Before sterile interstates and identical rest stops, there was a neon-lit ribbon of highway whose earliest stretches were surveyed with camels, whose paving was forced by a chaotic cross-country foot race, and which gave America the drive-through window. This episode traces the full lifespan of US Route 66, the 2,448-mile road from Chicago to Santa Monica, from its patchwork origins to its deliberate dismantling and stubborn nostalgic revival.

The conversation covers Lieutenant Edward Beale’s 1857 wagon survey along the 35th parallel, the painted-telephone-pole chaos of the auto trail era, and Cyrus Avery’s campaign to get a diagonal route onto the 1925 federal grid, including the bureaucratic fight with Kentucky over the number 60 that ended with 66. It then follows the 1928 Bunion Derby publicity stunt, the Dust Bowl migration that birthed the motor court, the golden age of neon signs and wigwam motels, and the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act and 1965 Highway Beautification Act that starved the small towns along the way.

• Why Route 66 became the first US highway fully paved end to end by 1938
• How John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath gave the highway its nickname, the Mother Road
• Red’s Giant Hamburg in Springfield, Missouri, credited as the world’s first drive-through restaurant
• The 1985 decommissioning, the ghost town of Two Guns, Arizona, and the 1999 National Route 66 Preservation Act
• Why states paint Route 66 shields directly on the pavement to foil souvenir thieves