#Route66

It’ll not have escaped your notice that the pickup truck segment is a murderously competitive arena. In fact, if it were an actual arena, it would be much like the Roman Coliseum — or at least the upcoming 49er/Chiefs tilt in Miami — with bodies strewn across the playing field and the crowd roaring for more.

This helps explain why the Detroit Three are intent on beating each other over the head with towing and torque numbers that have climbed to dizzying heights. For 2020, Ford has unleashed a Super Duty pickup with available four-figure torque or a monster V8 the size of which hasn’t been produced by Motown in decades.

It appears that I am a few days behind Matt in cruising westbound down Route 66 in New Mexico. We checked into the legendary Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari last night and discovered that our room came equipped with the December 24, 1956 issue of Automotive News, unearthed from a long-closed dealership down the street. Some of the articles in the trade rag proved that today’s car biz is indeed, in the words of Yankee great Yogi Berra, “deja vu all over again”…

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This is it! After stopping in Oklahoma City, we are now on one of my most anticipated stretches of road in this entire trip: the Old Route 66, or the Mother Road as it is fondly called. Even though I didn’t have enough time to drive Route 66 in its entire length from Chicago to Los Angeles, I still managed to hop on it for a good 1/3 of its length, all the way from Oklahoma City OK to Gallup NM, driving alongside Interstate 40 which ended up replacing it and visiting places such as Clinton OK, Texola OK, Shamrock TX, Amarillo TX, Tucumcari NM and Albuquerque NM. We will hop back onto Route 66 later in this Coast to Coast trip in California. A thorough visit of this part of Route 66 full of photographs as well as my impressions on the vehicle landscape in this region of the United States are below…