There was only one road back to L.A., U.S. interstate 15. Just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker, and Barstow, and Berdoo. Then on to the Hollywood freeway straight into frantic oblivion. Safety… obscurity… just another freak in the freak kingdom. We’d gone in search of the American dream. – Hunter S. Thompson
No matter if you’re on your way back from a Las Vegas induced drug binge or tooling through northern New Mexico, there’s nothing like a stellar road trip, and one of the most famous highways in the world happened to run right through us:
Santa Fe lost its place on Route 66 in 1938. Founded in 1610 on the ruins of an abandoned Tanoan Indian village, Santa Fe has been a capitol for nearly four hundred years making it the oldest capitol in the United States. The Palace of the Governors was constructed between 1610 and 1612 and is the oldest government building in the country. Once this town was the end of the old Santa Fe Trail (a portion of which was shared by Route 66 between 1926 and 1937), an exotic destination luring the earliest Anglo explorers and traders west.
The Santa Fe Trail would serve as part of the southern route to California during the gold rush of 1849, followed by the railroads in the 1880s and in turn the old trail would inspire the building of a national highway that would later become Route 66.
If you want to travel on 66, you can follow the signs, but if you’re up for some other killer routes of different numbers than check out our suggestions and we encourage you to add your own, because there’s nothing like a road trip.
Jack Kerouac summed it up nicely:
We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move.
