During our three-month Route 66 road trip, we visited quite a few car museums along the Mother Road. That probably isn’t surprising considering Route 66 and classic car culture go hand in hand. From vintage cruisers and restored classics to flashy muscle cars and movie vehicles, there are car museums…
Route 66 State Park ended up being one of the most unexpectedly interesting stops during our time exploring Missouri’s stretch of Route 66. At first glance, it seems like a quiet state park near St. Louis with hiking trails and river access, but there’s a lot more history here than…
There are a lot of small city history museums across America that mostly feel like collections of old artifacts and faded signs. The History Museum on the Square in Springfield is definitely not one of them. This museum takes the history of Springfield and the Ozarks and turns it into…
If you’re driving Route 66 through Missouri, the Red Cedar Inn Museum in Pacific is one of those stops that’s easy to miss, but absolutely worth pulling over for. It’s a small, free museum right off the Mother Road, but it does a great job of telling a much bigger…
Dr. Edmund A. Babler Memorial State Park ended up being the perfect home base for our Route 66 stretch near St. Louis. It’s just a little outside the city, but close enough to make it easy to explore some of the smaller Route 66 towns like Pacific and Eureka, while…
Spending time along U.S. Route 66 always feels a little like stepping into a living museum. Every small town has its own stories- neon signs that have been glowing for decades, roadside diners with generations of history, and museums packed with pieces of the past. During this stretch of our…
There are a lot of places along Route 66 that claim a special connection to the Mother Road, but Springfield has one of the strongest: it’s widely known as the birthplace of Route 66. In 1926, a telegram sent from the Colonial Hotel in downtown Springfield confirmed the highway’s now-famous…
Our Route 66 trip officially began from our home base in the Chicago suburbs, but we intentionally skipped Illinois (for now). After exploring much of Illinois Route 66 over the years, we’re planning a separate summer road trip (without the RV) to properly revisit and document those stops. We also…
The Weldon Spring Site is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management–controlled nuclear waste disposal site with a public interpretive center. That combination alone makes it memorable. During our Route 66 Centennial road trip, we were staying at Dr. Edmund A. Babler Memorial State Park just outside of…
Atlas Obscura is still one of my favorite tools for planning our travels. If you’re new to it, imagine a global guidebook filled with the strange, fascinating, and wonderfully odd, written by both everyday explorers and curious editors. You can track places you’ve visited, save future must-sees, and build your…