A Month on Route 66: On his borrowed Harley Davidson Road King, Geoff Hill says goodbye to Texas and heads into New Mexico's celebrity desert.
In the morning light in Amarillo I found a big black Harley, a purple customised Yamaha and their owners admiring the fact that I hadn't cleaned my own bike in several days.
"Howdy. Where ya headin'?"
"Santa Fe by nightfall. You?"
"Well, we been down from Wyoming three days. First night we slept on a picnic table, second night in a fleapit motel and third night at his old folks' place. Tonight we aim to be in Kansas."It had taken me a week to get here from Kansas. I was obviously not sleeping on enough picnic tables, I thought as they roared off with a wave.
There is a great camaraderie among bikers. You see one coming the other way and, as you close, you see that he too is loaded up for travelling - and, as you pass, both of you hold your left hand out in the traditional greeting. Just boys dressed up and playing with toys, but you'd better not say so or we'll come around and beat you with a wet lettuce.
The road ahead this morning is straight and true, and I wind the speedometer up . . . 80 . . . 90 . . . 100 . . . until I'm climbing through snowcapped mountains and out onto the high chaparral. In front, huge storms brew and boil, pouring their contents onto the dry earth.
I dance between them like a pilot flirting with the clouds, and come at last to Santa Fe whose dappled sidewalks are no longer stomped by priests and cowboys. Instead you find many classic Mercedes convertibles and lots of sensitive artistic types looking as if they'd faint if you walked up and said "The Simpsons!" loudly.
As I get back on the Harley, a security guard called Eddie comes over and we get to talking. A former motorcycle cop, he spends 10 minutes regaling me with merry tales of riding through alleyways at 65mph, falling off, breaking hips, banjaxing knees, twisting spines.
"Eddie, remind me never to go riding with you," I say, gunning the throttle and hitting the road again. At a garage 50 miles down the valley a mechanic is tinkering with a 1954 Mercedes sportster, behind him a graveyard of Detroit's finest: hugely finned and chromed Cadillacs and Imperials from the 1950s, abandoned and baking in the sun, but looking as if a quart of oil and a turn of the key would bring them thundering into life again.
This morning I had been frozen in the mountains, and this afternoon it's 90 in the shade. An hour later I'm rolling through the outskirts of Albuquerque. I pull over and stop a youngish couple walking by. Both are blonde. She has a badge that reads The Leather Love Line.
"Pardon me, but am I headed the right way for the bridge across the Rio Grande?"
"Absolutely, just take a right four blocks down," she says, handing me a business card across the top of which was written Dominant-Submissive Love, Fetishes, TV, Unique Erotica
"Tell me, are you into S&M?" she said sweetly. "No, M&S, although recently their socks have been a bit dull."
I cross the Rio Grande and climb Nine Mile Hill to where, once upon a time, a polar bear lived. Kept in a glass case at the old Rio Puerco trading post, the stuffed bear disappeared one night. The trading post had disappeared too, leaving only a white wall bearing a sweating skull and the grim warning: 700 miles desert.
There are few signs marking Route 66 out here, and no way of knowing I'm on the road apart from old maps and guidebooks I had brought with me. My constant companions on the old road are the railroad track and the telegraph poles. Few people care about the old road here - because there are few people here and they're too busy scratching a living from the desert.
At Cubero, there is only the long-closed Villa de Cubero Café, a trading post and a handful of houses. Yet it was here that Ernest Hemingway came to write much of The Old Man and the Sea. Standing in the baking sun, it's hard to comprehend such splendid perversity - yet he must have known it was only out here in the desert he could summon up the feat of imagination which would produce such an extraordinary book about the nature of the sea.
In the trading post, a man is buying two dozen cans of beer for lunch. There's no sign that Hemingway had ever been here.
In the lilac dusk I come at last to Gallup, through a landscape which has been the setting for films from Redskin in 1929 to the Superman series.
And when Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart, Hayworth and Peck were here, they stayed at the El Rancho, where a thirsty Errol Flynn once rode his horse into the bar. Each room is named after the stars who stayed there. I stay in the Marx Brothers Room. There were 47 of us, including me, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo, four chambermaids, three Russian aviators looking for their beards, two waiters, a sommelier and a polar bear.