Nisan 1
Birth of a new year; life begins
Springtime here in California is my favorite season, bringing with it the promise of new life, and it is during this time that Randy and I celebrate our New Year. However, the spring equinox marks the first official spring days; for us, the new year officially begins on March 30 of this year, the day after first new moon on March 29 after the equinox. We do this for two reasons: First for spiritual reasons; the Hebrews acknowledged this day as the first day of the year and the first day of the first month of the Hebrew calendar known as Nisan (1st month of the Hebrew calendar) begins that day. Fourteen days after the Nisan 1 is the Passover —the day Jesus died—the date of his crucifixion. The Hebrew calendar is a lunar one and fluctuates depending on the moon cycles; hence, Nisan 1 and the Passover change yearly. A miracle itself Jesus died on the same day as the Passover, when the Hebrews put the blood of the lamb on their doorpost so the angel of death would pass over them, resulting in Pharoah releasing them from captivity. The same way Jesus death frees His believers from the bonds of slavery. Jesus death and resurrection is perfect timing and set to the astrological clock God placed in the heavens.
We also acknowledge Nisan 1 as the beginning of the new year because it is the newness when life comes out of the long hibernation of winter to renew itself. So there’s nothing more beautiful than taking a road trip. The landscape bursts into life with wildflowers coming to life and grass painting the hillsides in vibrant greens. Snow-covered mountains in the background create a symphony of hues that delight the senses.
It’s a perfect time for our road trip this weekend. So, I’d like to share a few of our past moments traveling through the California foothills and often following a portion of Old Route 66 where emerald grasses sway in the spring breeze, whispering secrets of the season. Poppies dance playfully while violets bloom, their colors pinned to the corners of this vibrant land, all crafted by God’s tender hand.
Route 66 winds through Santa Monica, California, ends in Chicago. I'm reminded of my many travels along this road named the mother road by John Steinbeck. So, this week I want to share an article I wrote about the Mother Road in April of last year during one of my journeys to Canada.
I hope you enjoy the read and all my photographs!
Mother Road
Well, if you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way, take the highway, that's the best
Get your kicks on Route 66
Well, it winds from Chicago to LA
More than two thousand miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66
Well, it goes to St. Louis, down to Missouri
Oklahoma City looks, oh, so pretty
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino
If you get hip to this kind of trip
And go take that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66
Well, it goes to St. Louis, down to Missouri
Oklahoma City looks, oh, so pretty
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino
If you get hip to this kind of trip
And gon take that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66
Get your kicks on Route 66
Get your kicks on Route 66
Get your kicks on Route 66
Get your kicks on Route 66
Get your kicks on Route 66
It was 2008, and it was the first time I had used an online mapping service. Although I had traveled back and forth and up and down across America over the decades, and I can effortlessly name most of the stops along every roadway in The United States, I always routed our course to familiarize myself with local roadways. So, sitting by a window in our home on the Central Coast on a chilly afternoon, I sat mapping our destination to Orilla, Ontario. Canada, a two-hour drive from Toronto, and with my finger, I traced the winding road from the sandy beaches of the California coast to Detroit, which we would be following. The “Mother Road,” primarily known as Route 66, was made famous by the popular song Get your kicks on Route 66! It was written by Bobby Troup in 1946 and sung by Nat King Cole. Most of us have heard versions of this song at one time or another. My favorite is by Manhatten Transfer, which I've posted there. It features a visual travelogue of vagabonds on Route 66 from before it declined, making room for the Interstate Highway System introduced in the 1950s and 1960s and most of its signage removed by the mid-70s. Many of us older adults also recall the theme song to the famous 1960s TV series Route 66, composed by Nelson Riddle and starring Michael Milner and Glen Corbett, which was a series about three young men taking on odd jobs and assisting people in need while vagabounding across America on Route 66.
Further memorializing the road was author John Steinbeck, who coined Route 66 as the “Mother Road” in his 1939 book Grapes of Wrath. But it all began in the early 1900s, when Cyrus Avery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a realtor and coal company owner, anticipated a roadway system connecting the Midwest to California. Along with his associate John Woodruff of Springfield, Missouri, they successfully promoted the establishment of Route 66. This curvy path linked rural communities from Chicago to Los Angeles, not a straight route, permitting farmers to move grain and products effectively. By the 1930s, it had become an essential trucking route, earning Avery the title of "The Father of Route 66." (A little aside: mapping services were first developed for truck drivers to support navigation and route planning, which my kid brother Kelly helped develop) Today, while sections of the highway are preserved as historic landmarks and scenic byways, most of the original route has been decommissioned or absorbed into other roads. Modern four-lane Interstates have paced over the original Route 66, and the famous old road was mainly left to decay, crying out that at one time, another civilization existed along this roadway. Nonetheless, it holds cultural importance and nostalgia for many Americans, and endeavors to preserve and facilitate it as a tourist attraction continue to be inspired by tales of adventure.
Listening to the ocean breeze that afternoon, this journey I knew so well was once again calling my name. The pathway where motorists encounter freedom, euphoria, and nostalgia as they cruise Mother Road, breaking at the cute post-card diners, motels, and gas stations along the way. Travelers absorb the significance of Route 66 as they make their way down this road, which symbolizes the American Dream, exemplifying the spirit of achievement through hard work, success, prosperity, and the promise of opportunity and new horizons. Sitting there with my finger tracing our route, I had the idea to use Mapquest, so I typed in my journey: Arroyo Grande, California to Detroit, Michigan (even though our final destination was Canada through the Windsor, where Canadian custom officials awaited our arrival) choosing the southern route of the I-40 because it offered more protection from the winter than the northern I-70 which winds through Utah and the Colorado Rockies. The itinerary guided me south on Highway 101, the coastal freeway passing the beautiful beach cities of Santa Barbara and Ventura as it made its way to Santa Monica, connecting with the I-10 east towards San Bernadino, then north on the I-15 to Barstow, then east onto the I-40 towards Chicago, taking us over 300 miles out of the way! Of course, I knew this was completely wrong because I often drove to Las Vegas through Barstow. I used a well-traveled California highway through a mountain pass connecting the Pacific coast with the San Joaquin Valley and joining Highway 58 to Barstow, California. In other words, it was merely a 4-hour drive over the mountains east of me instead of the 7-plus hour roundabout directions provided by Mapquest, adding three more hours to our drive. Two thoughts came to my mind: firstly, to call my brother and ask him, “What the heck”? Second, I remarked to myself how uncanny it was that Mapquest directed me to the old Route 66.
When asking my brother about this phenomenon, he said the reason for the unusual routing was for the benefit of truck drivers. This path takes truck drivers past necessary filling stations, rest stops, and eateries. Trucks were routed to the Interstates, which replaced Route 66. Still, it's not a practical route for day drivers or longer sojourners seeking the fastest way to their journey’s end. I also noticed at the destinations; our crew would use the new GPS in rental cars, which gained popularity in the early 2000s, to guide them around cities without using a map. A few times, using GPS resulted in crewmembers being late for load-ins and rehearsals due to their malfunction. As a result, I made it a rule for myself to use mapping services only with the support of my good old Thomas Maps, which my Dad gave me years earlier when I moved to Southern California for college. I am forever grateful for that gift and how he taught me how to read a map. Learning about mapping allowed me to understand my precise location and taught me about geography, so rarely do I get lost; one exception was Philadelphia, where I lived for a while, losing my direction a few times on their multi-named streets and exiting the wrong roads off the roundabouts. I am happy using good old-fashioned maps any day to confirm my routing. I recommend you try it yourself the next time you travel a long distance and need directions. Check out Mapquest results against an accurate map and see if it takes you out of your way. Instead of driving south to Interstate 10 and traveling along Old Route 66, we cut over the mountains. We started our journey in Barstow and followed the iconic road to Chicago, where it ended before we detoured to Detroit.
Well, it was time to go, and we went on another trip to Old 66. We had packing down to a science, and we hit the road with our three co-stars, Samoyeds Kashmere and Oberon, and cat Pywakit. By 2008, we'd driven coast to coast and back, crisscrossing the USA hundreds and hundreds of times. We'd drive from Arroyo Grande on the California coast to New York in 48 hours! Just two of us take turns driving, sleeping, and stopping only to eat and freshen up. I think about how insane that was. But there were other times we'd take more time to explore. But not this time. From what I remember, it was a whirlwind trip to Canada where we were headlining at the famous Canadian React Casino Rama in their 5,000-seat theater for a weekend. We were arriving early for a TV show in Toronto for publicity, so we were busy, and as you can see, it isn't all glamour. Driving for 48 hours non-stop makes you feel like you are part of the Truck Driving Industry. You begin to relate more to truckers than anyone. I'm exaggerating a bit, but truckers always made me feel safe. Their presence on the road was reassuring to me. Like the distant sound of a train, the resonance of trucks provides an inner calmness in me. When I was about three or four years old, I remember a train ran about a mile from our home on the coast in Templeton, California. I’d hear the pitch and the subtle shift of sound of the train as it moved my way…. then vanished slowly as it continued away from me. The doppler effect. I “listened” to the movement of sound as I stared out my bedroom window at the stars moving round and round around the North Star, staying in perfect parallax as they traveled on the same path for millenniums, connecting my preternatural child to the universe. I remember that, but I can't put it in words. The best way to describe it is through Winnie The Pooh - Piglet asks, “How do you spell love? Pooh responds, “ You don’t spell it; you feel it.” That’s precisely what I felt, the sound vibrations of the trains and trucks permeating my essence and becoming part of the rhythm of my inner space. You don't spell it, you feel it.
Along any stretch of Route 66 from Santa Monica to Chicago, every stop is full of Route 66 gift shops, scenic national parks, and extraordinary museums. Winslow, Arizona, was always a gas-and-grab-a-snack stop for us on the way. One time I stopped and found a life-sized bronze statue of a musician with a guitar on a street corner in front of a large trompe-l'oeil mural painted by John Pugh a tribute to the Eagles band commemorating the song "Take It Easy" referring to “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona” from their famous song located in the downtown area of Winslow, where Jackson Browne reportedly broke down on his way to Sedona when he'd spent time in Winslow and remarked this about that Route 66 town, “I had dug the fact that all these women in Arizona were driving trucks. It appealed to me,” noted Browne in 1994’s bio-documentary “Jackson Browne: Going Home.”
Long before Jackson Browne, John Steinbeck had his tales to tell traveling on Route 66, referring to this passage from Oklahoma to California as the "Mother Road" in his novel "The Grapes of Wrath" as if it was specifically built for that purpose alone; to transport destitute Okies from Oklahoma and other points of the American Midwest to Golden California. Route 66 offered a way out for those fleeing the Dust Bowl's tumultuous effects during the Great Depression. The Mother Road symbolized hope and opportunity for desolate families escaping to a better life in California, making the thoroughfare a maternal figure, guiding them to a new beginning. Route 66 was “the path of a people in flight,” Steinbeck wrote, “refugees from dust and shrinking land.”
In the book, Steinbeck describes Route 66 as the “Mother Road” for how it served as a refuge for many people displaced by the Great Depression and the devastation in the Great Plains of the Dust Bowl years. Route 66 was “the path of a people in flight,” Steinbeck wrote, “It is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership,…from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.”
From Steinbeck's book:
The people in flight streamed out on 66, sometimes a single car, sometimes a little caravan. All day they rolled slowly along the road, and at night they stopped near water. In the day ancient leaky radiators sent up columns of steam, loose connecting-rods hammered and pounded. And the men driving the trucks and the overloaded cars listened apprehensively. How far between towns? It is a terror between cities. If something breaks - well, if something breaks, we camp right here while Jim walks to town, gets a part, and walks back. How much food do we get!
In the book, Steinbeck describes Route 66 as the “Mother Road” for how it served as a refuge for many people displaced by the Great Depression and the devastation in the Great Plains of the Dust Bowl years. Route 66 was “the path of a people in flight,” Steinbeck wrote, “It is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership,…from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.”
The Oklahoman refugees arrived in California to find only tent cities and shacks for housing, and the promised jobs working in fields on farms were few, leaving a desperate population homeless and hopeless at times. As we passed through Bakersfield on our trip East, I was reminded of these fantastic, strong people who survived. I grew up less than an hour north of Bakersfield in the heart of a refugee country. Many of the children of these immigrants were my classmates and friends growing up, but by their 70s, most were middle class and had risen like a Phoenix from the ashes of their extreme poverty. Randy’s family was on that route, especially his mother’s family, who suffered impoverishment. Most of these people were proud, and once they were on their feet, they just continued life, trying to dispose of memories of their traumatic journey to California. When John Steinbeck’s book The Grapes Of Wrath was published in 1939, many San Joaquin Valley communities banned the book from libraries and bookstores. For instance, in Bakersfield, residents and officials were upset by the portrayal of their city in Steinbeck’s novel. They banned and burned the book, and Farmer's organizations threatened to boycott bookstores selling it. Time heals many wounds, and after a few years, the boycott ended, and The Grapes Of Wrath became available in libraries and bookstores. In time, the hope from despair these people looked forward to became a reality, and the end of their journey finally became a reality. The San Joaquin Valley, with its rugged Sierra Nevada guarding the east and west sides of the Coastal Mountain Range, separates it from the ocean. They truly landed in the promised land described by Mark Twain, who, upon seeing the valley wildflowers, remarked that they were akin to "a vast sheet of flowers in bloom—enough flowers to carpet the whole earth—reaching out and out until they were lost in the haze of distance." The abundance and beauty of the flowers in the valley captured Twain’s awe.
As we crossed the southern Sierra Nevadas, weaving through the mountain path to Barstow, I prayed for all those motoring out to California during the Depression. Heading to Barstow, I was looking forward to eating at my favorite fast junk food place- Tommy’s, a hole-in-the-wall place made famous in Los Angeles for their amazing chili cheeseburgers and served to diners 24 hours a day. At night, it's popular among college students and groups to arrive in limousines and wear formal attire. An eclectic group of fans visit the original Tommy’s. I was happy they had expanded to Barstow.
Further up the road though, is Peggy Sues a classic 1950s-style diner that embraces the nostalgia of the Mother Road era, a popular stop for travelers along Route 66 and just off the Interstate 15 past Barstow. The following cities on our route were Kingman, Flagstaff, and Winslow, Arizona. Before refueling, our van had a double gas tank to make it to Gallup, New Mexico, but I always had to make a pit stop in Flagstaff. And, of course, our dogs needed travel breaks.
Our trip continued hour after hour, stopping, changing drivers, eating, getting gas, walking pets..passing Albuquerque and Amarillo, then Oklahoma City and Tulsa and Joplin, then St. Louis, and finally north to Chicago, where the trail begins and ends depending on which direction you travel following the Pontiac Trail, a former Indian trail and stagecoach road. The Pontiac Trail's rich history predates the famous Route 66. It was originally an Indian trail used by Native American tribes, including the Potawatomi and the Ottawa, for trading and travel. Later, during European colonization, it became a significant stagecoach route connecting Detroit, Michigan, with Pontiac and other settlements. Of course, it was paved over with concrete and renamed Route 66, accommodating travelers in the 20th century. Where Route 66 ends, the Pontiac Trail continues as other roads to the Canadian border outside Detroit. Following this ancient pathway, we made it to Canada. Saying goodbye to American roadways, we entered Canada, where work permits awaited us. Except for encountering sometimes rude and angry customer officials, it’s always been my experience that customs treated us better when visiting Canada to work rather than for recreation purposes. Even with all of our magic props and animals, customs were typically smooth sailing as long as our paperwork was in order. Our road manager, Jerry Pfaff, managed all of the paperwork. We assembled a manifest of our equipment and its value and obtained travel permits for our dogs and cats. It’s a lot of work. We were fortunate to find competent professionals to help us on the road.
We still had a long drive ahead of us to Orilla. When we arrived, I did what I always do after a long two-day drive. I take a long hot shower, followed by dinner, and then fall asleep. Sometimes until the next day. Before I could sleep, though, I was called backstage to care for giving our music to the music director. While there, I ran into Frank Sinatra Junior, headlining his last night at Casino Rama and whose stage manager was chatting with Jerry. I was introduced to Frank Jr., and he was kind and friendly, inviting us to his show. I took a raincheck, as I was so exhausted, but our crew went and loved his show. I had worked often with Frank’s father, Frank Sinatra Sr. who scared me for reasons I'll explain in another article. But he turned out to be a nice guy. That night, I was struck by the contrast between father and son’s personalities. It made me very happy to know Frank Senior raised a friendly, polite, real and decent son. I'll never forget Frank Junior’s humble character without pretentiousness, conceit, and instead shined with generosity. Encountering individuals in the entertainment world and of his Hollywood pedigree who are especially lovely to everyone makes being a performer worth it and fun and real. Genuineness is essential, and success in the show business can challenge a performer to maintain an authentic personality. Sometimes, your ego separates you from reality, and your life becomes a show — off and on stage. But staying close to my roots I believe kept me modest. Now that you have a taste of life on the road, I bid you good night as I head to my hotel room to sleep, leaving tomorrow to take care of tomorrow, closing this chapter of the story, and continuing to discuss our performances at Casino Rama next week. Until then, have a magical week!
🪄✨✨💖✨
There is something about ol’ Route 66 that just wants to live on. Probably from that historical sense of it being the connection between the Midwest and the West Coast. All the small towns along the way would have made a Greyhound rider ecstatic ! Like most everything today, progress and the big bad Interstate took a lot of it away. I remember seeing the old “end Route 66” sign on the corner of Jackson and Michigan in Chicago. Now it’s just more of a historical marker.
I love observing the Spring Equinox as the new year...it makes so much more sense and this year, it is really clicking into place. Much love to you both - you look so beautiful together!