Dan Rice, Owner and CEO of 66 to Cali, pulls out his Route 66 booth at the Santa Monica Pier on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. Rice sells made in the USA Route 66 T-shirts, travel guides and a variety of Route 66 souvenirs. Rice is a Route 66 enthusiast who has traveled the route more than a dozen times. He has driving it in as few as 3 days and as long as 2 weeks. Rice opened 66 to Cali at the Santa Monica Pier to provide an official ending to the route and to welcome the drivers. "The Santa Monica Pier is the spiritual end to Route 66." Rice said, "its the end of the road, and the beginning of the dream."
U.S. Route 66 (also known as the Will Rogers Highway after the humorist, and colloquially known as the "Main Street of America" or the "Mother Road") was a highway in the U.S. Highway System. One of the original U.S. highways, Route 66, US Highway 66, was established on November 11, 1926. However, road signs did not go up until the following year. The famous highway originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, before ending at Los Angeles, encompassing a total of 2,448 miles]. It was recognized in popular culture by both a hit song (written by Bobby Troup and performed by the Nat King Cole Trio and The Rolling Stones, among others) and a television show in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, U.S. Route 66 was referenced in the 2006 Disney/Pixar film Cars. Route 66 underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, changing its path and overall length. Many of the realignments gave travelers faster or safer routes, or detoured around city congestion. One realignment moved the western endpoint further west from downtown Barstow to Santa Monica.