The town of Strafford, Mo., is planning its annual Route 66 festival, according to the Springfield News-Leader. It's trying to round up volunteers and make Route 66 more prominent.

This idea sounds intriguing:

Keiser would like to produce a live show, with "Route 66 players" who will dramatize and detail the history. Keiser has volunteered to help write the script and recruit some actors for the show he would like to feature several times during the fall festival, which is tentatively set for the second Saturday in September.

ComingSoon.net has an excellent interview with "Cars" director John Lasseter. Check it out.

UPDATE: Here's another interview, this time with The Australian. It includes this excerpt about Route 66.

Observation is important, says Lasseter, who refers to the small town on America's Route 66 that is integral to the story. Bypassed by the major highway, it represents old-fashioned values.

"They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When you come to some of these towns, you can tell they were really vibrant but now the customers are all gone. You can tell from the peeling paint, the cracks in the asphalt, the dust, the sun-bleached nature of everything. All that stuff is extremely difficult to do with a computer."

Michael Yessis of World Hum: Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Planet asks this question amid a preview of the Independent Film Channel documentary "Wanderlust: On the Road with American Road Movies":

“Does the road still promise us an open sense of freedom and liberation as it did in so many great films? Or, has the adventure of the American road ultimately been reduced to the stuff of Hollywood lore?”

Yassel's answer:

I spent five days of those days traveling with my dad. We planned a night in Las Vegas and a side trip to Monument Valley, but otherwise loosely followed Route 66, a road he’d driven several times before the government built the interstate system. The United States we saw is as vast and as interesting as ever, filled with roadside diners and fast-food chains, black-socked European tourists and big-haired waitresses, gaudy billboards and breathtaking red rock landscapes. Hollywood can spin out road movie after road movie — another one, Pixar’s Cars, comes out June 9 — but these cinematic journeys, as much as I love watching them, will never trump the experience of rubber hitting road, the feeling of unfolding a map and sensing the possibilities that lie along every thin black line. If you think Hollywood sapped all the adventure out of road trips, you need to get in a car and drive.

Amen, brother. Say it.