{"id":53,"date":"2019-01-09T11:31:19","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T16:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmbaker.net\/?p=53"},"modified":"2022-08-19T07:01:15","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T11:01:15","slug":"grand-tour-1-chicago-to-bloomington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmbaker.net\/grand-tour-1-chicago-to-bloomington\/","title":{"rendered":"Grand Tour 1: The Road Trip as a Form of Quest"},"content":{"rendered":"
The post was originally published on my other blog Every Page is Page One<\/a>. The series our our Grand Tour will continue here.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Sunday, April 29, 2018 Chicago to Bloomington.<\/p>\r\n This is the beginning of the diary of the Grand Tour that my wife and I took in the spring of 2018. The tour consisted of doing the whole of Route 66<\/a>, then following the Pacific Coast Highway north as far as the Columbia Gorge<\/a> before heading back east through Yellowstone<\/a> and the Badlands<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The obvious question is, why? What it the point of a road trip? And why Route 66? Route 66 was one of the original transcontinental US highways, running from Chicago to LA. It was decommissioned in 1985 after it was made redundant by, and in some cases buried under, various Interstates. Nothing about this makes it special. It was not the longest transcontinental highway. In fact, it was not strictly transcontinental at all, since it starts in Chicago, not on the Atlantic. It was not one of the major ends-with-zero routes (though its backers tried hard to have it designated Route 60). Really, there isn’t anything special about the route itself. But it has acquired romantic associations. And, really, travel is mostly about romance.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But the romance of place is a capricious thing. I have always wanted to go to Valpara\u00edso<\/a> for no other reason than the name seems to me the most romantic city name on the planet, just from the sound of the word itself. Wherein lies the romance of Route 66? It seems to arise from a series of coincidences. Centrally, for me, it was named “The Mother Road” by John Steinbeck<\/a> in The Grapes of Wrath<\/a><\/em>, his great novel of the Dust Bowl<\/a> and the associated migrations to California in the 1930s. The places featured in a beloved novel always have romantic associations for me. But Route 66 also got a song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66<\/a>” by Bobby Troup. Then it got a TV show, Route 66<\/a><\/em> (almost none of which took place on Route 66). But perhaps most significantly, it got an entrepreneur. Angel Delgadillo<\/a> was the town barber in the small Arizona town of Seligman <\/a>on Route 66. But when Interstate 40 was built, it bypassed Seligman and the town began to die. Delgadillo founded the Arizona Historic Route 66 Association<\/a> to promote the old highway as a tourist route, essentially rescuing the town from the coyotes and the tumbleweeds. The idea caught on in other bypassed towns and soon there were similar associations in every state along the road, preserving old bits of road, and the businesses that lined it, and lobbying governments all along the road for historical designation. Today there are countless guidebooks and maps and pretty much all the old route is signed with historic route markers. It is a particularly big draw with European and Asian visitors.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Even so, what is the appeal of driving an old road like this? The Interstates will get you where you are going a lot faster and with less trouble. For me, at least, the answer is that the interstates and the old highways are fundamentally different experiences. The old highways were often patched together out of existing local routes and they are not always the fastest route from A to B. And because they are built out of old local routes, they go through every town and village along the way, greatly slowing your progress. But to me, that is the point. The old roads go through the country: through the towns, through the fields, through the mountains. The Interstates don’t do this. Like an airplane, they take you from city to city with as little interaction with the intervening territory as possible. Interstates are, therefore, less a means of fast road travel than a means of slow airplane travel.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n And for me, travel is not really about the destination, or even the points of interest along the way. It is about the road itself. It is about the road itself precisely because the road goes through, not over or around. Much of what Route 66 goes through is ordinary. Some of it is goofy. Some of it is kitschy. Some of it is blatantly commercial. Some of it is gorgeous. Some of it is ugly. All of which makes it human: a human artifact and a human place. As the Erich von D\u00e4niken<\/a> of a future age will assure our distant descendants, the interstates were built by space aliens. Route 66 was built by human beings.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But there is another romantic aspect to this. A journey is a kind of quest<\/a>. In literature, there is always some object that the hero is questing for: the San Graal<\/a>, a dragon’s hoard, a fabled city. But these are McGuffins<\/a>. The real story is in the adventure and how the hero must change in order to become worthy of the treasure. A road trip is probably not going to push you to the limits of human experience (to which, Robert McKee<\/a> tells us, a story must push its characters) but it is something of an ordeal. It is not something you take on simply for relaxation. If you simply want to relax, there are beaches for that. No, a journey is a quest, and there is a satisfaction in completing it, a romantic satisfaction, to be sure, but a very human satisfaction. And the great thing about Route 66 as a questing route, is that it presents significant way-finding difficulties. Since it is no longer an official highway, it is now a collection of city streets and country lanes, some of which have been reconfigured or abandoned. Finding all the turns, and even choosing which of the several historic alignments to follow, presents a genuine questing challenge.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n To be a valid quest, a journey must have a beginning and an end. You may stray from the route along the way (as we will). Getting lost and finding your way back is part of questing. But you must start at the beginning and you must finish at the end. In the case of Route 66, the beginning is in downtown Chicago. Not a place I would normally want to drive. But we have timed the whole trip carefully to ensure that our transit of each of its anchor cities, Chicago and Los Angeles, will take place on a Sunday when traffic is at its lightest. Day one starts, therefore, by getting to the original starting point of Route 66, at the corner of East Adams and Michigan Ave in downtown Chicago. We don’t start the day in Chicago, though, having stayed the night in Merrillville, south of the city after our drive from Kitchener the previous day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n