Sharing The Adventure

Beyond the Route 66 centennial a new era for this storied highway awaits. Iconic Route 66 is no mere highway. It is the quintessential American road trip, a living time capsule, and America’s longest small town. That won’t change just because the calendar page has 2027 at the top.

Even though Route 66 was and is the Main Street of America, it has always been in a state of evolution. So, as encouraging people to discover America through road trips and sharing adventures is what we do at Jim Hinckley’s America. our network needs to evolve as well.

Imagine a road trip with me as your virtual tour guide. Or perhaps you would like to explore the long shuttered Hotel Beale in the comfort of your home. Simply put, I hope that you are as excited about the changes coming to Jim Hinckley’s America as I am.

There is an old adage about not fixing something that isn’t broken. That may be pretty good advice but when it comes to Route 66, or our network, it doesn’t apply.

But sometimes the bridge washes out or Podbean suspends the live stream option. An EV doesn’t need a gas station and changing technologies provide new opportunities for telling stories. There comes a time when preservation requires change and a network needs to implement a new strategy.

our mission hasn’t changed

That need for a new strategy is where we find ourselves today at Jim Hinckley’s America. We inspire road trips by telling people where to go, share America’s story, and encourage folks to get out there and discover that story for themselves.

What is changing is the way we accomplish that mission.

Over the past several months this old dog has been working to learn a few new tricks with a modicum of success and a whole lot of frustration. The focus is on rebuilding, rearranging and expanding the Jim Hinckley’s America network so we can better serve the modern road trip enthusiast.

The goal is simple. Make it easier for you to plan a road trip, discover America, meet the people who are keeping the American story alive, and then share adventures with a growing community of like-minded travelers.

In other words, we are building a better road map. And, as might be expected, it is never easy to fold a map on a windy day.

A Community and a network

Jim Hinckley’s America began with my passion for road trips and the American story. It is built on my God given gift for telling people where to go that I use to write books and magazine articles, and beat my gums at presentations. Like Route 66 our network evolved with the passing of the years and the changing times.

First there was a website and that opened the door for blogging. Social media magnified these projects, when it worked or my page wasn’t locked (more frustration). Facebook live programs gave way to Coffee With Jim, our weekly podcast. The YouTube channel and Instagram allowed us to take the viewer with us and so it provided a new way to share the adventure. Now we have added Substack.

And somewhere along the way this thing became considerably bigger than I ever imagined. But we never lost site of one simple fact, Jim Hinckley’s America is a shared adventure.

The redesigned website will remain as the central hub. It brings together decades of blog posts with road-trip information, history, and resources in one place. The site is being developed specifically to make the enormous archive of material easier to explore.

We also want it to be easier to use and access. As exciting as they are, we don’t want you to just read chapters in the American story. We want you to go see it, experience it and to be a part of that story.

The Jim Hinckley’s America Website: More Than a Blog

There are now more than a decade’s worth of stories on our website. Some are about Route 66. Others are about forgotten highways, automobile history, ghost towns, fascinating characters, tourism development, historic preservation, small-town America and the oddball discoveries that make a road trip memorable.

And there is a reason for that diversity. America isn’t a museum and neither is Jim Hinckley’s America. Both are stories with new chapters being written every day. A schoolhouse, a neon sign, a roadside diner, a cemetery, a long-abandoned gas station or a restored courthouse discovered on a road trip are tangible links to the American story.

The website is being developed to make those connections easier to discover. Recent articles have ranged from the history behind Labor Day to Edsel Ford’s epic adventure in the summer of 1915. One recent story, Remember When …, took a decidedly philosophical look at the challenges of keeping a digital network growing in an era when platforms change rules almost as quickly as political promises.

The website is becoming less of a collection of individual articles and more of a road-trip and American-history time capsule. Think of it as the digital equivalent of stopping at an old roadside information center where the fellow behind the counter has spent a lifetime traveling America’s back roads.

Except you don’t have to worry about whether the coffee is fresh.

Coffee With Jim Gets Two Lives

One of the biggest changes involves Coffee With Jim. Podbean’s decision to discontinue its livestream capability forced us to make a choice. We decided to apply the speed bump principle: Go over it or go around it.

We went around it. The live stream version of Coffee With Jim was moved to the Jim Hinckley’s America YouTube channel. That gives us the ability to continue having guests join the program. It allows us to interact with viewers and create the informal Sunday-morning atmosphere that made Coffee With Jim feel more like a gathering at a virtual diner than a conventional podcast.

And there is another advantage. YouTube gives us a better opportunity to use photographs, maps, historic images, video clips and a bit of old-fashioned show-and-tell.

Podbean is being transformed into an audio library of chapters in America’s story. Every Friday we are sharing recorded programs built around history, road trips and the people and places that make America fascinating. Those programs continue to feed other podcast platforms such as Spotify and can also be used with embedded players on websites.

Recent programs have explored subjects such as Route 66 memories and milestones, pioneering automotive manufacturers, and the adventures of early motorists at the dawning of the great American road trip.

So, the livestream program is where we gather, stories on Podbean shine the light on American history, and the website is where we help you connect the dots.

A New Decade With Jim

Several years ago, we began an Instagram series called Decade With Jim. It became something of a digital travel diary and shared adventures. It was a daily collection of observations, adventures, history, humor and those little discoveries that rarely make it into a conventional travel guide.

Then life happened, Facebook problems happened, book deadlines happened, and Decade With Jim disappeared. But apparently our audience hadn’t forgotten.

So it is back. And this time it is being developed on Substack.

Substack provides an opportunity to revive the spirit of the old newsletter while building something considerably more expansive. Decade With Jim will provide a more personal look behind the scenes. This includes daily stories from the road, a bit of history, humor and the occasional glimpse into the wonderfully strange life of an author, historian and professional wanderer with a dark sense of humor.

But Decade With Jim is only the beginning. We are also using Substack to develop additional facets of the Jim Hinckley’s America network. The goal is to build a community that isn’t entirely dependent upon the changing rules of any single social-media platform.

After all, I have spent enough time learning the latest Facebook rules to qualify for a minor degree in frustration.

YouTube: From Weak Link to Road Ahead

For a long time, YouTube was the weak link in the network. As evidence by comments and reviews we had good material. We had shared adventures and interviews with people like film producer John Paget, author Cheryl Eichar Jett, and Casey Claypool, the Director of the Illinois Route 66 Scenic Byway.

The In Search of Lost Highways and Visit With Jim series were well received. Then added Coffee With Jim. But what we didn’t have was a consistent strategy.

That is changing. The Jim Hinckley’s America YouTube channel is being reorganized around several kinds of content with an orderly playlist:

• Coffee With Jim live programs
• Short-form road-trip and history videos
• In Search of Lost Highways
• Longer historical and travel features
• Behind-the-scenes adventures
• Practical road-trip information
• Presentations and interviews

The intention isn’t to turn Jim Hinckley’s America into another generic travel channel. There are already plenty of those.

Our goal is to create a channel where you can discover why a place matters as well as where it is. We want to build a community of folks passionate about road trips as well as the American story.

Instagram: Little Windows Into the Adventure

Instagram remains an important part of the network because it is ideally suited for those small discoveries that can inspire a much bigger adventure when shared in real time. These posts are linked to the Jim HInckley’s America Facebook page.

You share the discovery when we discover a fading neon sign, an unusual roadside attraction, cemetery or forgotten highway. Those are the breadcrumbs that pique curisoity and lead to an adventure.

Facebook: The Community Remains

There is no intention of abandoning the Jim Hinckley’s America Facebook page. With a community approaching 15,000 followers, it remains an important gathering place for people who love road trips, Route 66 and the American story.

But we are changing how we think about Facebook. It is no longer the foundation upon which everything else rests. Instead, it is one road in a much larger network.

That distinction became painfully obvious when the page was unexpectedly locked for an extended period of time. More recently, changes to the way Facebook handles posts with links and paid promotion have raised additional questions about how much time and resources should be devoted to the platform.

So we are diversifying. Facebook will continue to be a place for sharing stories, photographs, videos, road-trip recommendations, new articles and community conversations. But if Facebook changes the road signs tomorrow, we will still have other highways.

What Are People Saying?

From its incpetion the most encouraging, rewarding and exciting part of all of this is the people.

Over the years, we have received comments from travelers who discovered a diner because of something they read here, people planning a road trip who needed a little advice, historians in search of information, tourism professionals looking for ideas, and travelers who simply wanted to say thank.

Coffee With Jim has generated particularly gratifying feedback. One listener described the program as a virtual diner, a place where people gather on Sunday morning to talk about road trips, community development and America’s amazing story. That description has stuck because it captures what we hope the program becomes.

The podcast has also continued to grow. In October 2025, Coffee With Jim recorded approximately 20,000 downloads in a month, and the program received official Route 66 Centennial designation.

Meanwhile, the broader network has continued to expand. In August 2025, social-media reach and engagement exceeded 300,000 people. But numbers only tell part of the story.

And that is how a network becomes a community.

The Adventure Is Bigger Than Route 66

Route 66 will always have a special place here because it is the ultimate American expereince. It is the portal through which people discover the magic of the road trip. And, of course, it is a big part of my personal story.

Route 66 is the story with chapters about the American auto industry, aviation history, railroads, migration and immigrants, music, and our societal evolution. It is also a classroom where we learn about entrepreneurship, heritage and cultural toruism related conomic development, and historic preservation.

Jim Hinckley’s America is a community of curious adventruers. They want to see what is around the next bend. And that is why our network continues to expand beyond a Route 66 focus.

The goal is to discover America’s story together. And to use that story to inspire people to travel.

From the Screen to the Road

That brings us to the most important part of the Jim Hinckley’s America network. After all, this digital stuff needs to accomplish something. It needs to get you to turn of the television, put the phone down, and get you out the door.

And It needs to encourage you to discover America with road trips. So, as with Route 66 our network will continue to evolve.

And There Is More Road Ahead

The next few months promise to be busy at Jim Hinckley’s America.

On October 15, Jim Hinckley’s America will be part of the road show at the Kingman screening of John Paget’s Route 66: The Main Street of America at the Beale Street Theater.

The following day, October 16, I will be in Twentynine Palms, California, presenting a program about the dawn of the auto industry and the road trip. That is followed by a book singing the following morning.

And on November 11, the 100th anniversary of the commissioning of Route 66, the Illinois Route 66 Scenic Byway will host its inaugural Mother Road Conference in Springfield, Illinois. I am listed among the scheduled speakers for an event focused not merely on celebrating the first century of Route 66, but on considering what the next century might look like.

And yes, there will be opportunities to get a signed copy of Route 66: 100 Years, my 23rd book, along the way.

So keep an eye on the website calendar and the various Jim Hinckley’s America platforms for announcements.