Mother Road

As far as the chronicler knows, people from most cultures speak of "Mother Earth" when it comes to the myth of the common foundation of human existence.

But not everyone does. In the United States of America, this central role in the collective consciousness is not taken by something as banal as the Earth, no, it is a road. It just goes to show where car madness can lead. They really talk about the "Mother Road" here and mean the old Route 66.

Despite all the focus on rationality, one cannot escape this madness when one arrives in the area where Route 66 still exists on the old route, sometimes as narrow as in the 1930s - the section on the string of pearls Seligman, Kingman, Outman to Needles.

Here, everything that could have had to do with automobile traffic before about 1970 is declared a relic, admired a thousand times and photographed even more often. It's all a big fuss about a heap of scrap metal, under which there are some real treasures, although in most cases they are not properly restored. The "Road Houses" in particular have been very popular, formerly a gas station, towing service, workshop, and food supply station all in one. You can't get fuel there today, although there are dozens of old gas pumps standing around, at least not for a vehicle. Instead, you can buy all kinds of tourist junk, just like at Lake Königssee, only here it says "Route 66" on it. And in addition, you can find everything that the current Road House owner considers typical American - John Wayne or Elvis, depicted life-size in cardboard, must not be missing there, although their affinity for the Mother Road is certainly only loosely connected. And without the motorcycle groups, all of them naturally on Harley, all of this would only be worth half.

This section of Route 66 runs for long stretches very close to the railroad tracks. The kilometer-long freight trains in the uninhabited expanse of the Mojave Desert (eastward with up to seven dull diesel locomotives), the sparsely traveled Route 66 alongside, an occasional cactus, the shimmering, glaring, yet somewhat hazy light in the heat of Arizona - what the Upper Bavarian country bumpkin imagines the American West to be, the reality is pretty accurate.