Janet and her party drove the ‘Mother road’ on our Route 66  fly drive holiday and have provided some really useful feedback that we wanted to share with everyone as Route 66 holidays are our most popular.

You can view our Route 66 Fly Drives holidays by clicking here.

‘We are writing to let you know how much we all enjoyed our holiday and to say that all the arrangements made by Laura went faultlessly.

We were very pleased with all the hotels which you chose for us and particularly enjoyed the extra touch of history and luxury at the Skirvin, Oklahoma City. The Rio Grande Inn in Albuquerque was also an especially good hotel and was a great place to stop for 3 nights, within walking distance of the old town – we used one of our free days here to visit Santa Fe by train, as Santa Fe is not to be missed and it gave us all a break from driving.

Additionally, there were 3 hotels which you do not normally use that we picked out ourselves – we can thoroughly recommend them for future travellers. They were the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza in Chicago (very central and safe location, superb views from the bar), Ayres Hotel at Barstow (a bit classier and different to the bigger chain motels, in a good spot next to the outlet mall) and the Georgian at Santa Monica (beautiful old hotel right on the seafront – well worth paying a bit extra for the location).

The EZ-66 Guide was invaluable for route finding and enabled us to follow the maximum amount possible of original Route 66 within the time we had available, which is very much more interesting than the Interstate highways.

The personalised route book which you also supplied makes a great souvenir. I would just make a few comments about the advice in the route book:

Day 3 Chicago – St Louis The route described is nearly all along old Route 66, but we feel that anyone wanting to do this would need to split the drive over 2 days, with an overnight in Springfield IL. In order to cover the route in one day, we largely used I-55 with detours to visit specific places on the old road (Launching Pad Wilmington, Atlanta, Springfield IL + Chain of Rocks Bridge) and this worked very well. Incidentally, the overview states that you can drive across the historic Chain of Rocks Bridge – it is well worth detouring to visit, but is now closed to traffic.

Day 14 Williams – Needles The drive along historic Route 66 from Seligman past the Hackberry General Stores to Kingman is not to be missed. Also, after leaving Kingman there is a further stretch of old road over the spectacular Sitgreaves Pass to Oatman with its wild donkeys. Altogether, this makes about 137 miles of historic road – the best stretch of the whole route, so it would be a great shame to miss this by following I-40 as suggested in the route book.

Day 15 Needles – Barstow Again the route book suggests following I-40 but there are some more superb stretches of old road through Goffs, Amboy (Roy’s Motel), Ludlow and Newberry Springs. We made the decision not to visit Las Vegas especially so we could enjoy the drives on old route 66 for these 2 days and it really was a highlight of our holiday – highly recommended!

Thank you again, we were extremely pleased with our holiday and also thought it was good value, so we would not hesitate to recommend CNA.’