Signs Of The (Old) Times On America’s Great Historical Highway
There are many great highway drives in America – Highway 1 on the California coast and the Overseas Highway though the Florida Keys are prime examples – but there is one that lives only on because of its legacy.
That is the historic Route 66, a loooong highway between Chicago and Los Angeles that spawned songs, movies and countless memories. It also created legendary stops, creative roadside attractions and now, a lot of dust.
The fast-moving interstates made traveling Route 66 impractical but a lot of the character of driving American roads vanished with the demise of highways like Route 66. After all, what’s more imaginative, spending a night in a Comfort Inn/Hampton Inn/Marriott, etc., or staying in a teepee?
And while I like to get where I’m going when traveling, I’m also a bit of a nostalgia buff, so when I learned of the existence of the Route 66 Museum while I was in Victorville, CA, I popped in for a visit.
A friend and travel PR person, Tere Stamoulis, calls Victorville “one of the anchors of CA Route 66” and she should know; she’s a highway enthusiast of the great route.
It was a hot and quiet Sunday when I went to it, and I just as I turned to pull into the gravel parking lot, two motorhomes were entering ahead of me. Somehow, this seemed appropriate.
In front of us was a wall with several murals, including one that calls Needles the “gateway to California.” Needles these days is a sign you blow past on Interstate 15 on your way from L.A., to Las Vegas. So, too, is Victorville for that matter. But, like Victorville, it was once a key place along Route 66.
Once I found the correct door (it took me three tries; not the one at the front Kev, not the one around back but the one on the side), I stepped inside the museum and immediately realized I was stepping back in time.
A friendly elderly lady greeted me and told me to “have a look around,” which is what I came to do in the first place, of course.
There was no admission charge, which naturally I found great. A place like this could be anywhere from $3-15 and relieved of having to pay anything, if I didn’t like it I did not have to hang around for any set amount of time to justify the expense of going to it. That’s my philosophy on museums anyway.
I did like it, tho. The first thing I saw was a flower-power hippie mobile, brightly-painted old VW Bug bus. On every available inch on the walls and hanging from the ceiling were all kinds of Route 66 attraction signs: A neon sign from the Green Spot Motel, “Howdy, welcome to Mahan’s Half Acre” (?), old gas stations signs, plus a dancing hula girl.
“Green Spot Motel remains a Route 66 icon,” fellow travel blogger Don Nadeau told me via Twitter.
The museum is larger than I expected it to be; in addition to the main room – there’s so much on the walls, ceiling and on the floor it resembles a flea market or an old antique store – there’s two more rooms and a hallway with more, more and even more stuff.
I walked around in a kind of daze, wishing Tere or somebody with knowledge and stories could explain all of this to me – where the signs were on the highway, what all this stuff meant to the highway’s history, etc. Most of it, naturally, was focused on what was in Victorville, but I was trying to picture the whole highway back in the day.
Even tho it was a slow-moving Sunday in Victorville, I was surprised to see the museum was quite busy. There were about two dozen people in it. Most were playing tourist, huddled around the small gift shop area, so I pretty much had the actual museum to myself.
I spent maybe 45 minutes there, then went out to check out the old main road, which was once Victorville’s downtown at the height of Route 66. A sign over the street proclaimed “Old Town Route 66” and I was eager to see what the old town could offer the modern traveler .
A cold beer in an old-fashioned saloon, the kind with swinging doors? A country cafe with the best chicken fried steak this side of the Mississippi?
Nope. But if you want cheap discounted furniture, there are two of those places. And if you’re low on gas there’s two stations (and a couple more two blocks away), including a modern AM/PM convenience store. They sure didn’t have those in the days of Route 66!
The only other open business was a Mexican meat market. Every other business was boarded up, and I mean literally.
With no chicken fried steak or other hearty country meal to make me stay, I said goodbye to Route 66 and headed back to L.A. On the interstate highways, of course.
Cheers!
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