In early July, a young team from the National Trust for Historic Preservation began a month-long Preserve Route 66 tour to drum up support for congressional legislation to declare Route 66 a National Historic Trail.
Using stops along the Mother Road and the power of social media, the National Trust — with the blessing of the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership — said the group would be “documenting their experiences, attending meet-ups, and bringing attention to an icon of American history.” The trip concluded about a week ago.
So how did it go?
According to an email Wednesday from the National Trust, the group collected more than 58,000 signatures from Americans in support of the National Historic Trail designation for Route 66. One member of the group told me in early July he was optimistic they could hit 50,000 by the end of the tour.
Other fun facts from the Route 66 journey:
- The group made 232 stops along the 2,451 miles of Route 66.
- They spent 50,400 minutes on the Mother Road.
- They used 380 songs on their Spotify playlist.
- In terms of souvenirs, the National Trust group collected 35 postcards, 22 magnets, eight cacti and four figurines.
- The small Airstream trailer encountered little trouble — one windshield was repaired, and one nail was pulled from a back tire.
- Highest temperature during the trip was 113 degrees. The lowest was 52.
By my count, the National Trust’s Preserve Route 66 tour also generated several dozen stories in newspapers, magazines, radio and television media.
One of the most interesting follow-up stories about the tour was by Landscape Architecture Magazine. The article reveals the National Trust wanted young correspondents to bring a fresh viewpoint to Route 66:
Instead of filing another report on the endangered cultural heritage of the route, the National Trust wanted to curate a living, first-person experience that could introduce Route 66 to a new audience. They wanted to show “this quintessential American road trip that’s been written about and celebrated for decades, [and] tell it through the eyes and ears and Instagram photos of a new generation,” says Jason Clement, the director of marketing campaigns for the trust.
The Trust hired five millennial “roadies” (a term of endearment for Route 66 aficionados) to traverse the route from July 2 through August 3. Along with a photographer and a handful of National Trust staff, the roadies rotated into an Airstream trailer one at a time, each assigned a specific stretch of road, to document their trip through words, images, and social media posts. Presented as something midway between an expediently organized college road trip and the glossy staging of a lifestyle magazine, the project offered a blue-skied optimism with Polaroid photos and decadent pie Instagrams essential to the shared narrative of Route 66.
One of the correspondents was Morgan Vickers, who was quite taken by her stretch of road from Clinton, Oklahoma, to Albuquerque:
Vickers was taken by the otherworldly rocky outcroppings of eastern New Mexico, amid orange clay and green vegetation. In southwestern Oklahoma, Vickers was amazed by the rolling High Plains hills of countless grazing cattle, with a pond at the base of each mound. “Growing up on the East Coast, I don’t think Oklahoma was a place I ever really thought of going to,” she says. But: “I have never seen anything as green and lush in my entire life.” She texted a friend, “Why would anyone want to be anywhere except in Oklahoma?” It was, “for lack of a better word,” she says, “perfect.” […]
Vickers remembers the Midpoint Café in Adrian, Texas, where a dotted line in the road delineates the halfway point of Route 66. She pulled off the road for a photo, but ended up lingering in conversation with locals and other travelers. “The draw is the kitschy things on the side of the road, but what keeps you there is the conversation with the people,” she says. […]
“I really felt the deep sense,” says Vickers, “that I was in someone’s hometown [with] every single place I went to.”
That human connection will prove vital to Route 66’s future, Clement said.
Automobile dominance is in no danger of disappearing overnight despite Route 66’s struggles, but it’s not the way forward. This acknowledgment will have to be part of any comprehensive rehabilitation of the road. But Route 66 is emblematic of a mode of travel that is increasingly rare: travel that is about the journey as much, if not more, than the destination. “You don’t get that on an airplane,” says Clement, a seasoned business traveler who navigates airports three weeks out of each month. Route 66 is a continuous, analog experience, in contrast to the segmented, digital nature of air travel: flitting from one place to another in a hermetically sealed steel tube at great altitude that severs any connection to the ground experience. It offers a “sense that you actually go through communities and support them, as opposed to bypassing them,” says Clement.
(Instagram image by David Kafer of Morgan Vickers racing fellow “roadie” Grant Stevens along Glenrio Road, aka old Route 66, in New Mexico)
Sounds like Ms. Morgan “gets it”. Congratulations to her for her new-found sense of adventure. Hopefully this won’t be her last!
I saw the Landscape Architecture Magazine article on Facebook yesterday, and ended up spending a happy couple of hours entranced by all of the stories and pictures by the team who went on this fascinating trip. They wrote with great eloquence, thought and exuberance. Their skill at creating atmospheric photographs – not just pictures – resulted in many powerful images, which gave me many flashbacks from previous trips. They have really captured the essence of the Road. Yes, Ms. Morgan and her companions really do “get it”, and I think many people of all ages who see, read, and hear about their tour will “get it” too because of their good work.