Benton Harbour - Chicago - Bloomington Normal

Got in the Ford about 9:15 am to head off to the start of Route 66 in downtown Chicago.  Then spent about 40 minutes idling the card while trying to reconcile

• the written descriptions we had in several books that pegged the start of Route 66 as the intersection of Lakeshore and Jackson in downtown Chicago
• the tiny printed map of downtown Chicago we had
• the new TomTom GPS which steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the above streets existed
• the old Garmin GPS which steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the above streets intersected

 We finally got on the road, with a half-baked plan, and drove I94 in more cold, driving rain.  As we got downtown, the sky cleared, and beams of sunlight shone down on Chicago and its tall buildings.  We did indeed find the intersection, and with some California U-turns stopped a few feet away and took a celebratory picture.

Chicago looks like a great place to come back to, stay downtown and walk around.

Most of the original Route 66 in Chicago has long since been paved-over or built-over.  So having found the start, we made tracks for Joliet, where the road first emerges from the urban sprawl.  We spotted the first "Historic Route 66" sign and we were off!

We spotted our first bit of vintage Route66 kitsch in TBD with the Gemini Giant (see photo.)  Remember the Muffler Man chain?  It seems they commissioned a bunch of statues to use as signs, of a uniformed man holding a muffler.  When they went out of business, some of these statues were re-purposed.  One of these was bought by the Gemini Drive-In Restaurant - they ditched the muffler in favour of a cartoonish rocket ship and helmet.

There were a couple of vintage gas stations in Lexington and Odell. 

We stopped in at a fine Route 66 museum in Pontiac.  Pontiac is a pretty town, with a fine courthouse, well kept and decorated with Route 66 murals everywhere.  It looked a lot more prosperous than many of the smaller towns we went through, some of which lost most of their custom when the I-55 was built a few miles away.    We saw several classic cars in the car park.  (Oops, no-one told us we were supposed to drive a classic car on this trip.)

The drive from Pontiac into Bloomington-Normal was quiet.  In Illinois, Route 66 is usually sandwiched between the railway (which was probably the inspiration for its original routing, being the major line from Chicago to the west coast) and the interstate which eventually replaced it.  At one point, traffic was sufficient that they actually had a divided highway, with two lanes in each direction.  Once the interstate was built, the volume of traffic dropped off, and hereabouts they actually de-commissioned one of the carriageways to save on maintenance costs.  You could often see the remains of it, narrow by today's standard, a hundred feet to the right, badly cracked and bracketed by "Road Closed" signs every time a side road crossed it.  It must have galled many of the citizens of these small towns to see them wither as their trade sped by on the new interstate, usually just a mile or so away, for which they did not even qualify for an exit.