Route 66's 100th Anniversary: Essential Stops for 2026
On November 11, 1926, a federal highway planning committee designated U.S. Route 66 as a numbered road, one entry in a new national system intended to connect a country that was buying automobiles faster than it was paving the roads to drive them on. Nobody held a ceremony. Nobody cut a ribbon. The road simply existed, suddenly official, running 2,278 miles southwest from Chicago to the California coast through eight states and more varieties of American landscape than most people ever see in a lifetime.
One hundred years later, Route 66 is the most recognizable numbered highway in the world. It appeared on the decommissioning list in 1985, stripped of its federal designation when the interstate system made it technically redundant, and proceeded to become more famous in retirement than it had ever been in service. The route 66 centennial falls in 2026, one hundred years since the first road atlas printed those two digits in a keystone badge and pointed drivers southwest.
This is the best possible time to drive it.
Route 66 in 2026: Centennial Quick Facts
Commissioned: November 11, 1926 | Centennial date: November 11, 2026 Total length: 2,278 miles across eight states | Minimum drive time: 10 days States: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California
Route 66's 100th anniversary in 2026 brings a full year of programming, preservation milestones, and renewed attention to landmarks that have been dormant for years. Preservation organizations across all eight states have timed restoration work to the centennial: neon signs rewired, motor courts reopened, alignment stretches re-signed. It is the best year in a generation to drive the route properly.
What Route 66's Centennial Means for Travelers in 2026
The centennial is not a single event. It is a calendar year of programming, commemoration, and, more usefully, renewed attention to the roadside infrastructure that makes the drive worth making.
Several things converge in 2026 to make the route more compelling than at any point in the past decade. Preservation organizations across all eight states have accelerated restoration work timed to the anniversary: neon signs that have been dark for years are being rewired, motor courts that closed during the 2020s have been reopened under new ownership, and stretches of original alignment that were overgrown or neglected have been re-signed and documented. The Route 66 Centennial Commission has coordinated programming along the full corridor, meaning that travelers driving in 2026 will encounter events and exhibitions at locations that have been quiet for years.
The practical consequence: if there was ever a year to drive Route 66 properly, not as a scenic detour from an interstate, but as the primary route. This is it.
The Route in 2026: A Quick Overview
Route 66 passes through eight states: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas (a narrow thirteen-mile corridor), Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, over its 2,278-mile course. The full drive takes a minimum of ten days if you're moving with purpose; two to three weeks if you're stopping at the places that reward stopping.
Most of the original alignment is drivable. Some stretches run parallel to Interstate 40 or Interstate 55 as maintained frontage roads; others are isolated sections of two-lane blacktop through open country. A Route 66 highway map from any state tourism office or the National Historic Route 66 Federation website will identify which segments are currently accessible and where the original road diverges from the interstate corridor.
The highway runs roughly east to west, with Chicago as the traditional start point and Santa Monica as the end. Most drivers travel westbound, the direction the highway was built to carry and the route rewards that direction, particularly in the latter half, where the landscape opens dramatically as the highway crosses into the desert Southwest.
Ten Essential Stops for the Centennial Year
The full route contains several hundred documented landmarks, historic sites, and operating businesses. What follows is a curated selection of ten stops that together tell the story of Route 66 across one hundred years, from the marker where it begins to the pier where it ends.
1. The Route 66 Begin Sign, Chicago, Illinois
The sign is smaller than most people expect. At the corner of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue, with the Art Institute on one side and the sound of the El on the other, a modest marker announces ROUTE 66 BEGIN. Everything that follows for the next 2,278 miles is consequence of that designation.
The corner is the correct place to start, not because the sign is architecturally significant (it's a replica; the original markings were long since repaved over), but because standing in front of it with the full width of the continent ahead produces a specific kind of clarity about what you're about to do. The city behind you is large, the road ahead is long, and both facts are accurate simultaneously.
Chicago's Loop is worth a full day before the drive begins. The route runs west from Adams Street, through neighborhoods that look nothing like the open road country that follows, and the contrast sharpens as Illinois gradually gives way to Illinois farmland.
2. Standard Oil Gas Station, Odell, Illinois
Thirty miles southwest of Joliet, in the town of Odell, a small hip-roofed building with two service bays and a raised pump island has been standing at the corner of North West Street since 1932. It was built to a Standard Oil template, a house-style design intended to project cleanliness and reliability to motorists who were still getting used to the idea that they could drive hundreds of miles from home without running out of fuel or assistance.
The Odell station marks the point when the road trip stopped being an adventure and became an industry. It is one of the finest restored examples of early highway service architecture on the route, meticulously returned to its 1932 appearance by the Illinois Route 66 Association in the 1990s. For a centennial drive, it functions as the first explicit reminder that Route 66 was built to serve commerce as much as curiosity and that the infrastructure of service was itself a form of culture.
3. Meramec Caverns, Stanton, Missouri
The barn signs come first. For a hundred miles before you reach Stanton, Missouri, you will see Lester Dill's handiwork on the sides of barns along the route: hand-painted advertisements that directed Route 66 travelers to Meramec Caverns from as far as five states away. At their peak in the 1950s, there were reportedly more than a hundred of them, turning the landscape itself into a directional system.
Dill took over the caverns in 1933 and spent three decades making them one of the most aggressively marketed attractions on the highway. He also invented the bumper sticker. Inside the cave, the formations are legitimate. Meramec is a large, well-lit limestone system with genuine geological interest. The Jesse James connection Dill promoted so enthusiastically remains as verified as Dill intended it to be: not at all, but compellingly told.
4. Blue Whale of Catoosa, Catoosa, Oklahoma
Hugh Davis built the whale for his wife Zelta, who collected miniature whale figurines and apparently inspired a proportional response. The result is a sixty-foot concrete whale, painted turquoise, rising from a spring-fed pond on the edge of Catoosa with its mouth open wide enough to swim through. Davis never charged admission.
The Blue Whale is the Route 66 folk art tradition at its most immediately lovable, a private anniversary gift that became a public landmark by accident, then was nearly lost after Davis's death in 1990 before the community organized to restore it. It reopened in the early 2000s and has been one of the most reliably photographed objects on the Oklahoma corridor ever since. Approach from across the pond to get the full silhouette before moving in closer.
5. POPS Soda Ranch, Arcadia, Oklahoma
The 66-foot illuminated soda bottle out front is either a coincidence of branding or the most committed piece of Route 66 reference architecture built in this century, the height matching the highway number precisely. POPS opened in 2007 and stocks more than 700 varieties of bottled soda, sourced from small producers across the country and organized by flavor along refrigerated walls that run the length of the building.
It is one of the few Route 66 businesses established after the highway's decommissioning that belongs on the highway on its own terms, not trading on nostalgia, but adding something genuinely new. The contemporary Rand Elliott-designed building, with its curved roofline and floor-to-ceiling glass, manages to feel both modern and entirely at home. Buy at least one soda you've never heard of.
6. Blue Swallow Motel, Tucumcari, New Mexico
The neon swallow dives toward the vacancy sign every night in Tucumcari. The Blue Swallow Motel has been receiving Route 66 travelers since 1939, and the turquoise and coral palette glows against the New Mexico dark with the particular warmth of a building that understands exactly what it is.
This is the Route 66 motor court in its most complete surviving form, not a façade, not a museum installation, but a functioning 1939 property continuously maintained across eight decades of American highway history. The attached garages, the hand-painted room numbers, the original neon signage, and the U-shaped motor court layout are all intact. Every revival of interest in Route 66 culture eventually arrives at the Blue Swallow, because the Blue Swallow is what people are looking for when they make the drive.
Book a room. The neon outside the window is the most atmospheric night light available at any price on the New Mexico corridor.
7. Seligman Main Street, Seligman, Arizona
Angel Delgadillo has been cutting hair in Seligman since 1950. When Interstate 40 bypassed the town in 1978, Seligman's commercial economy collapsed within months. By 1987 the situation was dire enough that Delgadillo called a meeting of local business owners and proposed something that seemed impractical: lobby Arizona to designate the surviving alignment as a Historic Highway, market it to travelers, and rebuild the economy around the road's history.
The Arizona Historic Route 66 Association formed from that meeting. What followed, the state designation, the touring programs, the preservation attention that eventually spread across all eight states, which is directly traceable to a barbershop in Seligman, Arizona. Delgadillo is approaching his centennial. Stop at the barbershop.
8. Wigwam Motel, Holbrook, Arizona
Nineteen concrete teepees, the signs say wigwams, the shapes say teepees, and the distinction was never the point, are arranged in a horseshoe around a central office in Holbrook. Each one is large enough to contain a bed, a bathroom, and the experience of sleeping inside a fifteen-foot concrete cone on Route 66 in Arizona. The Wigwam has been offering this since 1950, and the waiting list for rooms on summer weekends indicates the concept has not exhausted its appeal.
The Holbrook unit is one of three surviving examples of Frank Redford's Wigwam Village chain from the 1930s, a concept built on the simple premise that a sufficiently unusual building would stop traffic that a conventional motor court could not. The original 1950s vehicles parked in the courtyard on rotating display are not decorative afterthoughts; they're the correct context.
9. Elmer's Bottle Tree Ranch, Oro Grande, California
Elmer Long spent decades welding steel pipes into branching armatures and hanging them with glass bottles in every color the industry has ever produced. The result is a forest of bottle trees scattered across a Mojave Desert lot, each tree holding dozens of bottles that transmit the desert light in blue, green, amber, and violet. The wind moves through it constantly, and the bottles produce a low percussion the desert amplifies rather than absorbs.
Long was present most days until his death in 2019, often still working. The ranch has been maintained since by family and community effort, and it remains free and open to the public, which is the correct price for something this particular. Visit in the morning, when the eastern light comes through the bottles from behind.
10. Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, California
At the western end of the pier, a sign reads SANTA MONICA 66 END OF THE TRAIL. The Pacific is directly ahead. The drive is over.
The pier opened in 1909 as a municipal sewer outfall, the least romantic foundation for the most romantic endpoint. It expanded through the 1920s into a recreational pier with an auditorium and a carousel, and when Route 66 was commissioned in 1926, the coast was already here, waiting. The End of the Trail designation is commemorative rather than original, added later to the mythology. It is nonetheless the correct place to stop.
Walk to the end of the pier before doing anything else. Let the Pacific establish itself as the actual terminus, not the sign, which is painted wood and not an ocean. Then turn around and look back at the continent you just crossed.
How to Plan Your Route 66 Centennial Drive
Time: Allow a minimum of ten days. Two weeks is better. Three is the standard for a drive where you stop at most of what deserves stopping at.
Direction: Drive west. Chicago to Santa Monica is the traditional direction and the one the highway was built to carry and the desert Southwest, which occupies the final third of the route, rewards arriving after several days of Midwest and plains travel, when the scale shift of the landscape registers at full effect.
Season: Late April through early June, or September through mid-October. July and August in the Texas panhandle and Arizona desert are manageable but demanding; winter in New Mexico and Arizona is beautiful but introduces weather uncertainty on mountain passes.
Maps: A dedicated Route 66 highway map is necessary, the alignment diverges from interstates repeatedly, and the frontage road sections where the original route survives are not always marked clearly from the interstate. State-by-state maps from the Route 66 Association offices are the most reliable.
Accommodation: Book the Blue Swallow Motel and the Wigwam Motel well in advance. Both fill quickly through the summer months, and both are experiences rather than simply places to sleep.
Plan Your Route 66 Centennial Drive: Go Deeper
The ten stops above are a starting point. The full Route 66 100th anniversary experience spans fifty landmarks across all eight states: neon corridors in Tucumcari and Tulsa, folk art environments in Foyil, Oklahoma, ghost towns on the New Mexico high plains, the finest surviving motor courts from 1939, and the artwork buried nose-first in a Texas wheat field.
Route 66 Road Trip: 50 Landmarks, Legends & Roadside Stories from America's Main Street covers all fifty in the same depth as the entries above, each with the full story, a Road Trip Note with practical orientation, and the single strangest detail the research turned up. It is the companion this route 66 centennial drive deserves for its hundredth year.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is Route 66's 100th anniversary? Route 66 was officially commissioned on November 11, 1926, making its centennial year 2026. Events and commemorative programs are planned across all eight states throughout the year.
Is Route 66 still drivable in 2026? Yes. The majority of the historic alignment is drivable, though some stretches have been replaced by Interstate 40 or Interstate 55. Dedicated Route 66 highway maps identify which segments of original road survive and how to access them.
How long does it take to drive Route 66? The full 2,278-mile route takes a minimum of ten days if you're moving with purpose, though most drivers who want to stop at the major landmarks plan for two to three weeks.
What states does Route 66 pass through? Route 66 passes through eight states: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Where does Route 66 start and end? The eastern terminus is in Chicago, Illinois, at the corner of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue. The western terminus is in Santa Monica, California, at the Santa Monica Pier.
What is the best time of year to drive Route 66? Late April through early June and September through mid-October offer the most comfortable driving conditions across the full route, avoiding extreme summer heat in the Texas panhandle and Arizona desert while keeping the mountain passes in New Mexico and Arizona accessible.
What happened to Route 66? Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985 when the Interstate Highway System made it redundant as a through-route. The designation was removed state by state as parallel interstates were completed. Preservation efforts beginning in the late 1980s (notably in Seligman, Arizona) led to historic designation programs across all eight states, and the route today is maintained and marked as a heritage tourism corridor.
This article draws from Route 66 Road Trip: 50 Landmarks, Legends & Roadside Stories from America's Main Street, a 50-landmark guide to Route 66 across all eight states , available June 2, 2026.