THINK BIKE
Life lessons from the back of a Harley on Route 66
THIS is what I learnt on the second day of our ride down The Mother Road: even if your head is too fat to slide the arm of your sunglasses between it and the helmet, it is still possible to steer a 400kg hog down the interstate at nearly 100km/h with one arm while you shield your eyes from the glare of the setting sun with the other.
The first day’s ride — 424km from Chicago to Carlinville, Illinois — was always going to be a beast. We had tackled the second-longest day of the entire trip on — for us — the wrong side of the road, on unfamiliar bikes while navigating the traffic in Chicago with a healthy dose of jet lag. Add a rainy, 12°C day and things were looking challenging.
But we dug deep into our utter lack of experience in biking trips and made it to our first overnight stop in one piece.
Having thus tamed the beast on day one, we oozed confidence as we hit the road for a manageable 225km from Carlinville to Cuba, Missouri. The sun was shining and the weather was sweet. I had that peaceful, easy feeling as we got stuck into our R66 playlists and took it gently, starting late and stopping after only 32km for an early lunch.
We may have got carried away with the “taking it easy” bit. At 5.30pm, we found ourselves staring at a road marker that said we still had 88km to go to our night stop, where Connie was waiting with an open-arms welcome at the Wagon Wheel Motel.
And so the third day dawned — 378km from Cuba to Baxter Springs, Kansas — and we’d gone from being as nervous as longtailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs to seasoned bikers. Well, at least we thought so.
The day’s warm and sunny ride through southern Missouri took us over rolling hills and through dense forests and vineyards, away from the six-lane Interstate that had dominated the first two days. There were a few historic places along the way — Rolla, Lebanon, Springfield and Carthage — and some boarded-up ghost towns.
That day we mastered that unspoken bikers’ greeting: when you pass one headed in the opposite direction, it’s etiquette to extend an arm in greeting. The first few times I used my accelerator arm — definitely uncool, as you almost lurch to a stop — until we discovered, through trial and error, that the only way is to drop your clutch hand out to the left, below handle-bar height while staring straight ahead to maintain your badass biking demeanour. Never, ever look at your greetee.
On day five, the endless Oklahoma cornfields turned to herds of steers, whose stench filled our nostrils as we roared past. We crossed the 1 000-mile mark and celebrated by taking a small detour to Harley-Davidson World in Oklahoma City for new kit, where we added a lot more “cool”.
Oklahoma gave way to Texas, the Lone Star State, on a 286km ride in challenging weather: gusting winds, mist, a dash of rain and thunder in the distance — all very easy for us hardcore bikers but those big-ass Oklahoma rain drops feel like hail when they hit your face at 65mph. We passed through tiny towns called Shamrock and McLean, hoping for a coffee, but they were deserted. They take Sunday seriously in these parts.
We spent the night at the Big Texan in Amarillo. There was lots of cowboy kitsch: dressed-up staff, amusement-park stalls, a Western-themed motel and a 2kg steak-mealeating competition. The speed-eating record, by the way, is held by a young, skinny mother named Molly Schuyler.
In the morning, we set out early for the 273km to Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Someone was cranking up the heat as we headed west, so it was good to get in a few hours’ early riding. We stopped, briefly, in Adrian, the Mother Road’s halfway point, marking the milestone with breakfast at the MidPoint Café, a classic American diner with some interesting customers, like the guy from Missouri who was cycling The Road, spreading the Good Word and handing out Bibles along the way. He encouraged us to take four. We haggled him down to one.
We arrived in Santa Rosa — just down the drag from Fort Sumner, where Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid — early enough to enjoy a swim in the Blue Hole, a natural artesian well where, legend has it, Billy himself would take a dip.
On the eighth day, we crossed the Rio Grande. This was a long haul — 413km to Gallup, New Mexico — which saw us on the bikes at 5.30am to beat the heat and the afternoon’s gusting winds. The rising sun was on our backs, Guns N’ Roses was on the playlist and all seemed right with the world until 50km down the road we had to pull over to try to warm our numb, gloved hands
on the engines before pushing on. After 128km of hammering down the Interstate, we stopped in Moriarty for a much-needed coffee, moments away, I’m pretty certain, from frostbite.
Route 66 in New Mexico is overlaid by the I40 for most of the way, so much of the riding is on the Interstate. But there is a beautiful section from Moriarty to Albuquerque, away from the highway, which leads straight through downtown Albuquerque with classic R66 neon signs on the diners and motels. We couldn’t beat the winds, though, and the last hour into Gallup was really gusty, so much so that I was relieved to be riding a bike as large as the 400kg “Pocahontas”, the name I had given my bike.
Gallup, a cool town surrounded by desert, is where many of the old, classic Westerns were made. Our night stop was the El Rancho Hotel, a landmark where John Wayne, Doris Day and Katharine Hepburn stayed back in the day. I lay on the bed in the Ronald Reagan suite where I’m sure Ronnie lay, all Brylcreemed up after a hard day on set as he contemplated switching careers. All I was contemplating was the next day’s impending heat and winds. We’d gone from being as nervous as long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs to seasoned bikers
We were late on the road after a lazy breakfast at the El Rancho and headed deep into the desert, through a piece of Arizona’s Painted Desert and onward to the wigwams at Holbrook. We had three days to go. As Brett said, he could smell the stables.
The tenth day was the pick of the tour — 426km of awesome riding with a quick detour to the Grand Canyon. First stop was Winslow to stand on the corner like the Eagles did:
Well I’m a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona Such a fine sight to see It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flat-bed Ford Slowin’ down to take a look at me.
It was worth the stop. There was a flat-bed Ford and the Eagles’ music playing in the background. Then we hammered down the Interstate to Flagstaff and took the spectacular road up to the Grand Canyon, climbing to 8 050 feet. There was snow on the peaks above us.
Route 66 saves the best for last. The 255km stretch from Seligman to Needles is the longest uninterrupted stretch of the road. The ride took us through Peach Springs and Kingman and into the Black Mountains on a narrow, winding mountain pass to Oatman, an old gold-mining ghost town. Then it was down into the Mohave Valley, where we battled the desert heat before crossing the Colorado River into California. At the Best Western, we went straight for the pool.
After 11 days and 3 218km of the Mother Road under our tyres, we felt we could channel Kerouac, Steinbeck and Hunter S Thompson.
At 5am, after a night of passing freight trains, we set off for the last run to LA — 450km and a chequered flag. It was 23°C at 5am and just light enough to see the spectacular landscape. It was just us and the mile-long freight trains snaking across the desert.
We survived California’s drivers, dropped off the bikes and headed to the American Electric Tattoo Company on Sunset Boulevard for some celebratory ink to mark the end of an unforgettable adventure.
I am now living proof that an idiot who never really rides a bike can fly across the world and then ride across a continent with zero preparation. Been there, done that, got the tat.
Now it feels strange to no longer have Pocahontas sitting outside, waiting quietly for me to saddle her up for another day. Clearly, this is addictive.