It’s called The Mother Road, meandering more than 2,400 miles across eight states, from Chicago to Santa Monica. It helped create towns and cities along its route, inspired songs, a hit TV show and millions of road trips. It’s Route 66, of course, and you should get your kicks (as the song says) this year, before the 100thanniversary crowds next year.
Created in 1926, Route 66 helped fuel the escape west for Dust Bowl farmers like those in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and urban victims of The Great Depression, followed by vacationers heading to Las Vegas and Disneyland. Starting in the 50s, it was replaced by faster interstates that bypassed its small towns, so the historic route today is a time warp, dotted with historic gas stations, motels, soda fountain cafes and hokey roadside attractions¾which are the heart of its nostalgic appeal.
Perhaps the most isolated–and interesting–portion of Route 66 is across Arizona, which includes access to one of the world’s most famous travel destinations, the Grand Canyon, accessible from Williams, Seligman or Flagstaff.
But let’s go in order – east to west – for the best of Route 66 in Arizona.
Arizona Office of Tourism
Petrified Forest National Park, just over the border with New Mexico, offers more than colorful ancient, petrified logs–Puerco Pueblo is the remains of a 6,000-year-old ancient village with petroglyphs to explore. Some walking paths are paved.
A few miles west is Holbrook, which is most famous for its iconic Wigwam Hotel. Try to stay in one of the dozen sturdy large steel teepees, each with its own bathroom and rustic furniture, instead of the more conventional motel building. There’s a collection of vintage cars dotting the premises, and the sprawling Rainbow Rock Shop downtown is the place to find souvenir bits of petrified wood and other minerals–look for the giant painted dinosaurs standing guard outside.
You’ll find a life-size bronze statue of a man standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, mimicking and honoring the popular song by The Eagles. The city has made it into a small park, and there’s an annual Standin’ on the Corner music festival here every September. Be sure to visit the Hubbell Trading Post, once one of the most important such depots in the Southwest and featured in several Hollywood Westerns, now a visitor center and museum, and the 9-11 Memorial, with pieces of girders from NYC’s Twin Towers.
Arizona Office of Tourism
Twenty-five miles farther west is Meteor Crater Natural Landmark, a huge soup-bowl-shaped 600-foot-deep dent in the earth left by a meteor some 50,000 years ago, one of the best-preserved meteor sites in the world. Only guided tours are permitted, and these are around the rim, not down into it. Go early in the day, and carry water, since there’s no shelter from the blazing desert sun. Recover at the air-conditioned visitor center.
Flagstaff is the largest city along Arizona’s Route 66, and many of the historic buildings still blink with their original neon signs. One of the largest, and most famous, is the dancing horses neon sign at the Western Hills Motel. The town’s social center is the Museum Club, a huge log cabin known for its live music and country/western dancing, including line dancing, which does not require a partner. It dates from the 1930s and supposedly is haunted.
Williams calls itself the gateway to the Grand Canyon, with a museum-like Visitor Center. If your time is limited, the historic train from downtown is a scenic two-hour ride each way, leaving you several hours to walk around the canyon rim, although not enough for a real hike into one of the side canyons or waterfalls.
Arizona Office of Tourism
Seligman has the world’s largest Route 66 sign, but that’s not the only reason to stop here. This is where tours start to Havasu Canyon, a Grand Canyon side canyon on the South Rim. It’s a four-hour slog to the canyon bottom, where you can swim in the pool created by Havasu Falls. When I did it, we each carried 100 oz. of water for the hike in-which I finished-and mules carried our luggage, tents and food. Or do it the easy way – by helicopter. Overnight camping is by permit only.
It’s worth spending time in Seligman, which is the quintessential 50s town, lined with old-fashioned soda fountains with names like Roadkill Café and kitschy gift shops, the largest of which is Route 66 Road Relics. The owner, known as “Big Mike,” is an endless source of stories about the road he loves. Yes, of course, rusted vintage cars and trucks are everywhere, and each May there’s a “Route 66 Fun Run” parade of as many as 800 of them driving around town.
Arizona Office of Tourism
There are two reasons to stop in Peach Springs. One is the Grand Canyon Caverns, the largest dry cave in the U.S., with guided tours, including a ghost walk that focuses on paranormal sightings. The other is to drive to the Grand Canyon Skywalk, the horseshoe-shaped glass-floored walkway that juts out several thousand feet over the canyon floor, definitely not for the faint-hearted.
Arizona Office of Tourism
Kingman, incongruously, is home to the world’s first museum of electric vehicles. Models on display range from a 1909 Elwell-Parker incorporating technology developed by a brilliant young engineer named Nikola Tesla, who once worked for Thomas Edison, to the bullet-shaped Venturi which broke the world land-speed record in 2016 (341.26 mph). Kingman celebrates its Route 66 heritage each October with a classic car show and entertainment. The town’s railroad history is encapsulated in the Kingman Railroad Museum, and indigenous artists are featured in the Mohave Museum of History & Arts.
Oatman is an old gold-mining town, pretty much a ghost town these days, famous for being where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard honeymooned and for the wild burros roaming around the sleepy downtown. There are staged gunfights in peak tourist season, but other than prowling around abandoned mining equipment, there’s nothing else to keep you here.
Arizona Office of Tourism
That brings us to the final Arizona section of Route 66, the Old Trails Arch Bridge across the Colorado River to California, which carried traffic from 1916–before Route 66 existed–until 1948. It’s no longer possible to drive over it, but it’s a great photo stop or just to marvel at the cantilever engineering. Now, it carries a gas pipeline, and vehicles travel across the river on I-40, nearby.
One thing you’ll notice–in Arizona and everywhere else along Route 66–are the Route 66 signs. They are everywhere–ginormous ones painted on pavement you drive over, smaller ones on murals on the sides of building, metal signs at intersections, canopy signs at the entrance to a town, even a ghost town. The pride is everywhere, matched by a nostalgia for a world gone by that you can visit by modern slow travel.
In 1999, Congress created the Historic Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program to protect small businesses along the route, and many local landmarks are administered by the National Park Service. The plan is that one day this will become a National Historic Trail, perhaps even a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Wouldn’t it be great if that happened in 2026, the 100th anniversary of Route 66?
Plan your Route 66 road trip through Arizona at visitarizona.com.