When I was a kid, my favorite non-western TV series was Route 66, an ongoing tale about a pair of itinerant young men who gadded about the American countryside in a sexy Corvette convertible, accompanied by a soundtrack of smoky jazz tunes. (This was so long ago that the show was in black & white.) Tod and Buz ? and, later in the series, Tod and Lincoln ? went from place to place searching for themselves, typically getting into some kind of trouble or getting other people out of it. Looking back, the subject matter was pretty heavy for a pre-teen; I probably didn't grasp the plots all that well. I think it was the sports car and the allure of the open road that drew me in.
Today, I no longer lust after a classic Corvette, but the empty highway keeps calling. The empty and quiet highway, negotiated not on four wheels but on two, where the only sounds are the whistling wind, the click of an upshift, and the purring of skinny tires over hard pavement.
For these reasons and others, I feel like Bicycle Route 66, Adventure Cycling's newest routing project, could be custom made especially for me.
The research is half completed, from Chicago to the Texas/New Mexico border. Research westward to Los Angeles will commence soon. For a preview of what to expect, check out Ginny's Sullivan's review of Bicycle Route 66 in northern Arizona, based on a quick trip she made last May.
Can't you hear it, the siren song of the open road? Can't you picture the '50s-style diners and drive-ins, the wigwam motels, the canopied service stations? Join me for a ride on the Mother Road, and together we'll bicycle back in time. We'll pedal from place to place, searching for ourselves and for the soul of the heartland.
Heck, we may even run into Tod and Buz.
Photo of Route 66 street sign in Sante Fe, New Mexico, by Michael McCoy.
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BIKING WITHOUT BORDERS is posted every Monday by Michael McCoy, Adventure Cycling?s media specialist, and highlights a little bit of this or a little bit of that ? just about anything, as long as it?s related to traveling by bicycle. Mac also compiles the organization's twice-monthly e-newsletter Bike Bits, which goes free-of-charge to more than 43,000 readers worldwide, and organizes the Bike Overnights program.
Source: http://blog.adventurecycling.org/2012/01/dreams-of-mother-road.html
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