Route 66 ends where you are, the western terminus of the most famous road in America. A sign at the end of this pier marks the official end of the highway that stretched 2,448 miles from Chicago to here, opened in 1926 as one of the first numbered federal highways and celebrated in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as the Mother Road — the path that Dust Bowl migrants followed west, hoping for a new life in California. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985 when the interstate highway system made it redundant, but the road retains its romantic hold on American imagination.
The pier itself was built in 1909 and extended in 1916; it holds a carousel built in 1922 whose horses appeared in the film The Sting, an aquarium, and the Pacific Park amusement rides, including a solar-powered Ferris wheel. Stand at the end of the pier and look west at the Pacific Ocean; on a clear day you can see the Malibu coast curving north and the outline of Catalina Island to the south. You are standing at the edge of the continent, at the end of the road.