Ancient Web: The Road Wanderer Kept a 2003 Route 66 Caravan in Daily Pages
Guy Randall's Road Wanderer website combines a personal history of the American West with a surviving day-by-day 2003 Route 66 Caravan photo diary.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
The Road Wanderer asks visitors to leave the interstate and notice what the older highway still remembers: neon motels, trading posts, abandoned mining camps, and the businesses left behind when traffic moved elsewhere.
The homepage carries a web-design copyright beginning in 1998 and a last-update note from June 2012. Its creator, Guy Randall, describes growing up in the American West during the aerospace boom, moving among California, Texas, and Colorado, and developing an affection for the landscape and its roadside history.
His sections include Route 66, ghost towns, Indigenous rock art, historic Boulder, and an N-scale model railroad called Magnolia. The model recreates a fictional Rocky Mountain mining community at the transition from steam to diesel locomotives.
A highway preservation trip, uploaded as it happened
The most valuable preserved material is Randall's 2003 Route 66 Caravan coverage. The trip began April 29, with support from Hampton Hotels' Save-A-Landmark program and road historian Jim Conkle. Randall photographed and wrote daily reports as the group traveled from Santa Monica toward Chicago.
The entries are far more specific than a retrospective itinerary. A May 2003 Arizona report records meeting Angel Delgadillo in Seligman, an advocate for historic Route 66. Later pages document museums, neon signs, roadside businesses, and the people who maintained them.
A June report from Joplin and Webb City describes former mining communities and a retired barber's Route 66 shop. The June 23–24 entry captures the sadness of participants beginning to separate after arriving in Chicago, while others prepared to head back west.
The online diary was not just tourism. The group helped draw attention to preserving historic buildings and businesses, including the Eat-Rite Diner in St. Louis. Randall's individual captions keep the names of proprietors and local preservation supporters beside their photographs.
The site's old links and image-heavy pages may not all work perfectly now. They nevertheless preserve a journey recorded close to the event, when publishing from the road required maintaining linked HTML pages rather than uploading to a social feed.
Read the caravan's Chicago arrival and explore the larger Road Wanderer archive.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #ancientweb, #photography, #route66, #travelogues, #roadsidehistory