Report
Get your fix on Route 66
Grand Canyon Brewery
Historic Route 66, in front of us, seems
to swallow us and its little traffic is
enough to make us feel forlorn, almost
abandoned and lost, like on another
planet: miles and miles of desert, the
Mojave, with very few homesteads and
sprinkled with white crosses along the
road, reminders of past accidents and
its fatal casualties.
Luckily at the horizon we can see
mountain peaks that point us towards
our destination: Grand Canyon National
Park, which extends for 4,927
km² and in 1979 has become a World
Heritage Site.
Feeling put right into a western movie,
like The Searchers (only John Wayne
is missing), yet no shadow of cowboys
on horseback around, just a few wellfed
coyotes curiously watching us. Not
even the presence of a country restaurant,
the Roadkill Café, placed in the
middle of nowhere, is enough to suppress
the feeling of being lost.
The journey from Los Angeles drags
on, but the charm that these places
emanate lets us endure all difficulties.
Of course, since the last time I visited,
in the mid-nineties of the last millennium,
many things have changed, as
always, some for the better, others for
the worse. With almost 6 million visitors
a year, mass tourism has reached
remote places such as this, removing
a little mystery and charm from the
place.
The first to be fascinated by this wonder
of the world was the Spanish conquistador
García López de Cárdenas.
US Route 66, 3,755 km from Chicago to Los Angeles/
Santa Monica, was inaugurated on November 11, 1926
and originally connected Chicago to Santa Monica
Beach, crossing the states of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Replaced by the new Interstate Highway System, it was
officially removed from the system in 1985. The road
currently exists under the name “Historic Route 66” and
is thus back on maps with this numbering.
John with wife Sarah
and son Bentley,
Grand Canyon
Brewing Company
16 BREWING AND BEVERAGE INDUSTRY · 2/2022