Janice Mollet doesn’t know how many people come through the restored Valentine Diner at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma. But her friend and fellow museum volunteer Sharon Brown pointed to a box of hundreds of push pins sitting on a shelf near wall maps of the U.S. and the world.

Mollet and Brown greet every summer visitor to this obligatory stop along Route 66, the Mother Road, and they invite each visitor to put in a pin — not necessarily to mark where they’re from, but to mark how far they’ve come in search of America.

“By the end of the summer, every one of those pins will be in those maps,” Brown said. “People come from everywhere.”

There’s never been a better time for American families to get on the road. So gather up the family. Drive past a few cornfields and hay meadows this summer. It’s good for the soul — and good for the country.

Your trip doesn’t have to be down Route 66, but it could be. Oh, and leave the politics behind. On that early summer Friday that Mollet and Brown were running the diner, President Donald Trump’s relationship with billionaire Elon Musk was blowing up. But along the broken stretch of Route 66 that runs between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, the escalating feud counted for absolutely nothing. The women held court in the converted and relocated 1950s diner just as if it were 1958 and Dwight D. Eisenhower were still president. The working Wurlitzer jukebox, which features The Four Tops, Pat Boone, and other classics, still only costs a quarter.

The building is a prefab steel diner made by a Kansas company. It began its life as Porter House Café in a nearby town, closing just eight years later.

“The diners cost $5,000,” the Oklahoma Historical Society explains. “Those who purchased and operated Valentine Diners agreed to place 10% of their daily gross income in a lock box at the diner’s front door to make payments over a period of time. Each month, a Valentine Company representative — the only person with a key to the lockbox — would stop by train, open the box, and send the collected payments to the manufacturer.”

The diner was acquired and restored by the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum, opening at the new location in 2003. Now it only sells candy and soda, but it’s a can’t-miss stop for cheesy tourist photos.

Brown considered what brings people to this small Midwest town of just over 11,000. She knows Elk City’s currently not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else — at least, not since the interstates were built. But once, the town was an important stop on the national highway that linked Chicago to Santa Monica. Some of Route 66’s former glory remains in the preserved, restored, and sometimes faked artifacts of the era.

“People come here looking for the kitsch — for the Americana,” Brown said. “Some arrive here with lists of the things they want to see and places they want to go, like they’ve been planning it for years. And they seem so happy to be here.”

Mollet has made the trip on Route 66 from her home in Oklahoma to its end in Santa Monica, California. But she’s never been the other way: from Elk City to Chicago. She said she’d like to do that next year, when Route 66 celebrates its centennial. The magic of Route 66 isn’t lost, not even on her.

Good for the Soul

There are so many benefits to family travel. As journalist Jim Dalrymple II wrote of traveling with children:

A family becomes more than a collection of affectionate people who meet for a few hours each day to swap stories of their individual work, school, or extracurriculars. A family that travels together evolves — even if for just a brief moment — into a team of collaborators, pilgrims who are part of something bigger than themselves.

But summer travel is also good for the country. Americans rejected the Biden administration’s call for lowered expectations and the warnings of an inevitable American decline, and they’re in a very different mood right now. Earlier this year, Rasmussen found that a majority of Americans believe the country is on the right track — for the first time in two decades of polling.

And after the forced shutdowns and travel restrictions of the Covid era, families are back on the road and seeking new experiences. The corporate media simply aren’t prepared to deal with this kind of optimism. A slew of stories warns about how Trump’s policies are driving away international tourists.

For her part, Brown hasn’t seen any such boycott. She told me that just one day prior, she and her friend had welcomed visitors from Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom to their small diner. The international tourists still arrive — sometimes by the busload.

“It’s going to be a good summer,” she predicted.

Connecting to America

Route 66 is all about connections, Lianne Halpern knows. She and her husband, Aldo, (with the help of sister Jaime) run the U-Drop Inn, a diner in the restored Conoco Tower building in Shamrock, Texas. This rare example of an art deco gas station was built in 1936, with an attached dance hall.

“This was an important stop,” she noted. “When the station was built, about 5,000 people lived here. It was the first stop in Texas on Route 66 for travelers going west.”

A cardboard cutout of Elvis and a plaque commemorate the time in 1963 when “the king” himself stayed at the nearby Sun ’n Sand Motel (now the Route 66 Inn) and ate in the corner booth at the U-Drop.

Its green neon beaconed travelers and tourists until I-40 came through. It fell into disrepair in the 1990s, and now the city of Shamrock owns it, while Halpern’s family leases the restaurant portion. The dance hall is now the Shamrock Visitor’s Center, and bands are still sometimes booked for special events.

But that’s not the inn’s real claim to fame now, or why so many families seek it out. In 2006, the animated movie Cars used real Route 66 locations as its models, and the U-Drop Inn was cast in the role of Ramone’s paint and body shop in Radiator Springs. Cars connected whole new generations to Route 66.

Halpern’s own connection to this portion of Route 66 is deep and familial. She grew up nearby, but like so many, she left for college and her career. After learning the restaurant business in California, she felt the pull of this seemingly desolate part of the Texas panhandle. She made her way back, with a stop in Arizona, which resulted in her “coming back to Texas to escape the heat” — surely the first time in history anyone has ever said those words!

She loves the small-town life and the lifeline Route 66 provides. The Mother Road still sustains industry and commerce, just as it has since it was established.

Halpern returns the favor. Her culinary education and market research into the Route 66 clientele led her to keep the menu simple.

“What I found is that people want American food, comfort food, on their Route 66 trip,” she said. “They want authentic. They want Grandma’s meatloaf. So that’s exactly what’s on our menu — my grandmother Ava’s meatloaf.”

Halpern has preserved the lunch counter in the U-Drop Inn even though she could probably fit a few more tables into the space. That’s because she loves interacting with the travelers who stop in.

“They want to know everything,” she said, before going on to echo something Mollet said in Oklahoma: “They’re just so happy to be here.”

There’s something about Route 66 that rises above the everyday and even the political. People get along here because they’ve come to connect to something bigger. People don’t visit Route 66 to change America; they come to be changed by it.

“No matter where they’re from, they have a passion for America,” Halpern said. “And this is America, distilled.”