 Route 66 stretches across eight straight states from Chicago to LA. This iconic highway represents so much to people worldwide. And for me when we were actually driving on the route, one of my favorite things about, you know, driving this iconic highway was to take the old highway Route 66. So these offshoots that most people, without knowing what they're looking for, would totally miss. Some of these are original brick highways. Some of them are as narrow as a sidewalk. Some are wide and they're part of an alignment that had this curvature on the side as you're driving up and down the hills of Route 66. This was most iconic in Oklahoma and we took an offshoot and only spent about 10 minutes on the road, but I remember the feeling of finally understanding what it meant to have Route 66 laid down where the landscape was. It's not cut through, it follows the land as it rolls along. So that was really iconic. One of the things that in working with our National Park Service folks they really talked about is that with Route 66 you can feel the landscape change in a way that when you're driving on the interstate, it's pretty flat and it's pretty consistent. It kind of removes the waves that come with the landscape and there are certain states where you could feel the landscape in a totally different way. In Oklahoma, in Texas and in the Mojave Desert. The other thing that stood out to me a lot was that especially as you get farther and farther west, the wide open spaces and that natural landscape is so much of what people love about Route 66 and is arguably one of the most threatened pieces of it right now as well is that wide open road trip experience and that's what makes some of those roadside attractions and some of those kitschy businesses along the way to like a spark of joy as well. One of my favorite things about the landscape in Route 66 is that one of the only National Park that exists on Route 66 is Painted Desert and there are some really interesting histories around Painted Desert and what that area meant before and after Route 66 was built. Before Route 66 was built, this was a, you know, this was the Petrified Forest. It was a beautiful otherworldly landscape that just happened to exist in our natural world and when Route 66 went through the Painted Desert that all of a sudden became a part of Route 66's story and now travelers on the route experience this, you know, magical, colorful space on their way to their next destination and throughout the route we saw things like the Grand Canyon and the Mojave Desert and how these changing landscapes affect how we see Route 66 and they also affect the things that are celebrated at the different shops and businesses along the route. One of the other things that really stood out to me with Route 66 was the overlap of space and time as well and this was something that our National Park Service friends talked a lot about but there's the physical spaces along Route 66 the actual physical trails that we're pushing for a new National Historic Trail but there are existing National Historic Trails along the 66 as well. There's the Trail of Tears, there's the Santa Fe Trail, there's the Camino Real, there's all these other ones that have connections to Route 66 as well and then there's the overlapping time as well. So all these stories, there's the native stories and the African American stories and the automobile and the colonization of America and just all these different things that overlap in time and in history as well and when it was described to me before I got out on Route 66 I don't think I fully understood that that there can be this physical and time overlap but now having been on Route 66 that 100% makes sense to me.