A living relic. A prominent Missouri author explores the great American road trip’s genesis along Route 66.
Defining Route 66 as we approach its hundredth birthday is a surprisingly complicated proposition. “It’s a road,” you might be tempted to say, but that’s not exactly true anymore. It was a highway once. Now it’s more like a series of roads, some with more historical character than others, linked together by the interstates that eventually replaced it. You can still drive much of the original road on a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, but the road, like a river, has changed its course over the years. In some places, all that remains of the original road is a dirt track over private property. In others, like the section at Missouri’s famed Hooker Cut, the original concrete road—with cracks every few feet and vegetation growing out of them—can still be driven on.
Route 66 is no longer one road, but it can still be thought of as a path for a road trip. Inside the pages of St. Louis author Sarah Kendzior’s book, The Last American Road Trip, she brings a fresh perspective on how we might think about America’s most iconic highway. The book chronicles the road trips Sarah has taken with her family to reach destinations such as caves, national parks, and Mark Twain’s birthplace in Florida, Missouri. Almost every one of the family’s adventures starts the same way: the family sets out to discover a new aspect of America by way of its roads (and, in at least one case, its rivers).
The book devotes two chapters to Route 66, which Sarah traveled in 2007, 2017, and 2023, each time under different circumstances. The chapters discursively interweave the experiences of each trip and are primarily anchored around the last two trips she took with her husband and children. In one scene, she explains the grisly shootout that took place between the Joplin police and Bonnie and Clyde at their hideout, while contemplating the criminal history of the road. In another, the family indulges in the mirthful kitsch of Uranus, the roadside attraction in St. Robert.
Along her adventures, Sarah meditates on what it means to be an American in the modern context of political turmoil, the pandemic, and the loss of Route 66 to the interstate. She never shies away from sharing her analysis of current events, which is always a mix of anxiety and defiant optimism about the future.
In one characteristic example, she writes, “Route 66 will turn 100 years old in 2026. I am afraid it is going to die, much like the dream of escape is dying in an era of digital surveillance and climate catastrophe. But I keep chasing it, the road and the dream, because I am its target audience, the American fool.”
Through her road trips, Sarah finds Route 66 to be something between a museum and a graveyard. She relays how some attractions along Missouri’s Route 66 are still reminiscent of what they once were, while others show decay.
That is, perhaps, what must come of a road that stopped serving its intended purpose years ago but has never ceased to capture imaginations and hearts.
This book review was orginally printed in the February 2026 issue of Missouri Life.
