The most compelling reason why tourists follow Route 66 is to experience the road’s ingrained time line of contemporary America. Before it was called Route 66, and long before it was even paved in 1926, this corridor was traversed by the National Old Trails Highway, one of the country’s first transcontinental highways. For three decades before and after World War II, Route 66 earned the title “Main Street of America”. It was mainly known as this because it wounds through small towns across the Midwest and Southwest and is lined by hundreds of cafés, motels, gas stations and tourist attractions (Route 66, 2014: Online). During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of farm families, displaced by the so-called dust bowl (the area in the south-central USA that became denuded of topsoil by wind erosion during the droughts of the mid-1930s) (Dust bowl – definition of dust …show more content…
In 1999, the National Route 66 Preservation Bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. An amount of $10 million in matching fund grants to individuals, corporations and communities are provided by the Act for the purpose of persevering or restoring historic properties along Route 66 (About us National Historic Route 66, 2015: Online). 3.3 South African examples of route tourism Across South Africa, many different tourism routes are being established. Examples of these tourism routes include the Panorama Route, the MDR and The Garden Route to just name a few (Routes & Trails - Articles - South African Tourism, 2015: Online). Viljoen (2007) states that a tourism route represents a development tool that is being increasingly used for developing tourism and local economics in Africa (2007:126). In the Southern part of Africa, there exists an initiative for tourism route development known as the Open Africa initiative. 3.3.1 The Open Africa