American Road Trip - Route 66: an Australian's Travel Guide to the 'Mother Road'

One of the reasons for writing this book and sharing our photos is to help people who wanted to do the adventure that is Route 66. Another reason was to recapture the journey, the moments, and the anticipation of one of the greatest road trips on planet earth.The planning and anticipation of our Route 66 road trip was one of many years, simply because living in Australia and the tyranny of distance, we thought it would be cost prohibitive. The other banal reason was I was very unsure about driving on the wrong side of the road - in Australia we drive on the left-hand side of the road but in the US it's the right-hand side of the road. But after a family trip to Disneyland, Universal Studios and San Diego Zoo in 2005, I figured that driving our hire car for the two hour journey with wall to wall automobiles on a Southern Californian Freeway (going the wrong way down the road) to San Diego was remotely stress free, then surely I could manage three weeks driving across the United States of America some day!And so with some excitement and anticipation, tentative discussions began - "...could we do Route 66?" The resounding answer was "yes!" But how and when? The most logical time frame for the trip was around the time of my 50th birthday (June 2011) so we could celebrate and have a reference point for people who ask "...why are you doing that?" It seems that in our generation you have to have some kind of justification or an impetus for "doing" something.Anyway with all that said, this book is a guide from the perspective of a couple of Australian's, to help anyone and everyone who has ever dreamed of doing the adventure, on whatever budget you might have, and travelling across the United States of America on the Mother Road - that is Route 66.