Wolfgang Werz took a drag on his cigarette and a sip from his coffee cup, looked at his watch and blew his whistle. It was 8 a.m. in the parking lot of the Best Western in suburban St. Louis, time for Mr. Werz to rally his troops — a dozen German and Swiss tourists — so they could jump on their Harley Davidson motorcycles and head out on Route 66.
Mr. Werz, who is 67, rattled off the day’s stops on their roughly 200-mile stretch through Missouri: the Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba; the rocking chair in Fanning; the Devil’s Elbow Bridge; the Redmon’s Candy shop in Phillipsburg; and, by about 5 p.m., Springfield, the birthplace of the highway known as the “The Main Street of America.”
Then Mr. Werz, a wiry, weather-beaten former ski instructor from Tubingen, Germany, looked at the group of middle-aged bikers in leather jackets and boots and gave them their marching orders on day three of their two-week, 2,500-mile sojourn from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif.: “Let’s go get your kicks.”
The “Mother Road,” as John Steinbeck dubbed Route 66 in “The Grapes of Wrath,” turns 100 this year, and the motels, diners and gas stations along the road have repaired their neon signs, refreshed their menus and stocked their shelves with commemorative goods for the flood of extra traffic. Tourism boards and Route 66 associations have held classic car rallies, street painting contests and art installations, including a 23-foot stained-glass-style push pin that marks the midpoint of the road in Oklahoma.
No one buys a ticket to visit Route 66, so numbers on how many tourists it attracts are imprecise. A Rutgers University study in 2011 estimated about $132 million in annual spending along the highway. Jennifer Wilding, a community engagement adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, whose domain includes four states intersected by Route 66, expects spending to be markedly higher during the centennial. The amount is probably less than a week’s worth of revenue at Disney World, but it is meaningful to small businesses.
The shops along Route 66 lean into their location, and as I drove sections of the route with Mr. Werz and his group this year, business owners said the anniversary was providing a significant financial boost.
International tourists are among the biggest sources of spending. More than one-third of visitors, by some counts, are from overseas. There are Route 66 associations throughout Europe and South America, as well as in Japan, Australia and beyond. Shopkeepers say that international travelers stay longer and spend more than Americans, who are typically older and buy less.
Jennifer Brennan, the co-owner of the Fanning 66 Outpost in Cuba, Mo., said sales had jumped about 50 percent this summer, with magnets, bracelets, and salt and pepper shakers selling especially well. “We’ve been ordering like crazy to keep up,” she said, adding that 120 international motorcyclists had stopped by that day.
Roberto Vannelli, the most gung-ho member of Mr. Werz’s group, bought 16 T-shirts by the time he made it to Arizona. Peter Fordemann and his wife, Katja Weinert, spent about $10,000 each to join Mr. Werz’s tour, a bucket list item that included flights from Germany and motorcycles they rented in Des Plaines, Ill.
Patrick Tuttle, the director of Visit Joplin, in Missouri, said visitors from 45 countries signed the guest book in city hall last year, when people from outside the United States spent $5.7 million in Joplin — the majority of whom were probably travelers on Route 66.
Mike Cowen, who turned a gas station into a gift shop in Williams, Ariz., said about 60 percent of his customers were from abroad.
Yet it can be an edgy time for international visitors to travel through America.
Sam Murray, who guides New Zealanders on Route 66, said some customers canceled their reservations this summer because they were nervous about the political climate. The strong U.S. dollar, combined with higher gas prices, airfares and travel insurance, also played a role.
But largely, Route 66 felt like an apolitical haven. International visitors told me they were reluctant to wade into political debates they had little stake in. Shopkeepers and restaurant owners did not want to alienate their customers by airing their own views.
“Friends say to me, ‘You can’t go to the U.S. now,’” Mr. Werz said. “I always say, every country has its problems. Presidents come and go. Route 66 stays the same.”
For decades, Route 66 was the quickest way to drive across the country for sharecroppers escaping the Dust Bowl, soldiers reporting for duty and travelers relocating. That last group included my parents, who moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1960. The road was filled with motels advertising air conditioning and color television, stores hawking souvenirs and restaurants that would soon be mythologized in the movie “American Graffiti.”
But as the interstate highway system expanded, many towns along Route 66 were bypassed and withered. The last stretch was bypassed in Williams, Ariz., when I-40 opened a few miles away, and the entire road was federally decommissioned in 1985.
Not long after, Angel Delgadillo, a barber in Seligman, Ariz., helped form the Historic Route 66 Association, which convinced the state to erect “Historic Route 66” signs to draw tourists back to their towns. The other seven states along the road followed.
It worked. Thousands of tourists trying to relive the era of road maps, station wagons and full-service filling stations returned to Route 66, even though it was no longer a contiguous artery. Route 66 enthusiasts speak reverently about the road, like Trekkies or model train nerds. The Route 66 Sentinel, a magazine whose slogan is “Watchdog of the Mother Road,” never seems to run out of material. Some “roadies” collect pins, shot glasses and other tchotchkes.
Some international fans said they learned about the road from Steinbeck’s book or the namesake Bobby Troup song. Raised in Germany, Mr. Werz said he fell in love with Westerns, classic cars and images of the American West.
“I grew up watching ‘Lassie,’ ‘Bonanza’ and John Wayne movies, and this was always America to me — the diners, neon signs, cars, and cowboys and Indians,” said Mr. Werz, who has Route 66 tattoos on both arms.
On his first trip on the route in 2009, Mr. Werz was struck by the friendliness of Americans. He returned the next year and the year after, when he brought his friend Anja. She loved the trip so much that after they finished in California, they went to Las Vegas and got married.
Wolfgang and Anja started a nonprofit group and have led about 20 tours, becoming minor celebrities. When their group visited Gary’s Gay Parita, a roadside museum in Ash Grove, Mo., the owners, Barb Turner Barnes and her husband, George, hugged Wolfgang and Anja like old friends.
Ms. Barnes said she loved international visitors. Plenty of Americans stop by, of course, but they are often in a rush. “We as a culture aren’t built for the contemplative,” she said. The walls of her gift shop were covered with stickers left by tourists from Costa Rica, Japan and elsewhere.
Roberto Rossi, who runs a Route 66 Association in Italy and wrote “Route 66: An American Myth,” agreed. The vistas are gorgeous and the sense of freedom palpable, but befriending people along the road is the main reason he has returned many times since his first trip in 1990.
“To me, Route 66 is not simply a road,” he wrote in an email. “It is a family that begins in Chicago and ends at the Santa Monica Pier.”
Several shopkeepers told me that international travelers wanted to see the “real America.” A better description might have been a “lost America,” when Route 66 was in its heyday before interstate highways plowed through the country.
As I traveled parts of the route, I was reminded, though, that the heyday was not universal, especially along stretches of the road where Jim Crow laws were enforced and people of color were unwelcome in many establishments.
Outside Oklahoma City, the Threatt Filling Station, one of the few Black-owned gas stations on Route 66, was a poignant reminder of that period. The station was an oasis for Black travelers in search of gas, food and a campground to avoid so-called sundown towns, which excluded people of color after dark into the 1960s.
“If you were a white traveler, your experience on the road would be a lot different than a Black traveler,” said Trait Thompson, the executive director of the Oklahoma History Society. “We tend to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses and with nostalgia, but it wasn’t that way for everyone.”
As Route 66 enters its second century, people along the road wonder what the future holds. During the road’s first renaissance in the 1990s, the journey appealed mainly to older Americans who had traveled Route 66 decades earlier. Then came the baby boomers, whose parents drove the road.
Michael Wallis, who in 1990 published “Route 66: The Mother Road,” is credited with igniting a renewed interest in the road. He was also the voice of the Sheriff in the 2006 Pixar film “Cars,” which takes place in a fictional Route 66 town, Radiator Springs. The movie has introduced younger fans to the road. Replica cars from the movie sit outside gas stations to attract families.
In Seligman, busloads of tourists speaking Mandarin and Spanish continue to stop at Angel Delgadillo’s old barbershop gift shop. Currencies from 166 countries are stapled to the ceiling.
Social media has helped shops and restaurants reach new fans. The Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, livestreams customers who try to win a free 72-ounce steak, plus a potato, salad and shrimp cocktail if they finish it all in one hour. Dozens of videos of the contests circulate widely on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. When Mr. Werz’s group arrived, Mariano Moesges, a burly woodworker from Hannover, Germany, tried and failed to finish the meal.
“We’re a wet canvas, and people are painting it,” said Bobby Lee, the restaurant’s owner.
The entire road is a kind of canvas. Many towns feature murals painted on building walls and vintage neon signs on storefronts. Musical roads, with bumps on the street that play a song when you ride over them, were built in Tulsa, Okla., where drivers can hear Woody Guthrie’s anthem “This Land Is Your Land.”
“Until you’re on it, you don’t see it,” said Rhys Martin, director of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association and manager of Preserve Route 66 for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and whose wife, Samantha Extance, worked on the musical road. “You can put your stamp on it.”
Only toward the end of their trip did Mr. Werz’s group begin to reflect on all they had seen. Taking two weeks to drive 2,500 miles might seem like a lot of time, but the group was busy, making half a dozen or more stops a day. They drove through New Mexico, made a detour into southern Utah (posing for a photo where Tom Hanks stopped running in the movie “Forrest Gump”), took helicopter rides over the Grand Canyon and traversed the Arizona Sidewinder, an eight-mile stretch with 191 hairpin turns at steep elevations with few guardrails. Each evening, they pulled into a motel parking lot, grabbed their bags from the S.U.V. that Anja drove, opened cold cans of Budweiser and relived the day.
The official end of Route 66 is at the intersection of Lincoln and Olympic Boulevards in Santa Monica, where it connects to the Pacific Coast Highway.
But for the German and Swiss bikers, and for many other travelers, their trip concluded not at the route’s actual finish line, but on a pier about a mile away.
That’s where Ian Bowen hawks souvenirs out of a hut next to a sign that reads “End of the Trail.” Mr. Bowen is a Route 66 geek, but he is also an interpretive vessel for the thousands of pilgrims who finish their journey exhausted yet exuberant at his little shop.
Every year, Mr. Bowen sells a couple thousand commemorative certificates for $10 each to customers who clutch them proudly. The certificates are hokey, but they help keep the memory of the journey alive.
“I know that when people are on the trip, they’re sharing pictures with friends and family and posting some stuff on social media, but I want them getting asked about it 10 years later,” Mr. Bowen said.
In mid-June, Mr. Werz’s tour arrived at Mr. Bowen’s shack and almost everyone bought a certificate. (Mr. Werz also provides his own in German.) The trip had been exhilarating, and for many of the participants, the everyday Americans they met stood out. As Jim Hinckley, a historian of the road and friend of Wolfgang and Anja, said during a stop in Kingman, Ariz.: “Route 66 — it’s the people. It’s a highway that doesn’t even exist.”
Having made the journey dozens of times, Wolfgang and Anja told their group knowingly that they would not fully grasp the trip until they got back to Europe.
“Route 66 is like Mount Everest,” he said. “You have to do it once in a lifetime.”
