Apparently most Americans recall Route 66 fondly, but I'm not one of them. I was a Route 66 baby. With divorced parents living in Chicago and Santa Fe, then Los Angeles, I spent summers doing shuttling along Route 66. To me it was a series of speed traps, tourist traps, fly traps, greasy spoons, and feeling ready-to-heave-nauseous in the back of a series of family wagons crawling across a mostly boring, flat landscape. When the arrival of interstate highways turned Route 66 into a two-day trip (Santa Fe to Chicago) and disconnected the drive from the little towns that did everything they could to divert you to spend money, I viewed the change as a huge leap forward.