Route 66 Invasion: The Rat Rod Tour Rolls Toward Its Final Stop

Sidewalks don’t usually fill up on a weekday for a caravan of unfinished, rusted-out cars. But that’s what happened in Galena, Kansas, when the 2026 Official Rat Rod Tour came through town behind a guided police escort — residents had folding chairs set up along the sidewalk, the kind of turnout you’d expect for a St. Patrick’s Day parade or a homecoming procession, not a road tour passing through.

The tour was running several hours behind schedule by the time it reached Galena. Heat was a factor. Air temperatures were pushing past 100 degrees, concrete and humidity likely pushed the heat index higher still, and a lot of these custom-built rat rods aren’t running air conditioning — they’re bare-metal, hand-welded machines built for character, not comfort.

Organizers had to work in an impromptu cool-air break along the route to let drivers and crews recover before continuing on.

That kind of adjustment is a small window into what this tour actually is: not a polished parade on a fixed clock, but a rolling, mile-by-mile test of both machines and people, with the schedule bending to whatever the road and the weather demand that day.

What the Route 66 Invasion Is

The 2026 Official Rat Rod Tour — branded the “Route 66 Invasion” — is the latest edition of an annual cross-country caravan run by Rat Rod Magazine. This year’s tour ties into Route 66’s centennial, and it’s built as a seven-day, eight-state run along the Mother Road covering somewhere in the range of 1,700 to 1,800 miles, depending on the source.

The tour kicked off with a pre-party and meet-and-greet on Friday, September 4, at Welder-Up in Goodsprings, Nevada, hosted by Steve Darnell and the Welder-Up crew. The caravan itself rolled out early the following morning, Saturday, September 5, heading toward Route 66 and linking up with the historic highway just before Oatman, Arizona. From there, the tour has worked its way east — day by day, state by state — with daily stops and meetups at roadside attractions along the way, drawing the kind of small-town crowds seen in Galena.

As the caravan crossed Oklahoma earlier this week, reports put the count at roughly 125 hand-built rat rods rolling through the state, drawing crowds who lined up just to photograph the procession as it passed.

A Tour With a Track Record

This isn’t a one-off event. The Rat Rod Tour has run in various forms for over a decade:

• 2012: The caravan crossed the Rockies, the desert, and Route 66 on a roughly 4,500-mile run.
• 2013: The tour split the country north to south along old Highway 61, a roughly 2,500-mile round trip between Minnesota and Louisiana.
• 2014: A Midwest zig-zag connecting two of the region’s largest rat rod events — Steelfest in St. Louis and the Redneck Rumble in Lebanon, Tennessee.
• 2023: The tour returned after a hiatus as its largest run to date, departing Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and growing to a caravan reportedly stretching nearly three miles before arriving at the inaugural RATSTOCK, held at the Psycho Silo Saloon in Langley, Illinois.
• 2025: The tour began at Rust-A-Mania in Clayton, North Carolina, and again finished at the Psycho Silo Saloon for RATSTOCK 3.

This year’s tour concludes at RATSTOCK 4, scheduled for September 11–12 at the Psycho Silo Saloon in Langley/Sheffield, Illinois. Organizers bill it as the largest rat rod event in the world, and this year’s edition is expected to include dirt-track exhibition laps alongside the usual display of hundreds of rat rods gathered from across the country.

By the time this caravan reaches Illinois, it will have crossed eight states, logged the better part of 1,800 miles, and passed through towns like Galena that don’t get much more warning than a caravan showing up behind a police escort — yet still turn out chairs and crowds like it’s a hometown event.

That’s the pull of the Rat Rod Tour: it’s less a scheduled parade than a rolling, weather-dependent, mile-by-mile test that pulls small towns along Route 66 into a moment of shared spectacle, whether they had time to plan for it or not.

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