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Route 66 was 20 years old and World War II had just ended when Bobby Troup, an aspiring songwriter from Pennsylvania, decided to go west. As it turned out, that drive in early 1946 did more than anyone could have imagined to establish the road as a symbol of footloose American freedom.

Stories, photos and travel recommendations from America’s Mother Road

Troup, 25 at the time, had already earned an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, written a hit song (1941’s “Daddy,” sung by Sammy Kaye), worked for bandleader Tommy Dorsey and served as a Marine through the war years. But to restart his career as a songwriter and actor, he believed that he needed to be in Los Angeles. So he and his wife, Cynthia, pointed their 1941 Buick toward California.

They started on U.S. 40, then picked up Route 66 in Illinois. Along the way, as Troup told author Michael Wallis in the book “Route 66: The Mother Road,” Cynthia came up with a phrase she thought was songworthy.

Bobby Troup, composer of the hit song “Route 66” and grand marshal of Duarte, Calif.’s Salute to Route 66 parade, rides in a 1948 Buick convertible and waves to fans in 1996.

(Louisa Gauerke / Associated Press)

“Get your kicks on Route 66,” she said.

Troup took it from there, creating “a kind of musical map of the highway.”

As Troup later recalled in an introduction to a Route 66 book by Tom Snyder, they heard Louis Armstrong play a club in St. Louis, stopped at Meramec Caverns in Missouri and found that “a good part of the highway was absolutely miserable — narrow, just two lanes, and very twisting through the Ozarks and Kansas.” Then came a snowstorm in Texas.

By the end of the drive, the up-tempo tune was half-done. Then, not quite a week after arrival, Troup landed a chance to pitch a few songs to Nat “King” Cole, who had already won fame with hits including “Sweet Lorraine” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”

They were sitting by a piano on stage — after Cole’s last set of the night at the Trocadero on Sunset Strip — when the nervous young songwriter decided to share his unfinished road song.

“I got up on the riser, pulled the piano bench back a little bit — and it went over the side and I fell over backwards,” Troup confessed in a later interview.

Still, Cole “loved it,” Troup recalled. “As a matter of fact, he got on the piano with me and played it.”

This was February. By mid-March, the song was done and Cole was recording it in a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, part of Route 66.

The finished version name-checked a dozen cities along the route, including these words:

Now you go through Saint Looey

Joplin, Missouri,

And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.

You see Amarillo,

Gallup, New Mexico,

Flagstaff, Arizona.

Don’t forget Winona,

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip

When you make that California trip

Get your kicks on Route 66.

In April, Capitol Records released “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” and the tune quickly rose to #11 on the Billboard chart of top-selling singles. Before 1946 was out, it had been recorded again, this time by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. That version went to #14.

Musicians Nat “King” Cole, left, and Bing Crosby, circa 1945.

(NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

Coming just as postwar America was rediscovering leisure travel, the song was a big hit — and for many, a painful irony. Even with guidance from the Green Book used by many African American travelers in those days, it would have been deeply risky — and illegal in some places — for any Black man, Nat King Cole included, to eat and sleep on Route 66. This was a year before Jackie Robinson integrated baseball’s major leagues, two years before the U.S. Army was integrated.

As Candacy Taylor puts it in her 2020 book “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America,” “the open road wasn’t open to all.” Into the 1950s, Taylor writes, “about 35% of the counties on Route 66 didn’t allow Black motorists after 6 p.m.” and six of the eight states on the route still had segregation laws. Cole may have helped sell Route 66, Taylor writes, but “the carefree adventure he was promoting was not meant for him.”

Documentary photographer Candacy Taylor at the New Aster Motel in Los Angeles in 2016. In her book “Overground Railroad,” she writes about the discrimination Black travelers faced while driving on Route 66.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Two years after recording the song, when the increasingly wealthy Cole and his family bought a Hancock Park mansion and became the neighborhood’s first Black homeowners, many neighbors tried to keep him out, poisoned the family dog and burned racist insults into his lawn.

The Coles stayed put. The family was still in that home on South Muirfield Road in 1956, when Cole became the first African American to host a network television show, and in 1965, when Cole died of cancer at 45.

Troup, who later was divorced from Cynthia and married singer/actor Julie London, went on to record more than a dozen albums and had other songs recorded by Little Richard and Miles Davis. As an actor, Troup filled many guest-star roles on television, played Dr. Joe Early on the 1970s TV show “Emergency!” and had a small part in Robert Altman’s 1970 film “MASH.”

Meanwhile, the song kept rolling. As years passed, Perry Como, Sammy Davis Jr., Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, the Manhattan Transfer, Michael Martin Murphey, Asleep at the Wheel, Buckwheat Zydeco, Depeche Mode, Glenn Frey, the Brian Setzer Orchestra and John Mayer recorded versions. At different points in the 2006 movie “Cars,” you hear Berry’s and Mayer’s versions. Troup, who died in 1999, never forgot the difference the song made, both in his life and the way people think about the road.

“On the basis of that song, I was able to go out and buy a house and stay in California,” Troup told Wallis. “I never realized when I was putting it together that I was writing about the most famous highway in the world. I just thought I was writing about a road — not a legend.”

The Rolling Stones are among the countless musicians who have recorded versions of “Route 66.”

(David Redfern / Redferns via Getty Images)

A UK ‘city of stories’ where independent bookshops stacked to the ceiling with novels sitting alongside traditional tearooms, makes the perfect weekend escape for book lovers

A delightful UK city bursting with independent bookshops and cafés makes for an ideal retreat for bibliophiles or those keen to discover the ‘city of stories’.

Strolling through Norwich in Norfolk on a weekend break is enough to whisk you away to another world, courtesy of its medieval and timber-framed buildings. Narrow lanes and cobbled streets are lined with more than 500 independent shops, offering homeware treasures, gifts and vintage clothing, alongside traditional tearooms, cafés, restaurants and bars.

Yet it’s the collection of independent bookshops, stacked floor to ceiling with novels and snug reading nooks, that truly steals the show. It comes as little surprise to stumble upon such a treasure trove of bookshops in the ‘city of stories’ – England’s first UNESCO City of Literature.

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Highlights include The Book Hive, boasting a charming green façade, tables piled high with your next great read, and window seats perfect for a spot of people-watching between chapters. Nearby, the independent children’s bookshop Bookbugs and Dragon Tales is a firm favourite – famously visited by Jacqueline Wilson, who has signed their dedicated author wall – and a wonderland where little ones can spend hours browsing its vibrant shelves.

Dormouse Bookshop, its shelves laden with rare and antiquarian books, is yet another hidden gem, and its setting on Elm Hill will have you feeling as though you’ve wandered straight into a fairy tale. And that’s just the beginning.

Stroll through the streets, and you’ll stumble upon second-hand books at virtually every turn. From Undercover Books to City Bookshop and Tombland Bookshop, there’s even a comic book store, Abstract Sprocket, catering to avid collectors and anime enthusiasts, reports the Liverpool Echo.

Whatever your preferred genre, Norwich has something for everyone, with each independent bookshop boasting its own unique character, whether through vibrant wall art or tucked-away nooks perfect for a peaceful read free from distractions. Beyond its wealth of bookshops, Norwich lays claim to some remarkable literary achievements.

The city is celebrated for opening the first English civic provincial library in 1608 and for being the home of one of the earliest known female writers in England, Julian of Norwich. It also boasts the only National Centre for Writing, hosts its annual City of Literature weekend, and the University of East Anglia (UEA) pioneered the first Creative Writing MA.

The city has also been a home to celebrated authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Eimear McBride and Sarah Perry. It’s also thought that around 108 different languages and dialects are spoken throughout the charming streets of Norwich, only adding to its storybook reputation.

For those who enjoy a good read accompanied by a warming cuppa, you’ll be thoroughly spoilt for choice when it comes to cafés. There are traditional tearooms, such as Biddy’s Tea Room and Harriet’s Cafe Tearooms, alongside cosy spots like The Yard Coffee, Flock, and Kofra, as well as the Refectory café nestled within the Cathedral.

After browsing the array of bookshops and coffee houses, there’s the 900-year-old outdoor market packed with independent food vendors and shops spanning around 200 lively stalls. For a glimpse of its heritage, there’s the 12th-century Norman castle and Norwich’s two impressive cathedrals, set against its winding alleyways and vibrant street art in a city brimming with character and stories to share.

Do you have a travel story to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com

The best coming-of-age stories derive their power from being endings as much as beginnings. There’s often a clarifying, poignant harshness in the losses they depict. That applies — with sobering grace — to the memory ballad “Amrum,” set on Germany’s titular North Sea island in 1945, when the winds of a world war’s conclusion blow into a 12-year-old boy’s life with unexpected consequences.

The movie bears a curious credit: “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” Bohm, who died last year at 86, was a highly respected film writer, actor and academic, a veteran of Germany’s New Wave. Realizing he’d be unable to direct his fictionalized childhood remembrance, he entrusted it to his mentee Akin, the firebrand behind modern German classics such as “Head-On” and “In the Fade.” The project became, according to Akin, like “adopting a child.”

In story terms, that child, a stand-in for Bohm himself, is wide-eyed, sensitive Nanning (well-cast newcomer Jasper Billerbeck), who works in the potato fields of local farmer Tessa (Diane Kruger, in a small but key role). At home, he has a pregnant mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister) and two younger siblings, but not the high-ranking Nazi officer patriarch who relocated them from bombed-out Hamburg to an ancestral house on this tiny, beachy outpost. Pejoratively dubbed a mainlander by even the friendliest neighbors and generally viewed with suspicion for his family’s Nazi ties, Nanning is assured by his ideology-soaked mom that their roots, their “bloodline,” make them real Amlumers.

The boy’s first real lesson in the shifting sands comes when, at dinner, he remarks that the war will soon be over, intending it as good news — Dad could come home. Yet his mother reacts as if he’d sided with the enemy by wishing defeat. Later, with the news of Hitler’s demise, she sinks into a depression, refusing food unless it’s white bread, butter and honey, all in scarce supply. So Nanning sets out to secure her the necessary ingredients, as if the fabric of his world depends on it.

What follows is a tightly told fable-like journey built around the war-battered realities of survival when everyone’s tired, hungry and irritated. There are brutal truths in store for Nanning about what his family represents. It’s an evolving boyhood, framed with unshowy elegance by cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub against the island’s flat, grassy, weather-rich horizons. “Amrum” avoids the sentimentality baked into so many childhood-during-wartime stories. Akin, as if inspired by the unfussy youthfulness that marked Italian neorealism and the New Waves in both France and Iran (there are shout-outs to “Bicycle Thieves” and “The 400 Blows”), zeroes in on the steady accumulation of detail rather than the trappings of cuteness or melodrama.

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

Near the end, “Amrum” serves up a wonderfully understated moment: Nanning is invited to celebrate the war’s end with a small group of dancing, drinking islanders. He hangs back, though, as if not quite ready to choose their joyous relief over obediently tending to his broken family. But you can see this dutiful son’s wish to be one of them. For all of us wondering when an ugly time will fade, the moment will resonate like a cautious, dawning hope.