Get hip to this timely tip: Route 66 is still a fine road for kicks in the sticks

摘要

It may be the only road where travelers feel compelled to stop, dig up a chunk of cracked pavement, and take it home as a souvenir. The same goes for the road signs. Such is the allure of America's most famous highway—Route 66. If Manifest Destiny opened up the West in the 19th century, Route 66 was the way to get there in the 20th. The "Mother Road," as John Steinbeck called it in The Grapes of Wrath, carried the Joads to California in the 1930s, GIs to war in the '40s, and vacation-or-bust tourists to the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, and Hollywood in the '50s and '60s. Then, in 1984, the final stretch of two-lane highway was replaced by four-lane superslab and Route 66 was left for dead—the alliterative number even wiped off road maps. Now things are looking up. Last year, President Clinton pledged $10 million to preserve the historic route.