"We're in Kirkwood, Missouri celebrating the 100th anniversary of Route 66, the celebration of cars and guitars. This is what Route 66 still does. It turns transportation into autobiography. A car is never just a car. It's the thing your dad drove, the thing you wanted when you were 17, the thing you finally bought when life gave you just enough money, time, and bad judgment to make it happen. And maybe that's why Route 66 still has this strange power a hundred years later. It promised that America was something you could enter sitting behind the wheel, that freedom had an engine, that reinvention might be waiting two towns over or two states over or just past the next bend in the road. I'm Harry Brunias. Follow my Route 66 series as I travel the mother road across America."