Hackberry General Store

Halfway along the loneliest, best-preserved run of the Mother Road — the eighty-odd miles between Seligman and Kingman — a low building leans out of the desert behind a yard of rusted cars, dead gas pumps, and hand-painted signs. From a moving car the Hackberry General Store looks abandoned. It is, in fact, one of the most beloved stops on Route 66, and the trick is that the junkyard is the exhibit.

The store opened in 1934 as the Northside Grocery, a Conoco station and general store on the then-new Route 66 alignment, in a hamlet that had been a silver-mining town in the 1870s until the ore ran out in 1919. When Interstate 40 bypassed this stretch in 1978, Hackberry died the death every Route 66 town feared, and the store closed. What brought it back was an artist. Bob Waldmire — a wandering Route 66 painter who traveled the road in an orange 1972 Volkswagen Microbus, and whose family in Illinois had invented the corn dog they sold as the Cozy Dog — bought the place in 1992 and reopened it as a souvenir shop and information center. Waldmire and his bus became the unofficial model for Fillmore, the hippie VW van in Pixar's Cars; he sold the store in 1998, and it has changed hands since, but the spirit he set is intact.

Inside, the ceiling is shingled with license plates, the walls papered with currency and patches left by travelers from every continent, and a 1950s diner sits recreated in the corner. Outside, the gas pumps are for photographs only — the nearest fuel is in Kingman or Seligman. There is nothing to buy here you need and nothing to see you could not skip, which is exactly why it works: Hackberry is the Mother Road distilled to its purest and most useless form, a place that exists only because people wanted the old road to keep meaning something. Pull over. That is the whole point.