Stephen Shore on Route 66: A Scavenger Hunt of Sorts

Beyond the icons — Cadillac Ranch, Gateway Arch, Petrified Forest National Park — there’s more to see along Route 66 than we ever could have accomplished on our trip five years ago.

We tried, and even with three weeks to complete the near-2500 miles miles of the route, we couldn’t visit everything we threw onto our Route 66 itinerary.

But that didn’t stop me from trying to sneak in my own little extras.

One of my side agendas along the way was to see if the places photographed by artist Stephen Shore in the 1970s were still in situ.

If you’re not familiar with Shore’s work and you’re also a fan of the American road trip experience — wow, are you in for a revelation.

In Shore’s collections Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, among others, he captures the melancholic beauty of the mundane throughout his travels across America.

Two-lane highways studded with gas station signs, the quiet brick facades of small downtowns, unassuming restaurants with paper placemats and Formica tabletops, motel rooms and parking lots… these are the everyday scenes we tend to absorb without documenting on our trips. But Shore saw them as something worth documenting.

Each photo in these series is labeled with the location and date, so I knew we’d have a few opportunities in Amarillo, Texas and other Western stops on our trip.

So I gathered a few sites to scope out along the way.

Please note: I respect copyright and don’t reproduce other artists’ work without permission, so please click the links in each description below to see Shore’s original images.

Some sites on Route 66 were easy to find:

Because the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona was one of our must-stop motels on the trip, I knew this one wouldn’t be a stretch.

I didn’t have a drone or a helicopter to capture the Amarillo National Bank Building from the same angle as Shore did in the “Tall in Texas” postcard series, but that building is hard to miss in downtown Amarillo!

And my greatest victory was finding the beef burger barrel building seen from the parking lot of a Toot’n Totum in Amarillo. Shore’s image includes the classic Toot’n Totum signs, which had of course been replaced by the time we showed up, but the barrel remains!

Other sites were long gone.

In Amarillo, the drive-ins photographed by Shore — The Double Dip and The Sunset — had fallen prey to redevelopment.

In Holbrook, the laundromat seen on Navajo Boulevard was a bust as well. It didn’t help that we arrived just before sunset after a gorgeous but long day in Petrified Forest and had to leave early to make it to Flagstaff the following day!

And our worst weather moment of the trip came as we drove through Kingman, Arizona, so I didn’t have a chance to suss out this empty pad site somewhere along Route 93. However, I was never so grateful to eat at a Cracker Barrel as I was that morning.

But it was fun to search.

Every time I go on a road trip, I tend to see things through a Shore-ian lens. Buildings with a history (with a small h as much as a capital H), hand-painted signs, the way neon has a certain glow — it all speaks to me.

Hey, I love a sweeping landscape as much as anyone (including Shore!), but it’s the quotidian moments on a road trip that add up to a full complement of the experience.

So in between the big destination stops, I like to see what else is out there. And I thank Stephen Shore for reminding me to notice.