Road trip! 8 reasons to rattle yer hocks and get your kicks

Any road trip – long or short – has a certain mystique and romanticism, but Route 66 has built a reputation as the mother of them all. “Get your kicks on Route 66” urged the 1946 Bobby Troup song. So we did.

But our latest road trip took us more places than just Route 66. From Canmore, Alberta, we headed south into the United States, then east through Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois (with a brief sojourn along Route 66), Indiana, Michigan and then back into Ontario, Canada.

Along the way, we were reminded of the eight reasons we love road trips, and a visit to the Route 66 museum in Pontiac, Illinois confirmed it.

Before Bill and I met, he’d heard through a friend that I’d gone on a spur-of-the-moment road trip from Ottawa to Montreal just to get good bagels. “She’s cool and adventurous,” he thought, so he was predisposed to loving me because of a road trip. Thirty-nine years later, we’ve done a lot of road trips together.

My road-trip nostalgia has been fed by books (The Motorcycle Diaries, by Ernesto “Che” Guevara ; The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson; Ghost Rider, by Neil Peart; On the Road, by Jack Kerouac), music (“Life is a Highway” by Tom Cochrane; “On the Road Again” by Willie Nelson), and movies (“Rat Race;” “Planes, Trains & Automobiles;” “Thelma & Louise”). In The Grapes of Wrath (book and movie), John Steinbeck called Route 66 “the Mother Road” and that’s been its nickname ever since.

Route 66 opened in 1927, the U.S.’s first interstate highway, passing through eight states from Chicago to Los Angeles. Sadly, it does not appear on maps anymore – it was decommissioned in 1985, replaced by five new interstates. However, about 85 percent can still be driven in sections. We drove a small portion – maybe a kilometre – as we came into Pontiac to visit the Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum.

The museum claims the largest collection of Route 66 memorabilia in Illinois. Showcases were piled with photos, maps, guidebooks, coffee mugs from famous restaurants, and a signed photo from Sammy Davis Jr. given to an attendant at Al Blessing’s Gas Station. The museum honours all those mom-and-pop businesses that supported travellers on the Mother Road: motels, gas stations, ‘50s-style diners, ice cream and hot dog stands. We saw dozens of historic highway marker signs, licence plates, music recordings, pop bottles, jackets, hats, menus.

We stuck our heads into Bob Waldmire’s 1972 VW camper van – chockablock full of buttons, bumper stickers and memorabilia from the Mother Road. Bob travelled its length for decades, creating Route 66 artwork and whimsical maps and supporting its establishment as an historical route. I agreed with his mantra “Travel farther, slower.”

The era of great American road trips really began in the 1950s – a prosperous time after the Second World War when roads were better and more families owned cars. I would imagine Canadians started road-tripping then too.

Here are our top 8 reasons for loving road trips.  

1. Freedom of the open road

Your schedule is your own when you’re driving on roads – no trains, planes or buses to catch at set times. You can change your route. Don’t like this bumpy freeway? Get off onto a smoother, quieter road. Don’t want to drive through a spring snowstorm? Stay an extra day in Spearfish, South Dakota. See an interesting sign to someplace? Pull over to visit the Mines of Spain or John Wayne’s Birthplace.

Road trips give you freedom to live in the moment, do what strikes your fancy. You can have soul-searching discussions with your road trip partner or go for pure fun and escapism. Or both!

2. Excitement of the unknown

“Get tanked,” said a billboard. Turns out tanking is a sport in Nebraska. You float down a river in a round steel cattle-watering tank. Who knew?

I love discovering things that I hadn’t even dreamt existed, or finally seeing things I’ve only ever read about.

We saw signs about cattle brand inspection laws. Tumbleweeds bounced across the road. Crop circles turned out to have been made by huge irrigators stretching across fields and moving in circular patterns. A prairie chicken ran onto the shoulder, then wisely turned around. A mountain runaway ramp had a “catchnet cable system” that turned out to be two parallel concrete walls with cable netting inside to stop a truck.

3. Road trip music!

My long list of favourite travel music contains many road trip songs. They have a strong driving beat that makes you feel you’re on the road, or makes you want to jump in the car. Strangely, though, we don’t often listen to music while on a road trip; it’s more of an instigator than a companion.

4. See quirky sights

Here’s the escapist part of road trips – stopping at those quirky, unusual places that are just plain fun. Vulcan, Alberta and Riverside, Iowa celebrated Star Trek – future road trips into space? Wall Drug, in Wall, South Dakota, began in 1931 as a small-town drugstore but grew into today’s enormous mall-like enclave of stores, restaurants and activities precisely because of road trips. In 1936, the druggist’s wife attempted to boost business by putting up highway signs offering free ice water to vacationers driving by on road trips to see Mount Rushmore. She was unbelievably successful. Carhenge, near Alliance, Nebraska, is a replica of Stonehenge in England, only made from old grey-painted vehicles at the ends of their road trips.

5. Meet interesting people

We walked around Lovell, Wyoming, searching for anyplace open on a Sunday evening to buy some breakfast food, since our Cattlemen’s Motel had a kitchenette. We asked a couple out walking their dogs, but they said everything was closed. Then, the woman offered to give us some of her food! We politely declined, but she insisted. “I have lots! What do you need? Bread? Eggs?” She really seemed to want to share, so I finally said yes. We walked a block to her house and chatted with her friend while she went inside. She returned with a grocery bag full of bread, eggs, butter, a can of pears, some sliced turkey, paper plates, napkins and plastic cutlery. We were blown away by her kindness and thanked her profusely.

Just past Hyattville, Wyoming, we needed directions. With no cell service and no paper map, we backtracked to the tiny village post office. While I was inside getting directions from the friendly postmistress, Bill chatted with a woman walking her dog, getting the same directions. When I returned to the car, she told us why she loved Wyoming – no state income tax, lots of sunshine, and freedom. “You wouldn’t know because you don’t have freedom in Canada, but in Wyoming you’re free to do whatever you want,” she said. I bit my tongue so hard I nearly self-pierced it. Clearly, we defined “freedom” differently. I felt like saying “Yes, people here have the freedom to get sick and not have universal health care. You have the freedom to carry guns and live with a high murder rate.” But I didn’t.

6. Eat at classic diners

In Mullen, Nebraska, we had breakfast at Big Red’s Bar & Grill, featuring “Beer, Bourbon, & Beans.” We stepped through the doorway and conversations at two tables of four stopped. Sixteen eyes sheltered by cowboy hats and ball caps studied us. Feeling like we’d walked into their living room, we paused, waved hello, and found a table. The kitchen area was dark. Eventually, one of the men stood up and brought us menus.

“What looks good?” he asked, quite friendly once his tongue got moving. We ordered bacon, eggs and coffee. Clearly not the place for lattes or eggs benny.

“Well, if you’d like to rattle yer hocks and help yerself to the coffee over there, I’ll get this cookin’ fer ya.”

I’ve never knowingly rattled my hocks before, but I took a stab at it and fetched us coffees. We studied the Hooker County history on the menus, read various signs (beer was $3, $3.25 or $3.50 depending on local versus imported), and blatantly eavesdropped.

“Not too many trains yesterday,” drawled one man, who turned out to be Jimmy. At least four trains had rumbled by before we’d turned out our lights in the motel across the road. We’d heard more all through the night and at least three or four that morning.

The sole female customer – I mentally called her Doreen – came by with the coffeepot, filling everyone’s cups. Lovely, gentle, wearing a turquoise sweatshirt with rhinestone flowers, she asked where we were from and was surprised to hear us say “Canada.” I think she’d been sent to check us out.

Our bacon and eggs were perfect, as was the bill of $13.59. We waved goodbye to Doreen, Jimmy and the gang as we left. I’d been dying to take a photo but figured that would be rude.

7. Be awed

Wondrous natural sights abound across the northern U.S. Our route took us via Yellowstone National Park, with its buffalo jams and other-worldly hot springs terraces. The Cloud Peak Skyway in Wyoming wandered through Ten Sleep Canyon with pockmarked reddish layers of millions-of-years-old limestone. We hiked around the base of Devils Tower, craning our necks to see the tall six-sided columns that give it a corduroy look. We meandered through South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, marvelling at the buttes, cliffs, striated spires and jagged rock formations.

Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota inspired awe simply for the massive size of these mountain sculptures. But our awe was not all positive. Seeing the monumental pile of rubble at the bases made me realize the sheer audacity of men deciding to blast a mountain and its ecosystem to smithereens. I also pondered land ownership issues (taken from the Indigenous peoples), the chest-thumping patriotism of Americans, and whether Canadians could ever agree on which prime ministers or Indigenous people to put on any similar sculptures.

We saw the mighty Mississippi River with barges moving downstream. At the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa, we learned about the river and discovered the city was named for Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian from Trois-Rivières, Quebec (or, as a later sign noted, from “Trios Rivieres near Quebec”).

Leaving Dubuque the next morning, we saw a sign pointing to his burial monument, so we followed it. Up a winding road we came to a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, with a 25-foot-tall limestone tower honouring the Canadian who had signed a treaty with the local Indigenous people for his land and married an Indigenous woman. We stood beside Dubuque’s tower and watched the storied river flow by. Rivers are another type of road – a route to travel without asphalt. You can’t help but think of Mark Twain and his characters Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

“All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change,” said Huck, before his river-road trip began.

8. Drive cool cars

What’s a road trip without a cool car? We once rented a black Ford Mustang convertible for the drive from Victoria to Tofino on Vancouver Island – that was our coolest road trip. This time, we found the cool cars in the Pontiac Museum, a few blocks from the Route 66 museum.

The Pontiac Museum – that’s a museum devoted to Pontiac cars, not the town museum – was filled with antique and classic Pontiacs and Oakland cars, model car kits, dealer promotional items, original design drawings, shop manuals, car parts and photos. Bill struggled to describe why his favourite was a cherry-red Pontiac GTO. “It’s beautiful. How do you describe that? It looks lean and mean. Not heavy, didn’t have fins.”

This museum was the perfect end to the sight-seeing part of our road trip home. After that, we set our Google destination on Ottawa and just drove. Although, we did take short detours in Ontario through Caledon and Newmarket to see the places where we’d each grown up. After all, detours are key highlights of road trips.

We did this road trip in late March, early April 2022. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.