The Spirit of FREEDOM Still Haunts Route 66

 

How did one road come to signify so many things to people, past and present?

Personally, I think it’s all about FREEDOM.

Our nation was founded by people on a fierce quest for FREEDOM.

Immigrants by the tens of millions have since come to America for the same reason. The burning, yearning NEED for FREEDOM is in America’s DNA and doubtless in the bloodstream of most people around the world.

 

What kind of FREEDOM?

• Freedom to travel when and where one’s heart desires.
• Freedom to believe in change.
• Freedom to live and build anywhere.
• Freedom to hope in tomorrow.
• Freedom to see new places and people, and to enjoy them at leisure.
• Freedom to connect with others who love to travel, move, or sightsee.
• Freedom to share nature’s beauty or man’s greatest cities with our families and friends.
• Freedom to escape . . . “In the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck said Route 66 is the path of a people in flight. We’re not on Route 66 yet, but Mother and I are most certainly people in flight. We’re hunched over in the front seat of the Crosley like Jack the Ripper is chasing us through the fogs of London.” ~ The Accidental Road by Jodi Lea Stewart

 

John Steinbeck used this famous highway to symbolize the grit, desperation, and migration of thousands from the Dust Bowl regions in the late 1930s, calling it a Highway of Flight. It was truly that, and more.

Free Enterprise at its best was represented by the multitudes of businesses springing up like garden weeds to service the droves of people traveling East to West and West to East. Motor courts, service stations, cafes, tourist camps, grocery stores . . . all found a way to thrive along the busy Mother Road. The automotive and transportation explosions were also aptly represented by Route 66.

 

“In the 1950s, Route 66 was a genuine celebrity. Families could actually leave their homes in the East or Midwest and drive out to the Grand Canyon or the Painted Desert. They could go all the way to the Pacific on a highway that passed through towns where Abe Lincoln practiced law, Jesse James robbed banks, and Will Rogers learned how to twirl a rope. 

“They could cross Mark Twain’s great river into lands where outlaws hid in dark caves, and drive through picture-book countrysides where cowpokes still chased dogies into the sunset.” Michael Wallis, Route 66, The Mother Road

Looking for change?

Take to the roads.

Need a better tomorrow?

Hop in the car and go find it.

Looking for Adventure?

Look no further than the highway stretching in front of you. Route 66 offered something different to each and every seeker.

 

Route 66 was a symbol of MOBILITY

 

Twenty-five hundred miles of pure Americana that to people living in the first half of the twentieth century meant not only the world, but a way to travel through part of that world.

Though officially taken out of the U.S. Highway system in 1985, Route 66 continues to generate nostalgia and give birth to new generations of travelers who long for the old glory days of Route 66.

 

Click HERE to find Guides, maps, and suggestions for a Route 66 road trip 

 

Beginning in Chicago and ending in California, a Route 66 trek is dubbed the quintessential road trip even today. Motorcycle and auto clubs

regularly schedule group road trips following “America’s Road” and indulging “in relaxed walks through historic, western-style downtowns, getting lost between dusty antique items, sipping a root beer in an authentic soda fountain, and enjoying an open-air movie before spending the night in an authentic mom and pop motel of the 50s.”

 

Route 66 represents every individual’s craving for FREEDOM. I predict that craving shall evermore pump through our veins and live in our hearts.

May Route 66 survive and thrive!

 Have you ever traveled Route 66? Of course, you have!  you! Tell us about it – we love to hear from you!

*Find Jodi on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, About.me, or roaming the roads of life in all its glory.

#novelsbyjodi

Because I believe FUNNY is better than sackcloth and ashes:

Jane: “Hey, Marilyn, have you read Jodi Lea Stewart’s latest novel, The Accidental Road yet?

“Honey, I was her main consultant!” Love, Marilyn

~ The Accidental Road ~

First-place Historical Fiction, Adventure-Drama, winner in the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards.

CLICK HERE

Kat’s almost-full-time job has become dodging the embarrassing tsunami of male attention aimed at her mother Ellie, a social butterfly who bears an uncanny resemblance to film star Marilyn Monroe. To add to Kat’s woes, her stepfather, Roy, has lately grown irrationally jealous of his beautiful wife. Kat buries her worries in movies and classical novels, but when Roy’s rants turn violent, she and Ellie plan an escape via Route 66 to the freedom of a new life in Las Vegas. Car trouble strands them in a dusty little town in Arizona where they encounter tales, treachery, and a slew of characters such as they have never met before, including mobsters infiltrating Arizona and Nevada in the 1950s. Can the road they chose bring them the life they’ve both longed for, or was it THE ACCIDENTAL ROAD bringing them to a disaster they can’t escape from? Trouble escalates when Ellie attracts the eye of a mafia Caporegime who, along with Roy, is determined to have her at any cost.

Just Released on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and anywhere novels are sold.

Jodi Lea Stewart is a fiction author who believes in and writes about the triumph of the human spirit through overcoming adversity via grit, humor, and stubborn tenacity. Her writing reflects her life beginning in Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, later moving as a youngster to an Arizona cattle ranch next door to the Navajo Nation, and, as a young adult, resuming in her native Texas. Growing up, she climbed petroglyph-etched boulders, bounced two feet in the air in the backend of pickups wrestling through washed-out terracotta roads, and rode horseback on the winds of her imagination through the arroyos and mountains of the Arizona high country. Her lifetime friendship with all nationalities, cowpunchers, and the southern gentry allows Jodi to write comfortably about anything in the Southwest, the South, and far BEYOND.

 

JODI’S LATEST INTERNATIONALLY AWARDED HISTORICAL FICTION NOVEL ~

Watch the Book Trailer for THE GOLD ROSE HERE.

I write historical fiction centered around the early to mid-twentieth century. My latest novel, THE GOLD ROSE, involves the Japanese invasion of China and the ensuing civil war that ushered in modern-day communism. No matter what the circumstances, eras, conflicts, or main plots entail… my goal is always to create characters everyone relates to. I believe that’s the kind of connective reading in which the reader and writer actually share a point in time. 😊 Happy reading, y’all!

 

JODI’S LATEST INTERNATIONALLY AWARDED HISTORICAL FICTION NOVEL ~

THE GOLD ROSE