Route 66 may have a song or two, a library of books movies and scholars. She may even have western travel buffs honoring her in more ways than you can shake a stick. But I know the true road that opened our West, and that road doesn’t even run true west or have 66 in its title, but does run through our early history.

We wouldn’t have any Route 66 if we first hadn’t been able to expand west, across the Allegheny mountains into the interior of our land. We share in the fruits of Lewis and Clark, of the Louisiana Purchase and of those Native Americans who first met the European on the Atlantic shores.

Those Native Americans utilized buffalo and other wildlife trails to trade up and down the eastern seaboard, and in turn, the settlers used them and eventually expanded them to wagon roads.

As my bike and I were about to discover, the Great Wagon Road that evolved from these “warrior paths” in 1744, our history and the history of this road is very much tied together.