Three-State Run

The shortest leg on paper is the busiest on the map. West of Springfield the road runs the old mining belt: Carthage with its marble courthouse, Joplin, and then — for thirteen famous miles — Kansas. Galena and Baxter Springs pack a century of road story into that corner: the rusted tow truck that inspired a Pixar character, brick main streets that refused to die when the highway moved. Then Oklahoma begins and the road becomes what it was invented to be — the spine of the Will Rogers Highway. Past Miami's Coleman Theatre and the Blue Whale of Catoosa grinning in its pond, the field runs down into Tulsa, where oil money built art-deco towers and neon still buzzes on 11th Street.