The midpoint of Route 66 is not a place you arrive at with fanfare—it’s a simple white line painted across the road in Adrian, Texas, flanked by a sign that reads “Midpoint, Route 66, 1139 miles to Chicago, 1139 miles to Los Angeles.” That’s it. Just balance point and fact. A mathematical curiosity made flesh.
And yet, standing there, it felt like more than that.
There’s something profoundly satisfying about symmetry in a world that rarely offers it. We’d been chasing the old highway for days by this point—detouring through time, through ghost towns and neon memories—and then, here we were. The center. The very heart of the journey. Halfway there and halfway home, depending on how you look at it.
Adrian itself is tiny. A handful of buildings, a stretch of dusty frontage, and the sense that if you blinked at the wrong moment, you’d miss the whole town. But it doesn’t feel forgotten. Not exactly. There’s pride here. And permanence.
It’s not a place you end up unless you meant to. Which, somehow, makes it feel earned.
We parked the car, stepped into the middle of the road (something you can do here without much worry), and took our photo at the sign. Then we just stood there for a while, letting the silence fill the space where highway noise should have been.
Midpoints are funny things. They don’t come with balloons. They don’t reward you for arriving. But they mark you just the same.
We weren’t the same people who started this trip. And we weren’t yet the people we’d be when we finished it. But here, in Adrian, Texas, we could at least name that space in between.