The Route 66 Towns Worth Stopping In

Route 66 turns 100 on November 11, and travelers can still sleep and eat in many of the motels and cafés built to serve it. A night in a 1930s stone cottage in Missouri is on offer. So is a room in Arizona shaped like a giant concrete tipi, with vintage cars parked outside the door.

New photo stops are going up for the anniversary too. Across the road’s eight states between Chicago and Santa Monica, the towns most worth an hour out of the car are the ones where that older roadside is still open for business, where a traveler can pick up a motel key or take a stool at a lunch counter a few minutes after leaving the interstate.

Pontiac, Illinois

Walkers in Pontiac can follow painted footprints on the sidewalks between 25 outdoor murals, and the biggest of them, a Route 66 shield, covers the back wall of the Route 66 Association of Illinois Hall of Fame and Museum. Admission is free at the museum, which sits in the town's former city hall and fire station. Inside is the Volkswagen van of the late road artist Bob Waldmire, and outside, his converted school bus, the Road Yacht, is parked beneath the awning of a new Centennial Plaza that was nearing completion in late October.

The Old Log Cabin Inn on Historic U.S. 66 opened in 1926 facing the original road. When the highway was moved to the other side of the property in the 1940s, the cabin was jacked up and turned around with horses so its front door would face the traffic. Breakfast and house-made pie are served there Monday through Saturday.

Cuba, Missouri

Bette Davis passed through Cuba in 1948 and, by local account, ate two turkey dinners, and her stop is one of more than a dozen local moments painted on walls downtown, along with Amelia Earhart's unplanned 1928 landing near town. Cuba was proclaimed the Route 66 City of Murals in a 2002 Missouri Senate resolution. A few miles west at Fanning 66 Outpost, the 42-foot Route 66 Rocker stands next to a store stocked with 300 flavors of popcorn.

Rooms at the Wagon Wheel Motel have been booked since 1938, in Tudor Revival cottages of Ozark sandstone, and the neon sign out front, hung around 1947, glows over the parking lot after dark. The motel has 19 rooms, and the whole property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Right next door, the meat at Missouri Hick Bar-B-Que is smoked over wild cherry wood, and the Ory's Spud there is a baked potato buried under beans, pork, two cheeses and bacon.

Galena, Kansas

In Galena, drivers can steer straight through a 16-foot Route 66 shield with a 10-by-10-foot opening in the middle, one face painted with sunflowers and a rusty tow truck. Over Front Street, the 100-foot Route 66 Centennial Arch was built partly from roof trusses salvaged from a Joplin middle school destroyed in the 2011 tornado, and since April an eight-foot gorilla named Gus, the mascot of nearby Pittsburg State University, has been perched on top.

Pixar based Tow Mater on the 1951 International boom truck parked outside Cars on the Route, a restored 1934 Kan-O-Tex station on Main Street, where the truck goes by Tater. Lunch is served at a small counter inside. On South Main, Gearhead Curios is in a 1939 stone Texaco station that is also the Kansas tourist information center, and a Muffler Man more than 20 feet tall stands outside a restroom done up in car parts, down to a funnel urinal.

Clinton, Oklahoma

Each room of the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton is built around a song, with Woody Guthrie's "Will Rogers Highway" and the Eagles' "Hotel California" among them and author Michael Wallis narrating, and the walk ends in a 1950s diner where visitors can slide into a booth or take a stool at the counter. Admission is $10 for adults and free for veterans and active military, and the museum is closed on November 11 itself. A photo stand-in painted by local artist Lynne Chastain went up outside in July, and McLain Rogers Park has kept its 1934 Art Deco gate facing Route 66. The next addition is a restored neon sign from the demolished Glancy Motor Hotel, due on the museum's southeast corner by the end of the year.

Shamrock, Texas

The U-Drop Inn Café reopened under new operators in February 2025 with brisket and meatloaf on the lunch menu, inside the 1936 Art Deco Tower Conoco station that is the Texas design in this year's Route 66 Forever stamp set. The town's visitor center and a gift shop are in the same building. Down Main Street, the Pioneer West Museum takes up about 25 rooms of a 1920s hotel, including a space exhibit called Prairie to the Moon, and a stone said to be a piece of the original Blarney Stone from County Cork is set in a green pillar at Blarney Stone Plaza.

Shamrock's biggest weekend comes in mid-March, when a St. Patrick's parade runs down Main Street and the Donegal beard contest is judged. After dark, the station's tower is lit with LED tubing, put in after a 2013 hailstorm wrecked the old neon.

Tucumcari, New Mexico

A room at the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari comes with a garage. Private garages sit between the rooms of the 1939 motor court, some still closed by their original wooden doors, so drivers park a few feet from their beds, and the rooms have 1939 Bell rotary-dial phones.

When the neon swallows are switched on at dusk, much of the Route 66 strip is lit as well, including the camel on the Motel Safari sign and the giant sombrero at La Cita. Dozens of murals cover walls around town, among them the late Doug Quarles's 100-foot "The Legendary Road" at Lowe's Market. Dinner is a short drive down the strip at Del's Restaurant, a 1950s original where chicken-fried steak comes out under a neon sign topped by a Hereford bull.

Holbrook, Arizona

Petrified Forest National Park, east of Holbrook, is the only national park with a piece of Route 66 inside its boundaries, and a $25 vehicle pass covers seven days. About six miles from the north entrance, the old alignment is marked at a pullout where a 1932 Studebaker sits beside a row of telephone poles on the raised roadbed the highway once followed.

Visitors can walk through the basement jail cells of the 1898 Navajo County courthouse, now a free history museum, and the cells were shipped by rail from St. Louis already assembled. Dinosaur statues up to about 25 feet tall fill the yard at the Rainbow Rock Shop and stay in view whether or not the shop is open.

The Wigwam Motel's 15 concrete wigwams stand about 30 feet tall and were first rented out in 1950, and a night in one costs about $120. A 1952 Ford and a 1956 Buick are among the vintage cars parked between them, and the Lewis family still runs the place.

Seligman, Arizona

The classic cars of the Historic Route 66 Fun Run leave Seligman on a Saturday morning every spring, and this May, Angel Delgadillo, 99, was on the schedule to send them off. The former barber helped found the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona in 1987, and his original barber chair is in his Original Route 66 Gift Shop, where copies of the memoir he published in January are for sale.

The Snow Cap drive-in that his brother Juan built from scrap lumber in 1953 is a running joke with a menu. The board lists a cheeseburger with cheese, and the mustard bottle squirts yarn at anyone who squeezes it. A Guinness World Record was set there in 2022 with 266 milkshake flavors on display. The Snow Cap is closed in winter, so a call ahead makes sense in November. Heading west, drivers can stay on 85 miles of State Route 66 all the way to Kingman without touching Interstate 40, with tours 210 feet underground at Grand Canyon Caverns along the way.

Oatman, Arizona

Oatman has fewer than 100 residents and more than 500,000 visitors a year, and the wild burros on Main Street get most of the attention. Descended from burros that miners and prospectors brought into the area as early as the 1860s, they wander between parked cars and push their heads into open windows. Hay cubes are for sale in town, but feeding a burro standing on the Route 66 roadway is banned under a Mohave County ordinance, and the youngest ones often wear stickers that read "Do Not Feed Me."

Coming from Kingman means a drive over Sitgreaves Pass, 3,586 feet up, on hairpin curves, and long RVs are better off approaching from the Topock side. Free gunfight shows are staged on Main Street most days, usually between about noon and 3 p.m., with donations going to charity. On July 4, contestants at the Sidewalk Egg Fry get 15 minutes and nothing but sunlight to cook an egg. Inside the Oatman Hotel saloon, the walls are papered with signed dollar bills, and anyone ready to add one can ask staff behind the bar for a staple gun and a marker.

Barstow, California

Diners at the Barstow Station McDonald's eat inside refurbished passenger rail cars, and the restaurant was billed as the world's largest McDonald's when it opened in 1975. About two miles away, the 1911 Harvey House known as Casa del Desierto has two free museums under one roof. The Route 66 Mother Road Museum reopened there in March 2025 with a Ford Model A among its displays, and locomotives from the Western America Railroad Museum sit on the tracks outside.

Calico Ghost Town is about 20 minutes away in Yermo, with $8 admission and an extra fee to walk into the Maggie Mine. Rainbow Basin Natural Area, eight miles north of Barstow and free to enter, has a one-way dirt loop through Fossil Canyon that is best driven in a high-clearance vehicle, and the narrow road is no place for an RV.

Anniversary week takes a little planning. Oklahoma's official celebration is set for Tulsa on November 11, with a birthday bash and a Veterans Day parade, on the same day the Route 66 museum in Clinton is closed. Two days later, runners in the Route 66 UltraRun set out from Seligman on a 140-mile course toward Topock, and seasonal stops like the Snow Cap are worth a phone call before a detour gets planned around them. Rooms at the Wagon Wheel date to 1938, the Blue Swallow opened in 1940, the wigwams in Holbrook were first rented in 1950 and the Snow Cap went up in 1953, all before Congress funded the Interstate Highway System in 1956, and all four are in business this fall. When the first guests checked into the wigwams, one bed cost $4.