Carol Highsmith: Route 66

“When I was a little girl in the late 1940s and early 1950s, my father, who was a traveling salesman, took our family on road trips that passed through little towns across America’s Northern Plains. And every summer, my mother would drive my sister, Sara, and me through even smaller Appalachian towns on the way to spend summers with my two grandmothers—one on a rural tobacco farm in North Carolina and the other in the heart of bustling Atlanta, Georgia.

On each of these trips, I rode in the backseat, usually with my nose pressed against the windowpane, taking in—and falling in love with—the ordinary but wondrous world that we passed by.

This was the tail end of the heyday of family travel on two-lane roads, when even the coast-to-coast highways had traffic lights and ran straight through big cities and where travelers—and especially we children—were enticed off the highway to visit quirky roadside attractions such as gem shops and little zoos and dinosaur parks.

Interstate superhighways stole away most of the cross-country traffic and put an end to most of those weary journeys and almost all the tiny, oddball theme parks, as well as most home-cooking restaurants and old motels called ‘travel courts’ along the two-lane roads. Now it’s mostly people who live or farm who bother to use them.

But one remnant, or at least pieces of it, remain. It is what we called the ‘Mother Road’—U.S. Route 66 that snaked its way down from Chicago to Oklahoma, and then west all the way to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California.”

— Carol Highsmith