Route 66 museum trips to small towns

Many towns along Route 66 lost most of their traffic when the interstates opened, and some of them answered by opening a museum. The results are some of the most personal collections in the country: the Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame in Pontiac, the restored Kan-O-Tex station in Galena, Kansas, the Coleman Theatre in Miami, Oklahoma, and two fine state-run museums in Clinton and Elk City.

Our 8-day Main Street Museums trip runs from Chicago to Oklahoma City and visits about a dozen of them, at a pace that leaves time to talk with the people who run them. Several open specially for our groups, and we pay the entry fees and leave a donation in every volunteer-run collection.

The road captain on this trip is Darlene Moss, a former librarian from Pontiac who knows the curators by name. Expect old gas pumps and maps, but also local history: lead and zinc mining in the tri-state district, the Dust Bowl migration, the Trail of Tears and the Mother Road's place in Black travel history.

The full route coach trip, the Illinois and Missouri section and both day tours also stop at these museums.

Most of these museums are small enough to see in an hour, which leaves time for the town around them: a courthouse square, an old movie theater, a cafe with photographs of the road in its heyday on the walls. Between the museums the road itself is the exhibit, with restored stations, bridges and murals every few miles.