When I set out last week on America’s storied Route 66, I had to wait in line behind groups of Taiwanese and Italian tourists to grab a selfie at the sign where “the Mother Road” begins in downtown Chicago. Despite America’s rapidly declining image overseas, this mother of all road trips — nearly 2,500 miles across the American heartland, from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean — remains particularly popular among overseas visitors.
“I had people from 19 countries here in one day, recently,” Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum docent Rose Geralds, 87, tells me. She gestures proudly at the visitors’ log, which showed entries from Brazil, Turkey, Italy, Japan, the UK, France and Australia on the day I visited.
Geralds reckons at least one-third of museum patrons are from overseas — and there’s been no decline, she says, since the beginning of the second Trump term. It helps, she adds, that the “Main Street of America” celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, alongside the nation’s 250th.