Get Your Kicks On Route 66

One of my favorite nieces (actually they’re all favorites) is a talented and entertaining writer whose posts on her own blog often tickle my funny bone. In a recent tale about a road trip she mentioned Route 66, and that’s all it took for my memories to rev up to full speed like a super-charged muscle car. Well, maybe not that fast, but…

Road trips — especially those from my younger years — have always been the source of some of my fondest memories, and I’ve written about them at least twice before. (Here and here, if you’re curious.) And even though we didn’t often actually travel on Route 66, it was even then a well-known national highway. These days, the remnants of the highway are pretty inactive, but the nostalgia attached to its name is still a strong force.

Those thoughts were in my mind today as I was going through some old pictures and color slides, and some of those from past road trips reminded me of a dilemma we often faced. It seems as if there were always two schools of thought about taking pictures on trips. In a nutshell, do you show the scenic stuff or the people?

In most cases, we tried to do both, and like most compromises it didn’t do justice to either side. The scenery was often truncated and hard to see with any detail, and the people usually looked stiff and awkwardly posed. But none of that really detracted from the trip itself, and even after a half-century I can remember that we usually managed to have a good time and create a lot of lasting memories.

Vince Gill W/ Del McCoury Band — “Give Me The Highway”