I know exactly when I fell in love with the West. I’ve always been proud to call myself a westerner, but an entire new world opened to me when at the age of 5, we took one of only two vacations we ever took together as a family (both of them to Missouri) to visit my grandparents on my father’s side. (It was the only two times I ever saw them.) I guess you could have called us “reverse Okies” because my father’s family came out to California during the dust bowl days and here we were, headed back on the same road, a road called Route 66.

That’s when my infatuation with the West began, when we took what was also called The Migrant Road and the Road of Flight. It was a two-lane mostly asphalt highway that stretched from LA to Chicago. Route 66 introduced me to parts of the West I’d never seen, and I loved every minute of it. The Mother Road became so famous there was even a popular television show I never missed called Route 66 that featured two guys in their Corvette who got their kicks on Route 66.

Route 66 was also called “America’s Main Street” because the empty intervals were broken by trading posts, gas stations, motels and restaurants selling everything from “genuine” Indian moccasins made in Japan, to petrified wood salt and pepper shakers. At Arizona and New Mexico Indian trading posts you could buy Kachina dolls, cowboy hats and belts, long horns from real Longhorns and in Texas and Oklahoma it was tiny vials of black crude.

Route 66 was littered with huge and unique billboards that advertised gila monsters and mountain lions just 30 miles down the road and real rattlesnakes in Santa Rosa, N.M. The Jackrabbit Trading Post billboards featured huge jackrabbits telling the kids in the backseat that they should nag their parents to pull in so they could buy “authentic” feathered headdresses and cap guns. Further down the road in Post, Texas, you could stop to see a real jackalope, a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope. I still have a postcard of a cowboy mounted on one. And who could forget the Burma Shave signs that chopped up funny messages in multiple signs divided by miles of highway like the one that said, “Don’t hang your arm out too far... It might go home in another car.... Buy Burma Shave.”

Gas stations were an oasis on Route 66 and even before the car stopped rolling the car doors would fly open and everyone would head for the restrooms. I’d never heard of Whiting Brothers gas stations before that were advertised on long yellow signs. Nor had I seen a Mohawk, DX, Horn Brothers, Skelly, Hedges or Phillips 66 station where they not only washed your windows, they checked your oil and the pressure in your tires, offered free ice for your ice chest and they’d fill your water bag hanging off your front bumper that most cars carried in case the radiator blew. All for only 29 cents per gallon of gas.

Mostly we ate out of our ice chest but I’ll NEVER forget the potato soup in Shamrock, Texas, the fried chicken at Ptomaine Joe’s Place, the Iceberg Cafe in Albuquerque in the shape of an iceberg, the Mexican restaurant formed like a sombrero, a cafe cobbled together to look like a shoe, and the orange juice sold from a roadside stand in the shape of an orange. A huge cowboy advertised The Big Texas Steak Ranch in Amarillo and it’s still there today only in a different location. And you can still get a 72-ounce steak for free if you eat it and all the fixins.

Many of the cars we met on Route 66 had a bumper sticker advertising the Meramec Caverns in Missouri or the Meteor Crater in Arizona. My biggest regret was we didn’t stop to spend one night in a Wigwam Village teepee so I could see the inside of one. I also never got to put any change in a Magic Finger’s Mattress featured in multiple “motor courts.” Funny, in two roundtrips to Missouri, I never did get to see a single jackalope. Come to think of it, nor have I ever seen one.

But I’m still looking.