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Fun Ahead: Return of the Great American Road Trip
Route 66 Redux
Cruising the southwest stretch of the classic highway
By Kimberly Brown Seely


	Sign for the times: Route 66, New Mexico (Jeremy Woodhouse/PhotoDisc)

OUR FAMILY, LIKE MOST, GAVE UP ON SPONTANEITY about a minute after our first child was born. I am reminded of this one spring break a dozen years later (my boys are 12 and nine) when we decide on the spur of the moment to retrace what's left of Route 66—starting in Las Vegas, Nevada, and driving to Albuquerque, New Mexico—some 900 miles with detours. My husband and I have only a loose idea of where we're headed, but after a steady diet of schedules and play dates, the sheer randomness of the road feels fantastic. We pick up a mile-by-mile guide to Route 66 at a gift shop and, ditching the interstate, give in to the old road instead. Our high-desert spin delivers all the big stuff, like the Grand Canyon. Yet it's the funky, leg-stretching detours in between—the self-portrait taken in Twin Arrows, the pieces of pavement pocketed outside Two Guns, just standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona—where we find ourselves surprised with the unexpected adventure of it all.

Route 66 Redux: The Details

To get the goods on the mileage, directions, stops, and stays on the Route 66 Redux CLICK HERE.

Day 1 >> Las Vegas, Nevada-Flagstaff, Arizona
We head south from Las Vegas, stopping for lunch in Kingman, Arizona, (our first official point on the Route 66 trail). The neon-lined strip where I-40, U.S. 93, Arizona 68, and Route 66 converge begs to be bypassed for a simpler two-lane. We find it, veering onto the longest remaining stretch of continuous Route 66 and making a leisurely loop through the kind of towns the interstate forgot: Hackberry, Truxton, Peach Springs. Just past Peach Springs, in classic Route 66 tradition (everything from tepees to pythons competing for motorists' eyeballs), a giant fiberglass dinosaur stops us in our tracks. This, it turns out, is the 1950s signpost for Grand Canyon Caverns, where we not only climb out of the car but descend 21 stories by elevator to explore a series of huge underground chambers and weird limestone formations. The caves earn a three-star rating. "I bet bats like it here too!" hollers James, my nine-year-old, nicknamed Fruit Bat for his propensity to consume endless quantities of apples, pears, oranges, you name it. We pile back into the four-door and gun it all the way to Flagstaff, overnighting at the historic Weatherford Hotel.

Day 2 >> Flagstaff-Grand Canyon
We linger in the Weatherford's dining room while the boys pump pennies into the lobby's antique scale, which coughs up your weight and fortune. Although Route 66 runs due east from Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon is too close to ignore, so we swing north and take U.S. 89 toward the national park's less-crowded east entrance. Although we're tempted to pull off at Sunset Crater Volcano and Wupatki National Monuments, we press on to the Cameron Trading Post, stopping for bowls of eye-poppingly spicy green chile. At Desert View, just inside the park, we get an outrageous vista of vermilion cliffs rising from the Paria Plateau while far below, an impressive stretch of the Colorado River snakes through Marble Canyon.

The boys are more wowed, though, by the Watchtower, a cylindrical stone structure designed in 1932 by architect Mary E. J. Colter. The guys dash up its circular stairway but are still too energetic, so we tackle three miles of the South Rim Trail. My husband has his heart set on staying at the El Tovar Hotel, a hulking pile of stone and hand-hewn logs, and we luck into a last-minute cancellation.

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