Desert Lights

This is the rally's detour, and it doesn't apologize for it. The morning is pure 66: down from the pines to Williams, the last town on the highway to be bypassed, and out along the longest unbroken stretch of the original road through Seligman — where a barber named Angel Delgadillo started the movement that saved Route 66 — and Hackberry's packed-to-the-rafters general store. At Kingman the rally turns north onto US-93, through the Joshua-tree country of the Cerbat foothills, across the Colorado at Hoover Dam's white concrete curve. Then the desert goes electric: Las Vegas, rising out of the valley like a mirage that decided to stay. A century-old road, one night of neon — the two great American light shows, back to back.