Jill's Journal: Barstow (California), located about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, is not the most attractive town in the country or the state or even the county. I don’t say this too often, but it’s hard for us to find much to like about the town. It reminds me somewhat of Crescent City, also in California but 760 miles northwest of here in the extreme northern part of the state. Barstow is in the desert and Crescent City is on the ocean, but both are run-down, medium-sized towns that have clearly seen better days. We’ve seen plenty of rough “characters” milling about downtown in both spots that made me double-check the car doors were locked. Both also appear to have big homeless populations. And neither one is a place we’d feel safe loitering about during the evening hours (or the daylight ones, for that matter).
BUT, Barstow does have something that ranks high on the coolness scale. Historic Route 66 runs right through the town, right down Main Street.
And in the 1911 Harvey House, a historic rail depot and hotel complex from a bygone time, is the Route 66 Mother Road Museum. The museum is small, but it has several photographs and a few artifacts all related to Route 66.
Ahhh, Route 66. Now
those must have been the days to really take a road trip. We take it for granted these days that we can drive to just about any spot in the country and do it relatively quickly. Back in the 1920s, when Route 66 got its start, it was one of the first U.S. highways and stretched from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles. The "open road" was a new concept. Route 66 must have represented freedom and adventure to people whose travels, as a general rule, had previously been limited to the nearest town.
“…and they came in to 66 from tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads, 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”
--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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