Eckleburg + Grumblecake of the Duke City Fix blog have vowed to dine at every one of Albuquerque’s Central Avenue restaurants in 2006.

From Tramway to Coors. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Our path may at times veer off of Central to include other restaurants in Old Town or on side streets we deem “close enough,” but good old Route 66 will be our guide.

This means we’ll enjoy the delights of Graze, Artichoke Cafe, and Ambrozia (close enough!), while at the same time we tempt fate at Loyola’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and those questionable-looking, supiciously inexpensive Chinese places.

We’ll update you on this cultural experience here and on a new blog. … We suspect that we’ll learn a lot about the Duke City during this endeavor — we’ll see posh stuff, not-so-posh stuff, and down-right nasty stuff. We’ll do our best to hit up waitresses and waiters for juicy tidbits about ABQ history. We’ll correlate our take on food quality with the city inspector’s take on kitchen cleanliness. We’ll take pictures and come up with some silly rating system that is sure to entertain.

It will be a formidable task. Central Avenue, by my reckoning, is at least 15 miles long and festooned with restaurants. Even though Interstate 40 bypassed it decades ago, Central remains one of the busiest streets in the city. The couple probably will need two meals a day to pull it off, and I hope they have a StairMaster available.

The headline on this Cincinnati Post story by Nick Clooney says: “Motoring west along Route 66.” I guess the word “along” makes it accurate, since he didn’t do any actual driving on the Mother Road itself, but on Interstate 44 instead. Considering how dull the story is (and the drive), it make me wonder why he bothered.

The Oakville-Mehlville Journal in Missouri reported additional details about Route 66 in Missouri recently being designated a scenic byway. We reported about the initial announcement in November.

The Route 66 Association of Missouri and the Missouri Department of Transportation worked for several years to acquire the designation. Scenic byway status allows communities and groups to apply for federal funds to develop interpretive sites and find ways to boost tourism along the Mother Road.

I attended one of the required meetings about the program in Cuba, Mo., where support from the public was high.

Missouri’s Route 66 differs from most other scenic byways. Tommy Pike, president of the Missouri association and one of the key leaders of the scenic byway effort, explains it well:

“People have a tendency to think of a scenic byway as, for instance, the Lewis and Clark Trail. Route 66 is a 20th-century scenic byway,” Pike said. “When you think of Lewis and Clark or the Trail of Tears, you think of scenic vistas. Route 66 might have been downtown St. Louis with neon signs to some, but it’s a scenic byway from a different time.

“The thing with Route 66 is there are a lot of travelers and foreign travelers on it,” Pike said. “But we aren’t Six Flags, we aren’t Silver Dollar City or Worlds of Fun, and there is not a front gate. These people fly to Chicago and rent a car, or some guy from Kansas comes over here and cuts over to St. Louis and rides it back down to Oklahoma City or Albuquerque and then rides it back home. Sometimes people from Japan come here and rent a car in Chicago and ride Route 66 to Los Angeles.

“But we don’t have a front gate where we sell a ticket and get an exact head count,” Pike said. “I’ve met people from Norway, Japan, Germany and Australia in the past year, and people just don’t realize these tourists are coming through their community.

“Now people may realize Route 66 is more significant,” Pike said. “In its heyday, it was a means of getting there. People traveled it to go somewhere. Now it is a destination. People come here to drive Route 66, but now Route 66 is a 2,400-mile destination.”

Hat tip to Roger Kramer for alerting me to this story.