The New York Times ran a piece this week about something I've seen with my own eyes out around the Twin Arrows ruins east of Flagstaff: Route 66 is packed with Europeans. The highway turned 100 this year, and the overseas crowds have turned out for the centennial like it's a family reunion they've been planning for decades. You can read the whole story here.

Tell you what, if you've never stood at a gas station in Amarillo or Seligman and watched a couple from overseas argue over a paper map of a road their grandparents never drove, you're missing something. The Times says these folks are chasing Americana and trying to keep war, inflation and politics in the rearview, and I'll tell you a two-lane blacktop through the desert does a fine job of shrinking your problems down to the size of the next town's water tower.

What gets me is what they come for. It ain't the fast way anywhere, and that's exactly the point. They want the neon signs and the pie shops and the motels where the door still opens with a real key on a real keychain. They want the burros walking loose through Oatman, Arizona. They want to stand at the decrepit ruins of trading posts and feel something. I wrote about Twin Arrows a few weeks back, that rusting cluster of buildings most folks blow past at 75 miles an hour, and I heard from more than one reader in Europe who'd stopped there on their own Route 66 run. They find the faded stuff and love it more than the shiny stuff, same as me.

The centennial has to be doing those little towns along the way some good, the motels and diners and souvenir shops that watched the interstates steal their traffic a generation or two back. Any town built on hard work and knowing your neighbor's name is worth a tank of gas, and it does my heart good to see Europeans figuring that out one chicken-fried steak at a time.

Now, I'll admit the cars they rent make me chuckle. From what I've seen, a lot of them go straight for the convertible because that's the postcard, even though anybody who's driven that desert in August knows a convertible is basically a rotisserie. But I reckon you don't cross an ocean to be practical. My rule has always been that the best road trip car is whichever one you can afford that doesn't beat you to death by hour six, and if a rented convertible with the top down is what makes the trip feel real to somebody rolling through Oklahoma, then that's the right car, full stop.

There's a lesson in it for us, too. We've got a road in this country that the whole world daydreams about, and half of us have never driven more than a stretch of it. It runs through the Ozarks not far from where I grew up, down around St. Louis and across Missouri on old alignments that'll rattle your teeth loose. I've been mapping out a fall camping trip through that country anyway, and reading about folks crossing an ocean for this road has me thinking I ought to give the old girl her hundredth birthday present myself. A hundred years is worth a tank of gas. Probably two.