Trip 66, Day Zero

Some background on the cross-country road trip I'll be recounting here:

I recently heard an interview on public radio with the president of the Lincoln Highway Association. The highway, the first transcontinental road on North America, just celebrated its centennial. It was established partly to promote automotive as a preferred means of travel; at the time only a small percent of Americans even had automobiles, and even those who owned one weren't keen to drive along rough rural terrain in them. The highway wasn't even paved—it was just a smoother dirt road alternative to the other cross-country roads of the time. It was also continuous, so that a traveler wouldn't have to hop around from different snippets of local roads to make his way from New York to San Francisco. Some segments of the highway did follow historic routes that were already in existence.

I had intended to drive Route 66 to get my car from Chicago—where I’d been living for a couple of years—back to the Los Angeles area, to where I had recently returned. Six months of being car-less in Car Land was plenty and I decided I could save money on shipping my beloved hatchback, Bunny; get in a visit to my Windy City and all the amazing friends I have there; and have a fun road trip on the way back. I never really considered not doing the trip solo, although most people told me I was a little bit crazy not to bring someone with me. Believe me, I watch enough “psychopath of the week” procedural shows to have a healthy fear of rural gas station attendants and hotel night clerks. What I fear more is the complete dissolution of my relationship with whichever lucky friend gets to be stuck with my crabby ass for 2,000 miles. I decided to take my chances with the psychopaths.

Since Route 66 is no longer a continuous functioning highway, I like to think that my choice to drive the more modern Routes 40 and 44 is like a someone in 1913 choosing the new Lincoln Highway over the segmented older sections. Safer and quicker, but still rife with history.