I have been enjoying in the last few days a beautiful book named Route 66 Backroads: Your Guide to Scenic Side Trips & Adventures from the Mother Road. It was written by Jim Hinckley and features photography by Kerrick James, Rick Bowers, and Nora Mays Bowers. The title is somewhat misleading, but not in a bad way. Before looking through the book, I had assumed that it would highlight 66 sites and other places of interest nearby. While sites such as these are covered, the scenic side trips take you far away from the Mother Road, showing many of the other interesting areas within the eight Route 66 states. In my home state of Illinois, for instance, we travel along Route 66, then take an excursion along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, a scenic drive along U.S. 52 from Joliet to Galena, and another north from Springfield to Peru. There is a drive from the St. Louis area north along the Great River Road to Nauvoo, and finally a trip from Cahokia down to the southern tip of Illinois at Cairo. While all of these drives start on 66, they take you up to two hundred miles away on fascinating adventures.
This last spring, I had the pleasure of taking a few of these excursions (although without the help of this book at the time). Carol, the kids and I drove 66 from Chicago into Missouri, then returned to Illinois and traveled north along the Great River Road to the Quad Cities. We then went east to Peru and followed the Illinois & Michigan Canal corridor back to Joliet. Thus, I can attest that these trips away from Route 66 are well worth the time spent.
The photography throughout the book is stunning, and the narrative compelling. I give the book my highest praise: it makes me want to jump in the car and take a road trip!
Voyageur Press, 2008, $24.99US. ISBN 978-0-7603-2817-0.
Click here to go to the upcoming events and blog previous posts (archive)
In 2004 at the Route 66 festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know Russell Olsen. He was at the festival selling his first book, Route 66 Lost & Found. The book did two things better than just about any other work on Route 66 that I have seen: first, Russell used vintage postcards and photos of Route 66 sites, then he paired those images with modern photos of the current look of the same site taken from the same vantage point. Second, and almost as important, he accompanied those paired images with knowledgeable text that told little-known details of the background of the sites. The results are intimate, knowing, and exhilarating.