There are roads you take, and then there is the road that takes you.
Route 66 was never a polite suggestion. It was forged out of necessity and desire in equal measure — the country's first coast-to-coast highway, paved when paved roads were still a promise most places hadn't kept. It burned through the American imagination the way only things built with real conviction do. The Dust Bowl families who drove it west carried everything they owned. The postwar drivers who followed them carried something lighter: the belief that the road could fix whatever the city had broken. That heat — that urgency — never left the asphalt.
The road still burns. You just have to be willing to feel it.
