Research
Now, we'd seen on TV somewhere, that while Calais is not an attractive place to visit (aside from its many and bountiful hypermarchet wine departments), Bouloigne is a very attractive, tourist-friendly destination and only a short drive from Calais, so we decided to go there instead and be tourists.
We very much enjoyed the journey, stopped and bought a bootful of beautiful booze, admired the scenery from the motorway, and had a pleasant drive into Bouloigne's centre-ville... and we looked at some shops... and we got a bit bored... and we went back to catch an earlier ferry home than we'd intended.
When I told my mum about this, she said to me, "didn't you go and
see the city wall?"
"Is there a city wall?"
"How about the sea life centre, you could have done that."
"Didn't know that was there."
... and so on.
So, two lessons learnt:
- Sometimes the journey is more entertaining than the destination -- this is why we're doing a great big long driving holiday, rather than stopping in one place. If we get bored, there's always going to be some more miles to get under our belts
- It's no good jetting off as a tourist without doing some research. We've known for 6 months that we're doing this, so we've been boning up on the attractions.
Drivin' Route 66 (CD)
This is
one of those corny Macromedia Director authored "multimedia"
presentations that you got a lot of in the mid 90s, when a double speed
CD ROM or a sound card was an exciting and novel thing.
It was the cover disk on PC Format in March '96, when we were both students, and it did make driving Route 66 look like a pretty cool thing to do. There's a load of pictures of classic Route 66 scenery - desertscapes, motels, neon, that kind of thing, - and interviews with people for whom the road was important during the 40s, 50s and 60s ... So that was the seed planted. It lay dormant for 4 years, before we did anything about it.
Road Trip USA, Jamie Jensen
(buy at Amazon)
This
is a compendium of road trip guides, all based on two-lane routes in
the USA. Initially I was interested in the "Great Northern" route,
which takes in Twin Peaks country, which I've always wanted to visit (maybe another time).
Truth be told, they all look like great journeys -- but we decided to
go for the corniest one first.
It's a bit bulky, but nonetheless Road Trip USA will be coming with us on the journey.
Narratives
Guide books are great, but to get a feel for a subject, there's nowt like some proper narrative fiction, and non-fiction travelogues.The library sorted me out with a copy of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (buy at Amazon) , the first piece of fiction in any Route 66 book's bibliography. It's a damn good yarn too, and I'll be thinking of it when we hit the hayfields of Oklahoma, or when we cross the brow of a hill and see California laid out before us.
Next
there's Irma Kurtz' The Great American Bus Ride (buy
at Amazon). Irma's an ex-pat Yank -- an agony aunt for one of the
UK women's mags. In this book she decides to spend a few months
travelling all over the USA on the Greyhound buses.
The thing is, she's not interested in places. You learn a lot about the sort of people you get to chat to on buses, and very little about the places the Greyhounds go between. Interesting, more a people book than a classic travel book.
Sean Condon's Drive
Through America (appears not to be available on Amazon), meanwhile,
is a great laugh, and by my reckoning, at least 10% of it is true. I'm
dubious about his claims that the FBI dragged him and his companion off
and tortured them with electrodes to the nipples, merely for making lewd
comments about Chelsea Clinton. I also wonder whether they really
stole a TV remote from every room they stayed in -- but who am I to
question these claims?
Condon's a wuss though: "America is a very big country and apart from New York we have no idea where we're going. I'm tempted to nominate Route 66 but there are two problems with that - it's too corny and there's not much left of it on the map we're studying."
Bah. Never shy away from corniness, my friend. This is America after all, home of "Touched by an Angel".
There were other travelogues... I forget. You know, all Bill Bryson books kind of melt into each other in the memory. I forget which things he despises are English and which are American...
Route 66 Traveller's Guide and Roadside Companion - Tom Snyder
(buy at Amazon) 
It
looks as if this will be the trip bible. It's a junction-by-junction
guide to the whole 2278 mile journey. Tom (yes, I know, first names...
but he writes in a very friendly manner) recommends detours, hotels,
motels, eateries, sights along the way. The book also contains reprints
of AAA roadmaps of the 1930s, overprinted with the route of the
present-day Interstates. This is how we plan to find those parts of old
Route 66 that are still navigable.
Route 66 Federation stuff
Next up there's two products
of the National Historic Route 66
Federation, the Route 66 Dining and Lodging Guide and the "Here
it is!" map series, one per state, which you buy as a pack. If
anything, the directions on these maps are more detailed than in the Tom
Snyder book. The dining and lodging is based on 100 mile stretches of
the route which are "adopted" by enthusiasts, each of whom as provided
recommendations which I guess we'll be paying attention to.
Berlitz Pocket Guides
(Buy at Amazon: Chicago,Las Vegas, [Los Angeles doesn't seem to be on Amazon]) 
Not a lot to say
about these. Even as mini-guides, there's probably more stuff in these
than we'll be able to take advantage of in the time we spend in Chicago,
Las Vegas or LA respectively.
And finally...
You shouldn't
drive any distance without an atlas.
Funny story: A few weeks ago there was a meeting a few of us had to go to in Portsmouth, so I hired a car and drove one grown up (Hah! See that, Steve?) and two students down there. Steve the grown up sat in the front and navigated. Two hours into the journey, one of the students leans over the back of the seat and says "You've got a map out! Are we lost?". Answer: "Do you see how the purpose of the map is to prevent us from getting lost?".
Alright, it was gentle humour, like the Queen's Speech, not
meant to be belly laughs.