Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When I set out last week on America’s storied Route 66, I had to wait in line behind groups of Taiwanese and Italian tourists to grab a selfie at the sign where “the Mother Road” begins in downtown Chicago. Despite America’s rapidly declining image overseas, this mother of all road trips — nearly 2,500 miles across the American heartland, from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean — remains particularly popular among overseas visitors.
“I had people from 19 countries here in one day, recently,” Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum docent Rose Geralds, 87, tells me. She gestures proudly at the visitors’ log, which showed entries from Brazil, Turkey, Italy, Japan, the UK, France and Australia on the day I visited.
Geralds reckons at least one-third of museum patrons are from overseas — and there’s been no decline, she says, since the beginning of the second Trump term. It helps, she adds, that the “Main Street of America” celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, alongside the nation’s 250th.
“Foreign travellers have become the lifeline of the road,” historian Michael Wallis, author of Route 66, 100th anniversary edition: The Mother Road, tells me. “It’s the classic American road trip, and for many, it’s the trip of a lifetime,” he says, adding that Northern European travellers particularly like to do the route by Harley-Davidson. Interstate highways cover the same ground but bypass all the small towns en route. “When you’re on 66, you are closer to your surroundings, you can see a woman in her pink curlers on a riding mower cutting the grass and you can smell that grass, all your senses are engaged,” says Wallis.
The route is known for “Mom and Pop” motels and chrome-and-linoleum diners, neon signs and art deco filling stations — all the American heartland clichés that I remember from childhood summer road trips in vast sedans without air conditioning or seatbelts. But these days, many Americans find the route’s quirky roadside attractions — the giant rocking chairs and grotesque fibreglass statues known as Muffler Men — too kitsch by half.
Still, the adoring Japanese and Italian tourists snapping selfies with the Gemini Giant Muffler Man made clear they didn’t want me spoiling their fun by saying so. “This is the true Americana,” one of them told me firmly, with the help of Google Translate.
Waitress Abby Lee is serving classic diner fare to a packed mid-morning crowd in farmers’ overalls and straggly long beards and a sheriff’s deputy in a bulletproof vest at Shelly’s Route 66 Café in Cuba, Missouri. “I had a group from the UK this morning, and lots of French and Italians. To them, this is the American dream trip. This is America in its prime,” she tells me.
The dream of recreating “America in its prime” is exactly what catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency in rural areas like this. Nostalgia is a powerful force in the heartland — both politically, and on the tourist trail, it seems.
For my money, that’s what makes Route 66 so special: chatting to the waitress who served me apple pie at the Country Aire restaurant whose display case holds truly gargantuan pie slices; and the farm wife who politely asks “you just passing through?” as I unfurl my paper route map. The gentle chit-chat over making change, the genuine pride in a buttermilk biscuit well-made, the shy smile at a compliment from strangers — that’s the Main Street of America vibe that draws dreamers from around the world to Route 66. And at a time when America’s reality is so troubled, that dream seems as real as ever to them.
At the Wagon Wheel Motel — which claims to be the longest continuously operating Route 66 motel — Francois-Xavier and Lorenza Mallez from Versailles, France, are packing up for another day on the road across America. Their chatter wakes me, and I step outside to ask why they love it so. “It’s a mythical road, it’s the books, it’s the music, it’s the movies,” Francois-Xavier tells me, his eyes misting up. “And it’s the people you meet along the way,” Lorenza chimes in. “If it weren’t for Route 66, we wouldn’t have met you!” she enthuses, insisting on a hug before they take off.
The writer is a contributing columnist