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Route 66. The ‘Main Road of America’, the Mother Road that took so many Americans from dustbowl desperation to a bright new Californian dream. Route 66 is America’s most famous road.

Well, it’s time to get some kicks, I thought. And surely, if it’s an American dream, it has to be a Harley. I picked up a Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail in Los Angeles. The Softail is a remake of the fifties Hardtail frames - lots of chrome, a round headlight and tall perspex windscreen - but hidden away it has the best of modern technology, with a belt drive and rear suspension. It’s no moped, either. At 1340cc, its V2 engine is as large as some sports cars.

Leather saddlebags stuffed with a few clothes, I set off in a loop through the western states, heading northeast from LA. Biking in Nevada and Utah is like riding into a postcard. Mesa table-mountains and free-standing buttes flashed by, chocolate-coloured and beige, magenta and orange. Lightning forks scratched their summits and distant rainstorms hung like negligees billowing in the clean air.

Las Vegas passed like a weird, mock-fairy-tale mirage in the desert. In Bryce Canyon, thousands of hoodoos (eroding rock pinnacles) stood like choirboys, ruffs around their necks, singing a crescendo of silence. Then I rode south, across the rust red reaches of Arizona to the Grand Canyon. As I looked down into it, a plane flew tourists on a tour thousands of feet below.

I hit Route 66 at Flagstaff and turned west towards the Pacific. The Harley purred at 55 mph and then, at the sight of the open road, growled up to 70 and beyond. Riding a Softail is like being on a runaway carthorse. You really have to throw it around the corners. It’s heavy but the road-holding is good.

In Arizona and California the Old Route 66 has now mainly been overtaken by Interstate 40, but sections of the old road still remain. The old hard-top sits quietly decaying, unloved and usually unrepaired. In the old towns, I passed 60s diners and old motels that are just clinging on. In deserted gas stations fat 50s petrol pumps still stood to attention.

In the small town of Seligman I met Larry Murphy, a Route 66 enthusiast who actually moved here so that he would be living on the Mother Road. He remembers being driven along it as a child when his family moved west. He keeps all sorts 66-abilia in his garage: a huge petrol station sign, a 30 year old Thunderbird in near-mint condition and of course some original shield-shaped roadsigns with 66 standing bold in black on white.

Bikers are a community of course - other riders gave a slow-hand wave as they sped by. Then, as I stood filling the bike one day, the petrol station was overtaken by a deep, gutteral roar. Ten bikes, all Harleys, pulled into the forecourt. A rider saw the Softail and came over. We fell into conversation. Harley fans to the core, they were touring for the weekend from Utah.

‘It’s a hairy-legs weekend, this. We ain’t got no women with us.’

Well, it takes all sorts.

In the Black Mountains near the Californian border, the Harley sputtered round the sharp bends and then roared at the straights. This is old Wild West country. A century ago, Oatman was a gold-mining town. Some of the old buildings are still there, complete with wooden boardwalks, overhanging eaves and copious mess from the donkeys that run wild all over this area.

Nowadays Oatman makes its living as a theme-goldrush town. Just after lunch, outside the Motherlode Restaurant, there was a gunfight between the sheriff and a crowd of baddies in black, who all died obligingly in the road. They even do gunfight weddings, in which the groom is dragged off by cowboys to be captured by the sheriff and delivered to the streetside altar with a rope around his neck. Some might see it as a fitting metaphor for married life.

It is also desolate, sun-beaten country, where bushes blow on the wind, putting roots down where they come to rest. You really feel for the Arkies (from Arkansas) and Okies (Oklahoma) who came this way all those years ago. Some never made it over the Californian border. They were turned back because they were carrying diseases. Others died from the heat of the Mojave Desert. It is so hot there that General Patten used it to train his troops for the North African campaign in World War II.

Even at 80mph (whoops, 65), the heat flickered in my face like a furnace. Cacti stood by the roadside, arms held up like policemen trying to flag me down. But what else can you do with 20 miles of arrow-straight road and nothing man-made in sight? Fantastic.

All too soon I came to the fringes of LA again, suburbs that sprawled for miles and miles inland. The original Route 66 probably never quite made it to the coast, but there is a theory that Santa Monica Boulevard is the Mother Road’s last gasp and that was good enough for me. Black helmet and shades, I headed towards the coast, cruising beneath the Hollywood sign and then past Beverly Hills. The palm trees and buildings rolled by either side, reflected in the huge chrome petrol tank.

It wasn’t Bobby Troup’s song (‘I get my kicks, on Route 66…’) that passed through my mind here. Instead it was Cheryl Crow: ‘All I wanna do, is have some fun, until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard...’

My thoughts exactly.

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