When Interstate 40 bypassed Route 66 between Oklahoma City and Barstow, California, it took a more direct path through Arizona - passing twenty-five miles south of Peach Springs, the administrative base of the Hualapai Nation whose highway map position most closely resembles Radiator Springs' fictional location. Towns along the bypassed stretch simply died. Hackberry, Valentine, Truxton - places that had thrived on the steady stream of east-west traffic found themselves on a road to nowhere. Williams, Arizona was the last community bypassed in 1984. Three years later, Angel Delgadillo of Seligman began promoting the abandoned route to nostalgia seekers, and the first section of 'Historic 66' was designated. The film captures this precisely: the moment when the new road made the old road obsolete, and the people who stayed watched their purpose evaporate.

US 66 enters Cherokee County at Galena, Kansas - a former mining town named for the lead ore extracted there, now a shadow of itself. The interstate doesn't even enter the state. Route 66 historian Michael Wallis, who voiced the Sheriff in the film, remembers the late Joe Ranft discovering the truck that became Tow Mater here. The route turns south through Baxter Springs, continues through Miami and Tulsa in Oklahoma, then runs as a free alternate to the Turner Turnpike between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. In Clinton, the filmmakers met Dr. Mason Jr., a country veterinarian turned Best Western owner who donated land for the local Route 66 museum - the 'Doc' of Radiator Springs, who died in 2007 and whose memory now marks mile 66 of I-40.

The Texas Panhandle offers little of the original route - I-40 simply paved over most of it or absorbed it as service road. Amarillo anchors this stretch, home to Cadillac Ranch where ten vintage Cadillacs stand nose-down in a wheat field, spray-painted by generations of visitors. West of Adrian, Texas, the highway crosses into New Mexico at Glenrio, a divided ghost town straddling the state line. Tucumcari follows - population 5,000, once advertised on hundreds of miles of billboards as 'Tucumcari Tonite! 2,000 motel rooms!' A few neon motels have been restored. The mountain bearing the town's initial dominates the desert horizon, recognizable to anyone who watched Lightning McQueen skid into the fictional equivalent.

Holbrook brings the Wigwam Motel - concrete tepees that became the Cozy Cone in animated form. Winslow offers 'Standin' on the Corner Park,' memorializing the Eagles song that put the town back on the map. In Seligman, the Delgadillo brothers who helped save the route from total obscurity would have been essential interview subjects. West of Seligman, Route 66 and I-40 diverge dramatically, with the old highway threading through Peach Springs and ghost towns while the interstate takes its efficient shortcut south. The 'Ornament Valley' of the film is Monument Valley, 170 miles north; the waterfall behind Sally's drive is Havasu Falls, accessible only by foot or horseback on the Grand Canyon's Havasupai reservation. The filmmakers compressed geography as ruthlessly as time.

The routes reconverge at Kingman, though an early alignment once continued through Oatman - a ghost town whose wild burros, descendants of pack animals released by prospectors, may have inspired the film's misbehaving tractor herd. The old Route 66 bridge at Topock is no longer passable; all traffic must leave Arizona on I-40. The film acknowledges no California locations, ending the narrative where the nostalgia ends - at the border of a state too modern to mourn its bypassed highways. Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim now offers a reconstructed 'Radiator Springs,' completing a circle of appropriation: real places inspiring animation inspiring a theme park version of a place that never existed but somehow feels more authentic than the parking lot it occupies.