Wilmington, Ill., is trying to generate more business into its downtown area. So not only was one Web site created that hypes up the town’s link to Route 66, but two, reports the Joliet Herald News.

One Web site is www.route66wilmington.com. The other is a MySpace site, found here.

(Hat tip to Lynn “Lulu” Bagdon.)

The Associated Press is reporting that a restaurant inspired by Lucille’s in Hydro, Okla., will open in nearby Weatherford in August.

Rick Koch, owner of the soon-to-open business, told me last week that Lucille’s Roadhouse has a tentative opening date of Aug. 1. It was going to open late July, but he said they had more restaurant equipment to install and needed more time.

Some photos of the mostly finished Roadhouse can be seen here.

Koch also owns the original Lucille’s and has done some much-needed repairs to it. It was run by Lucille Hamons on Route 66 for decades until she died in 2000.

The AP says:

Hamons and her husband bought the gas station in 1941 and served customers downstairs while they lived in the upstairs area. The establishment became famous for its self-proclaimed “coldest beer in America” and Lucille Hamons’ storytelling.

Koch’s restaurant will have a facade that’s a replica of the original Lucille’s and will feature a 1950s-style diner on one side, a steakhouse on the other side and a gift shop in the middle.

Eugene Baak of the Renaissance Boy Go! blog recently discovered that the Ramone’s House of Body Art toy from in the “Cars” movie bears a strong resemblance to the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. To show us, he displayed photos of both.

Heck, I could have told you that.

St. Louis has a tangle of Route 66 alignments, more than any city I can think of on the Mother Road.

One of them is the Manchester Road alignment. The proprietor of the Adventures of Secret Agent 009 blog recently traveled down that alignment and shot a slew of photos, mostly of the unique architecture of that area.

Spud Hilton (yes, that’s his name) of the San Francisco Chronicle decided to visit the Route 66 town of Flagstaff, Ariz., for a different reason than most tourists would — he wanted to explore the region’s volcanoes.

Volcanoes? Yes, and not just a few of them, either.

… Flagstaff sits at the center of the little-known San Francisco Volcanic Field, one of the most densely volcanic regions in North America. Unlike Northern Arizona’s famous features carved by wind and water, this 1,800-square mile region was forged in fire, a lava lover’s sampler plate with more than 600 volcanoes, where the adventurous can climb into a cross-sectioned cinder cone, hike what was once the caldera of a stratovolcano taller than the Rockies, follow the route of lava flows above ground and below, and walk among the ruins left by ancient Americans who changed the way they built, grew and co-existed because of an eruption 900 years ago that turned the sky black and the land gray.

And Flagstaff’s location at the base of the largest volcano makes it the perfect base for exploring the fiery past, as well as sampling the city’s increasingly hip present.

Because of a random hotspot similar to the one that created the Hawaiian Islands, an area around Flagstaff 50 miles long and 35 miles wide is so flush with volcanoes that geologists often refer to them by assigned number instead of by name. There is a cinder cone, lava dome or stratovolcano for every 3 square miles. If you applied that rate elsewhere, there would be 16 volcanoes within the city limits of San Francisco. Every feature 10 stories or taller exists because molten rock burbled up through every available pore in the landscape.

If you visit, don’t worry about becoming a victim like the residents of Pompeii did centuries ago. The volcanoes around Flagstaff are dormant — at least for now.