The owner of Roy’s (and all of Amboy) is Kyle Okura, whose late father, entrepreneur and philanthropist Albert Okura, bought it in 2005, resumed gas sales in 2008, relighted the sign in 2019 and died in 2023. The younger Okura has been upgrading the property, which includes six roadside cottages and 20 motel units. But there’s a lot to do, in large part because the groundwater in Amboy is too salty to drink.

Still, Roy’s is capitalizing on the Route 66 centennial. In March, manager Kenneth Large said, the outpost hosted a rally that drew 400 classic cars, and “a good couple of thousand people” camped there for four days. A goal is to get one cabin ready for overnight guests using hauled water, perhaps by the end of the summer. If that works, other units may follow.

“I don’t know if we’ll make it, but we’re trying,” Large said.

(Michael Hurcomb / Corbis via Getty Images)

Some people might think of Barstow as a train town, which it is, but you can sense the Mother Road along Main Street (a.k.a. Route 66), where you’ll spot many murals and vintage signs. There’s a cool green neon one for the Cactus Motel (alive and kicking at 916 E. Main) and a lonely tall one for El Rancho Motel (112 E. Main), which burned down in July 2022, leaving an empty lot beneath its 100-foot-high sign.

Speaking of trains, however, Barstow’s old Harvey House, the Casa del Desierto, still stands along the tracks. On its east side you’ll see the Western America Railroad Museum. On the north side: Barstow’s Mother Road Museum. I didn’t get inside the Mother Road Museum (its hours are 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Saturday and noon-3 p.m. Sunday), but displays in its 3,000 square feet include a 1958 Edsel, 1922 Model T and 1929 Model A.

Barstow’s Route 66 Motel (marked on this map) is one budget spot, with a fetching neon sign and several vintage cars in its lot. Its 20 rooms are priced from $56 to $90.

(David Fouts / For The Times)

In the Mojave Desert exurbs just north of Victorville, you see tumbleweeds, train tracks and for-sale signs offering asphalt and alfalfa. And then you see Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch, which looks like nothing else.

From about 2000 until his death at 72 in 2019, Elmer Long built a little world of his own on this property, planting metal rods with welded “branches,” then hanging colored bottles on them. The result is a sort of glistening grove, with glass catching the sunbeams, dangling doodads acting as chimes, hubcaps and typewriters slowly melting into the landscape.

Long, a Marine Corps veteran who worked more than 30 years at a cement factory, pursued this project after raising a family, retiring early and growing a footlong white beard. The ranch’s inheritors are doing their best to keep his vision intact.

“It’s all Elmer,” said caretaker Brian McKenzie, 50, tidying up as visitors roamed among the bottle trees.

How many bottles are there?

“Elmer never counted, so neither have I,” McKenzie said.

But it looks like there are more than 200 “trees.” And McKenzie has continued to add items and pursue other projects toward the back of the 2-acre property, which sits right on Route 66. A memorial fountain honoring Elmer was added in the last year.

As Elmer Long often told the story, the ranch began when Long decided to display some of the many bottles his father and he had scavenged on desert camping trips together.

“I put ’em out, and they looked good,” Long told a visitor from California Through My Lens.

The ranch is free to visit ($10 donation recommended) and has a dirt parking lot. The hours are usually dawn to dusk, but can vary.

Elmer Long’s son, Elliott Long, runs the ranch’s Instagram site. He wrote in 2024 that “Nothing on this earth makes me happier than seeing a smiling face in awe of the world that pops built.”

(David Fouts / For The Times)

The Mitla Cafe’s unlikely story begins in 1937 with Lucia Montaño, formerly of Tepatitlan, Jalisco, teaming up with husband Vicente Montaño to open a lunch counter. From the start, the tacos dorados, made with a fried tortilla, sold fast.

In the next chapter of this yarn, Lucia Montaño, now a mother, keeps the cafe going despite the death of her husband, the lingering Depression and then World War II. By the war’s end in 1945, Lucia Montaño has married again — to Salvador Rodriguez — and the two have burst through a wall to expand the restaurant.

All these years later, the restaurant still occupies the same space on San Bernardino’s west side and the same extended family runs it. When I arrived without a reservation for weekend, a line was spilling out the door. I waited about 20 minutes, admiring the Route 66 pictures on the walls, the little cactus lamps on the tables, the customers packed in tight around the counter. The wait was well worth it. I loved my pozole soup.

But there’s more to the story. Back in the early 1950s, a burger stand operator named Glen Bell tried Mitla’s hard-shell tacos, loved them, befriended Mitla’s owners, came up with his own version of their recipe and eventually made those tacos part of a new fast-food venture: Taco Bell, founded in 1962. (Taco Bell includes Mitla in its official origin story, as does Times columnist Gustavo Arellano in his 2012 book, “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.”)

The restaurant is open Wednesday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Look for the sign with the combination of low-key neon and red roof tiles.

(David Fouts / For The Times)

The golden age of Wigwam Villages began in the 1930s and 1940s, when six of them opened from Kentucky to Arizona. In 1949 came the chain’s California site: San Bernardino, still going strong and owned by a family with roots in India and the Inland Empire.

As in all of these ersatz Native villages, the freestanding guest rooms are in the conical shape of tepees (but architect Frank Redford called them “wigwams” because he liked the word better).

Now known as the Wigwam Motel, this San Bernardino landmark has 19 guest units arrayed in a semicircle, each painted white with zigzag red lines for decoration.

The 19 units and office (all 32 feet high) are outfitted with air-conditioning units and neighbored by a well-tended lawn and swimming pool. The interiors have flat ceilings of standard height, which reduced the cone effect. Still, the rooms measure 178 to 260 square feet, with small refrigerators, TVs and Wi-Fi. In the morning, guests can get coffee and granola bars. Spring rates typically start at $119 on weekdays, $149 on weekends.

The property is notably tidy and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

General manager Samir Patel said his family bought the motel in 2003 in part because of its role in Route 66 history. In fact, Patel said, last September he drove the route from Amarillo to Los Angeles to get a better feel for the road.

“It gave me a sense of how much 66 means to these small business owners in these small towns,” Patel said.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

You can’t miss the sign. The

l (marked on this map), which opened in 1959 on Colorado Boulevard facing Pasadena City College, announces itself with large letters that look like they were lifted from an ancient Moroccan manuscript.

The hotel itself is less eccentric. Designed by Harold Zook around a swimming pool and cluster of palm trees, it includes 70 rooms, breeze blocks separating patio areas and no particular emphasis on Route 66 or nostalgia. (The hotel’s position on the Rose Parade path is a bigger selling point, a clerk said.) Rates start at about $120 and parking is free. You might want to ask for a ground-floor room; the elevator is closed indefinitely and all access to the second and third floors is by the stairs.

This location does put travelers in easy striking distance of several vintage neon signs and businesses with longstanding Route 66 connections. (From 1926 to 1940, the westbound route followed Colorado for several miles before turning south at Fair Oaks Avenue. From 1940 on, Route 66 left Colorado a few blocks sooner, following the newly completed Arroyo Seco Parkway.)

One of those longstanding spots is the

a haven for model railroaders. “We’re one of the last animated neon signs on Route 66,” owner Fred Hill said. Every night, the sign lights up at dusk and shuts off at 11 p.m.

Canterbury Records has another memorable sign, not neon, but a perfect yellow circle. The shop claims to be the oldest surviving record shop in Los Angeles County, owned by the same family since 1960. Vroman’s Bookstore has stood on Colorado Boulevard since 1894. And then there’s the 35er bar, a.k.a. Freddie’s 35er. This windowless sports bar has been family owned and operated since 1963, when a shot of whiskey cost 35 cents.

(David Fouts / For The Times)

Back in the early years of Route 66 in Pasadena, a Tarzana-based dairy operation called Adohr Milk Farms had a storefront with a cool neon sign. Decades passed and a series of new businesses came to that Arroyo Parkway address, putting up at least one new facade. Architecturally, the block was nothing special.

But then in 2020, with Howlin’ Ray’s hot chicken preparing to move in, somebody peeled back an outer layer and found the old “Milk Farm” sign, which experts say probably dates to the 1930s. Preservationists jumped into action, asking Johnny Ray Zone, the founder of Howlin’ Rays, to save the old sign.

Now comes the twist: He said yes. Drive by after dark and you’ll see the reborn sign — and frequently a line out the door. This does not mean that milk is suddenly trending. The crowds come for Howlin’ Ray’s, which uses a side-wall mural and a small sign to announce itself. (Besides the Pasadena address, which opened in late 2022, Howlin’ Ray’s has locations in L.A. Chinatown and Las Vegas.)

For those eager to dive deep, there’s been

about the

and

But the bottom line for now is that the neon survives and people love that chicken.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Even in the cemetery trade, business does not stand still.

Hollywood Forever, founded in 1899 as Hollywood Cemetery, is proof of that. The cemetery already had plenty of occupants, including some famous ones, when Route 66 was redirected along Santa Monica Boulevard in the 1930s. And it continued to attract families of the rich and famous for many years before a downturn in the late 20th century.

Then, fortunately, new owners in the 1990s brought a new name and many new ideas. Nowadays, this graveyard (next-door neighbor to the Paramount studio lot) is a striking example of forward-looking nostalgia. It combines film screenings, yoga sessions, concerts, lectures and other cultural programming — including one of the largest Día de los Muertos festivals in the West — with a long roster of show business grave sites.

Mel Blanc, Cecil B. DeMille, Judy Garland, Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone, Rudolph Valentino, Burt Reynolds, Chris Cornell and many others either repose here or are celebrated with cenotaphs. (Toto, of “The Wizard of Oz,” has a cenotaph.)

The yoga classes typically happen on the venue’s Fairbanks Lawn, as do Hollywood Forever’s perennially popular Saturday night summer Cinespia movie screenings. (Many moviegoers bring blankets and picnic dinners.) Comedy shows and concerts are offered in Hollywood Forever’s on-site Masonic Lodge.

(David Fouts / For The Times)

The Formosa Cafe might be the most showbizzy Chinese restaurant you’ll ever find. Or maybe it’s the most Chinese showbiz restaurant.

Either way, it’s a beauty, full of tasseled lamps, flocked red wallpaper and publicity photos of long-ago stars above a long bar. Red leather booths line the walls, and what’s that toward the back? It’s a converted streetcar, part of the L.A. Pacific Electric system from the 1900s, now outfitted with dining tables.

The restaurant opened in 1939, a few years after Route 66 was extended and realigned to follow Santa Monica Boulevard. Back in the day, customers like Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and John Wayne ate (and drank) here. Decades of high jinks ensued. Then came a downturn, some bad renovations and closure in 2016.

Happily, we’re in a new chapter now. A new set of owners, the historically inclined 1933 Group, completed a $2.4-million restoration/renovation in 2019, yielding a space that’s lively and gorgeous. It beckons you first with its signature sign in green neon script. Then come all the throwback details inside, including a tin ceiling.

Yet this is not simple-minded nostalgia. The owners set aside a chunk of wall space to tell the story of Chinese Americans in early Hollywood through photos and lobby cards curated by film expert Arthur Dong. Instead of Chinese American caricatures, anyone interested gets a fuller, more sophisticated look at history.

As I happily consumed my $24 Biandang Box weekday lunch special (basically a sampling of five menu items), I realized that for all of the Formosa’s historic elements, there’s no hint of Route 66. Well, almost no hint. If you look to the right of the bar, you might spot a bell, the size and shape of a bottle, bearing the Route 66 shield.

(David Fouts / For The Times)

This is the official end of the line — the last address on the formal path of Route 66 from 1936 to 1964, with a suitably splashy Googie building to mark the spot. (Before 1936, the highway ended in downtown Los Angeles.)

From 1959 to 1991, this was the site of the old Penguin Coffee Shop, its glass walls, terrazzo floors and swooping roof designed by Googie specialists Armet & Davis. After the coffee shop closed, a dentist took over for years (but left the penguin mascot behind on the sign).

Then in 2018, the Mel’s Drive-In chain from San Francisco arrived and opened one of its ’50s-style coffee shops, restoring many original features.

There’s no carhop or drive-through service, but you will find a long counter, slanted ceilings, jukeboxes, a Route 66 marker at the front door and a kid-friendly casual atmosphere. For another hint of the building’s history, check out the sign outside again. Yes, that’s the old penguin, still perched on top.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

If you’re looking to splurge in throwback style at the end of an all-American road trip, consider the tall turquoise option that awaits on Ocean Boulevard, a few blocks off Route 66.

That’s the site of the Georgian Hotel, an eight-story 1933 Art Deco gem with yellow highlights and a neon sign up top. It reopened in 2023 after a major renovation and restoration.

Back in the day, “the Georgian was the definitive hotel at the end of Route 66,” road devotee and entrepreneur Dan Rice has been telling people for years. “If you got to the end, if you had the money, that’s where you stayed.”

For a drink or meal, options include the curvaceous Sirena restaurant bar and terrace near the entrance and the Georgian Room restaurant downstairs. It’s hard to imagine now, but at one point before its renewal, the hotel served as a retirement home.

For an overnight, rates start at about $590. The hotel, which won a thumbs-up from the Michelin guide in 2025, has 84 rooms and suites. There’s also a rotating art gallery display on the ground floor.

(David Fouts / For The Times)

Who drives 2,400 miles from Chicago, then stops half a mile short of the Pacific Ocean?

Nobody with sense. Yet that was the official path of Route 66 from 1936 until it was decommissioned in 1985. After all those westward miles, it ended at Lincoln and Olympic boulevards in Santa Monica, where it met U.S. 101A (now known as Pacific Coast Highway). That’s where Mel’s Drive-In is now.

Fortunately, there has always been a common-sense solution to this. You keep going west, fight to find parking and stroll out onto the Santa Monica Pier. There you smell the sea, hear the gulls, see the waves and amble among restaurants and souvenir shops under a spinning Ferris wheel.

If you’re lucky, you’ll pass beneath the pier’s signature neon sign (which goes back to the 1940s). But at some point in 2026, that sign is supposed to come down while crews replace the bridge leading to the pier. During that project, city plans call for a half-size replica sign elsewhere on the pier.

Whether you pass the original sign or the replica, if you’re out on the pier for sunset, you will feel like you have arrived. You may also be spooked by the tightly packed crowds.

To make sure everybody knows you made it, take a selfie by the unofficial Route 66 sign that says “End of the trail” and buy a Route 66 certificate of completion from the 66 to Cali kiosk.

And if you figure a celebratory dinner is in order at the end of your Route 66 journey? I can recommend the Lobster, a fancy surf-and-turf dining room that’s cantilevered next to the pier, so it feels as if you’re hovering over the coast. This is a good moment to remember what Michael Wallis wrote long ago in “Route 66: The Mother Road” — that “Route 66 expresses who we are, where we live, what we do, and whom we can become.”