Route 66 – in an NSX

Route 66 is perhaps America’s single most famous road.

I’ve always wanted to drive it, so when the opportunity came up to do so, I jumped at it. Especially when we could do it in an Acura NSX.

Here’s our tale, complete with stunning photography:

Factory

Honda and Acura may hail from Japan, but in this case, it's an American car for an American road trip, then: the NSX factory is in Marysville, Ohio, close enough to Chicago for photographer Luc and I to collect it from the factory. I say close, it’s four hours away.

I like the NSX in the UK, but in its width, in its demeanour, it sometimes feels not strictly for us. It’s distinctly, intentionally, not a McLaren 570 GT or Porsche 911.

Chicago

So after a factory tour and a cross-state journey, a mid-evening start in a freezing cold Chicago, Illinois, is ours. Around 85% of the ‘original’ Route 66 is driveable. The guidebooks say to allow a month, perhaps more, to do it properly. We’ve got just eight days.

Dwight

We’re going east to west because that’s how Route 66 found its fame. That direction has always been a migratory path, never more so than in the 1930s when repeated droughts in prairie states – dust even fell in Chicago and New York – drove millions west towards California.

Out of Chicago, Route 66 city roads becomes suburban ones, which becomes highway, and we get as far as Dwight, two hours away, by nightfall. Don’t do as we do. Late, tired, unplanned, we find a terrible motel and a fast food joint is the only open place to eat. Poor start. Sorry Luc. My bad. 

The old gas station

The morning gets better. Dwight is one of those bypassed towns. Quaint, quiet. We find Paul, a volunteer at the old gas station, a museum yet to open for the season. Driving by, he sees us taking pictures and pulls in, in England a prelude to ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’.

A great car

Here it’s a warm invitation to talk about the route and the NSX. Which, as it goes, is turning out to be terrific: a 300+ mile range, a compliant ride, width that matters not a jot out here and a nose that just about copes with America’s ludicrous driveway ramps.

Odell

From Dwight Route 66 picks up parallel to the Interstate, then dips off again as the Interstate veers around the town after town. Highway, town, highway, repeat. Next to Dwight is Odell, where a sweet café wouldn’t look out of place in San Francisco or Shoreditch, except for the tremendous size of the omelette and that it’s accompanied by chips and gravy, what with this being breakfast time.

It only takes a couple of these to realise that if you stopped at every coffee shop on old Route 66 and mooched around every town, you could spend a year doing this trip. Some people do. I’d try it but at some point the editor would stop signing off my expenses.

Statues

So on we go. To Atlanta, Illinois and, er, that’s weird: a large statue of a man holding a hot dog. There are a few of these blokes holding different things: a rocket, a tool, and so on. You get used to it. Atlanta is like Back to the Future’s Hill Valley from 1955, only quieter. All you can hear is songbirds and the occasional V8 pick-up truck. Everywhere you go, the background muzak in America is a V8 pick-up truck. Which is fine by me.

Flying saucer

More driving, more signs – for the ‘historic’ route, and the retail that modern America is built on. More motels. More antiques, never more so than at the Pink Elephant Antique Mall, a mecca to tat, and a flying saucer the size of a comfortable flat, which, to be fair, I’d quite like to take home.

Route 66 can get a bit confusing around big cities. St Louis is America’s central port, because the Mississippi river is massive here even though it’s still a thousand miles to the sea, and the original Route 66 route varied year on year before it was replaced by Interstates. Sometimes there are signs telling you which Route 66 years you’re driving on. You kinda pick one and run with it; a migratory route upon which towns sprung up. 

Museum

I like Springfield, Missouri’s state capital where there’s a great car museum: the Route 66 Car Museum. The absent owner – only ever referred to as Milky – just has an eclectic, but very cool taste in unusual cars. If you’re anywhere near, you should go. Michael, who works here, is more interested in the NSX.

What’s it like? Well, most amazingly it fits the four bags Luc turned up with, but I’m taken with its ability to shorten distances, slink onto electric power only, for short, quiet spells around town. And that everybody loves it, regardless of whether they know what it is – about half of people you meet.

Drive-in theatre

America’s intrinsic car culture, which I’m envious of, means that almost everyone you meet is curious. Nobody thinks you’re a show-off. We’d un-embarrassedly turn up to a Drive-In movie in one, had we not arrived two weeks before the first showing of the year. But it doesn’t matter where you go, in an interesting car it feels like you’re among friends.

The old bridge

In Kansas, which doesn’t get much of Route 66 – merely 11 miles of it nips through the top of the state – Luc is on top of a beautiful old bridge, a one-way road since bypassed, and I’m stationary, or reversing the wrong way, in a $160,000 supercar, when a police car drives past on the adjacent causeway. We just get a wave.

I know not all of America is like this, and that it helps to look wealthy. There’s grimness here. The radio news tells me Oklahoma has approved nitrogen gas for executions, followed by a chat with the three most right-wing people I’ve ever listened to on the radio.

Whale

But look, this is a feelgood road trip and what we’re looking for is... heck, will you look at that whale! Oh my. A steel and fibreglass anniversary present, apparently. The bumph doesn’t say how it was received. I think Luc thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. On the right day it’s top three.

A car graveyard

It’s better, by miles, than the famous Route 66 landmark – Cadillac Ranch, the ten half-buried cars near Amarillo. There are lots of abandoned cars in the US, so actually seeing ten of them in a field is only unusual in that they’ve been buried up to their middle. Originally an art installation, it now feels like a shrine to consumerism.

It’s filthy, and there are scores of mildly-embarrassed looking parents whose kids scour a stubble field littered with thousands of discarded empty spray cans, in hope of one that has a few squirts of paint left, before tossing away the empty cans into the dusty evening where they become somebody else’s problem.

Monument Valley

It feels like you’re almost home at this point, but actually you’re not even at McLean. There’s mile after mile after mile of being on, or near, the I40, with individual trailers and single houses dotted to the side.

There’s a lot of wilderness to see. Monument Valley isn’t exactly on Route 66 – as in it’s a seven hour round trip off it, so all of those pictures you see of it, including in this feature, I suppose, are a total con – but if you have time it’s worth it. It’s more interesting than Route 66 and you’ll have had enough of the antiques shops by then anyway. You can even take in the Grand Canyon. A lot of people do, and then head up to Las Vegas.

The Petrified Forest

So the further west you go, the less it feels like Route 66 is being traded on. There’s more to see. Route 66 used to spear right through the Petrified Forest, and look closely and you can see where a small crown in the bush next to a line of disused telegraph poles, but it’s the Forest that’s the star. 

Sitgreaves Pass

Arizona, meanwhile, has a bit of road called the Sitgreaves Pass, where at least I can put the NSX in manual for a moment. A road so good that they’ve put a 20mph limit on it that everyone ignores. Having driven 2000 miles in mostly a straight line, it’s like they put all the corners in one place. The steering’s directness is terrific.

It’s the first time in a week I notice the gearshift paddles are attached to the wheel, not the column, and you finally realise that there’s real sports car chassis beneath this thing. We spend quite a long time on this road.

Oatman

It leads to Oatman, where somebody must have had a flash of marketing genius, or was very stubborn, 130 years ago, because they left things exactly as they were. Now it’s full of donkeys and shops selling precisely the kind of tat that you’d expect them to: Route 66 plaques and number plates and firefighter-honouring penknives.

Open roads

And now we are nearly home. From Oatman it’s a relatively quick run into California – America’s open and largely uncongested roads lets you cover tremendous distances in no time at all – and the Route 66 theme begins to dry up. I suppose these towns depended on it less back in its heyday; and certainly do now. Or maybe most Route 66ers have had enough of it by now.

The end

So the signs begin to thin out, and Route 66 ultimately ends with a fizzle, rather than a bang, as you head into, and across, Los Angeles. You pass the skyscrapers and the road falls westward on Santa Monica boulevard, where a sign signifying the end of Route 66 used to sit.

Only it doesn’t now. A couple of years ago it was relocated to Santa Monica pier, because Los Angeles doesn’t shy from a marketing opportunity, and to hell with tradition. But it’s fitting: they’re all trying to make something out of Route 66.

Is it a trip worth taking? Yeah. If I drove America again, I’d do a different route; maybe only start on 66, maybe only finish on it. But you see a lot of America, which is something in itself. Mind you, imagine getting to the end and remembering you live in New York.

Scroll through to see more photos from our trip…

On the Route 66 in Missouri

On the Route 66 in Missouri

Kansas

Oklahoma

Oklahoma

New Mexico

California

Arizona

Arizona

Missouri

Missouri

Missouri

Oklahoma

New Mexico

New Mexico

New Mexico

Utah

Arizona

Arizona

Arizona