Route 50 – Day 18

This is the last day of the road trip. I had three things on the docket for today. The first was to see the last remaining 9′ wide section of the original Route 66 road. More on that in a moment. The second was to visit the Route 66 Vintage Iron Motorcycle Museum, but when I got there it looked like it had closed and everything had been sold or removed. That was a bummer. The last was to meet up with my youngest daughter in St. Louis for a wonderful dinner. As the song says, two out of three ain’t bad.

Route 66 was discontinued in 1937, but it still lives in the hearts of minds of the American public. It was the first time that you could drive across most of America on a paved road. The 9′ section that I went to see was a single lane road for this part of the route. Here are a couple of pictures.

In this section of the highway you can see that for modern times, they have widened the sides of the road enough for two cars to comfortably pass. This is no longer a main road, but it must have been an interesting trip to travel this 100 years ago when another car was coming right at you.

So thus concludes my road trip that covered Route 50 out to California, part of Highway 1 along the Pacific coast and then following Interstate 40 and 44 back to Missouri.