Walk into any conversation about Williams this September and someone will mention Route 66 turning 100. It's on banners downtown, it's in the tourism newsletters, it's the reason a Japanese car show is rolling through a town of about 3,000 people in early October. Alongside Route 66 centennial events, one of this fall's biggest events is the return of a tradition with a different history.
That distinction matters if you live here and you're trying to figure out which weekends are worth clearing your schedule for.
The centennial wave is real, and it's front-loaded
Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926, which makes this year's stretch of car shows, cruise nights, and roadside programming a genuine milestone rather than a marketing invention. Williams has leaned into that history harder than most towns on the route. Because it was the last town bypassed by Interstate 40, in 1984, the city has claimed a kind of seniority in the centennial conversation. It bills itself as the town that gets to celebrate the highway's 100th year first, since Williams held out longest before the interstate finally routed around it.
That framing shows up directly in this fall's lineup. The Route 66 JDM Classic Car Show lands October 2 and 3, bringing a niche crowd of Japanese-import enthusiasts to a downtown that spent June hosting 500 vehicles for the more traditional Historic Route 66 Car Show. Labor Daze, on September 7, closes out the summer with two stages of live music, food trucks, and fireworks timed to burst over Route 66 itself. These visitor-oriented events bring people off the interstate and into downtown storefronts.
The event the town had to vote back in
Rendezvous Days has a different history, and its return followed a community effort to revive it. The event had gone dormant for years before city leaders started asking residents, through surveys, whether it was worth reviving. It was. Organizer Tanya Aleshire led a public planning meeting at Williams City Hall to relaunch it, and the date the city landed on, September 18 through 20, was chosen specifically to coincide with the Route 66 centennial rather than by coincidence.
That timing choice is worth sitting with. Rendezvous Days has nothing to do with cars or highways. It celebrates the American fur trade and mountain-man era, with primitive shooting competitions, traders' row, camping, and a street dance on Route 66 itself, all set at Buckskinner Park on South 6th Street and spilling into downtown. The city could have scheduled its comeback for any weekend on the calendar. Instead it deliberately folded a piece of pre-highway frontier history into the same window as the Route 66 hoopla, which tells you something about how the town wants this centennial year to read. It's not just a highway anniversary. It's an excuse to also resurrect something older and more local that had quietly slipped off the calendar.
What's actually on the schedule this fall
If you're mapping out weekends between now and the holidays, here's the rundown as it stands:
- September 7 — Labor Daze Festival, downtown, with two music stages and a fireworks finale over Route 66
- September 12 — Patriot Day Parade in historic downtown, marking the 25th anniversary of September 11
- September 18 to 20 — Rendezvous Days, revived after a hiatus, at Buckskinner Park and downtown Route 66
- September 19 — Grand Canyon Railway's own anniversary steam train run
- October 2 and 3 — Route 66 JDM Classic Car Show, downtown
- October 3 — Steam Saturdays continue at the Grand Canyon Railway
Notice that the Railway's September 19 anniversary run isn't a Route 66 centennial event at all. It's the Railway marking its own operating history, which happens to fall in the same crowded stretch of the calendar as everything else this fall. Three different anniversaries, three different reasons, all converging in the same stretch of the fall calendar almost by accident.
Reading the difference when you're actually planning a weekend
The practical takeaway for residents is knowing which events change your Saturday routine and which ones you can quietly skip if you're not in the mood for crowds. The car-show weekends bring parking pressure downtown and closures along Route 66 and Railroad Avenue for the cruise routes, the same pattern the June car show already demonstrated with its two-loop procession through the historic district. If your errands take you through the six-block downtown core, plan around those windows.
Rendezvous Days is different in character. Because it's anchored at Buckskinner Park as much as downtown, it spreads the crowd out rather than concentrating it on Route 66 the way a car show does. The street dance portion will still close off a stretch of the highway for an evening, but the bulk of the event, the shooting competitions, the trading, the camping, happens in a park most residents already know for its reservoir, its hiking trail, and its occasional mosquito problem in warmer months. It's a weekend built more for wandering than for watching a parade go by.
The Patriot Day Parade on September 12 has no centennial tie-in. It's a town marking a date that matters to it, offering a different occasion from the car shows and other fall events.
The actual birthday hasn't happened yet
Here's the detail that gets lost in all the fall programming: none of this is the centennial. Route 66 doesn't turn 100 until November 11, which is Veterans Day this year and lands well after the JDM show wraps up, though the Railway's fall programming begins earlier. Everything happening in September and October is, technically, the buildup. The town is marking the approach to the actual date with events across the fall. The schedule also includes Steam Saturdays, a mid-October Polar Express season, and eventually a Holiday Tree Lighting on November 28.
That sequencing says something about how Williams treats its own history. The centennial programming extends across the season, alongside Rendezvous Days and other events on the fall calendar.
If you're weighing what life actually looks like in a town built around a highway's calendar, or you're curious what else is happening in the neighborhoods around Flagstaff this fall, Karra Polder spends her weeks in these communities and is always glad to talk through what a place like Williams actually feels like day to day. Let's Connect.
