“Get your kicks on Route 66”
– written by Bobby Troup, recorded by Nat King Cole, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones

“66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there”
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I got them 66 Highway blues”
– written by Woody Guthrie, also recorded by Pete Seeger

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Sometimes there’s a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I’ve ever seen anywhere else”
– Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly’s Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way”
– Michael Zadoorian, novelist, The Leisure Seeker

“Get your motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure in whatever comes our way”
– Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild

“The spirit of Route 66 is in the details: every scratch on a fender, every curl of paint on a weathered billboard, every blade of grass growing up through a cracked street”
– John Lasseter, director of Cars

“This highway, if you just think about it, is peppered with hope; it is peppered with tears”
– Angel Delgadio, co-founder of Arizona Route 66 Historical Association

“66 is the mother road, the road of flight.[81]”
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Route 66, 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, opened in 1926

Doyle vs Holmes

WE all know the identity of Sherlock Holmes’s arch-nemesis, don’t we – but what if the real “killer” was the great detective’s creator? Find out more when Sherlock Holmes: The Death and Life comes to the Ustinov Studio at Bath Theatre Royal on Friday 30th and Saturday 31st January.

The premise of this witty one-man play, by David Stuart Davies, is the challenge faced by an author when one of their fictional characters takes on a life of their own.

The performance – awarded four stars by the Daily Mail – is a light-hearted and intriguing investigation of the consequences of a fictional creation who behaves quite against the wishes of the author.

The play finds Arthur Conan Doyle (Nigel Miles-Thomas) tiring of his “intolerably arrogant” Sherlock Holmes, and inventing the arch villain, Moriarty, to dispose of him.

But Doyle’s dangerous strategy, combined with his passion for raising the spirits of the dead, has rather more surreal and dramatic consequences than he bargains for!

Nigel Miles-Thomas has performed in productions worldwide including the West End and with Steven Berkoff’s company. His TV credits include Dr Who, Grange Hill, The Professionals, Minder, The Dick Emery Show, The Story of English and Middlemarch.