Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [108]
I agreed wholeheartedly with him.
‘I’ve had many, many tourists over the years and still they come in and say to me: “You people on Route 66 are like one big family. I started in Chicago, Illinois, and they all treat us so well.”’
I knew exactly what he meant. ‘That’s what’s happened to us,’ I said. ‘We were flabbergasted in Missouri, Oklahoma and other places by how nice people were to us.’
‘And that is what we helped to preserve. Isn’t that beautiful?’
‘It’s lovely. Small-town America is wonderful. I’m a big fan.’
‘At first the travelling public that came here were mainly grown-ups. But when John Lasseter made Cars – I’m in it, incidentally: he interviewed me for about two hours for the extra disc with the DVD – he captured the imagination of the children, the generation that’s going to inherit all of this. And now we have children coming here from all over the world, saying, “We saw you on the DVD.”’
Angel exuded this sort of positivity throughout our conversation. It was one of those great days, and it got even better when I walked down Seligman’s Main Street and bumped into a gang of leather-clad trikers.
Ever since I’d started my journey on Route 66, I’d noticed a lot of people riding next to me on hired Harleys. Frankly, I’d grown to dislike them. Big, chrome-covered monsters, to me they had begun to look more like tourist buses with every passing day. The people who rented them were okay. Many of them were early retirement guys in search of freedom and escape after decades of hard work. But I also had a sense that they were buying into that corporate image of Route 66 that I mentioned at the start of the book. They all seemed to think that it had to be ridden on a Harley or driven in a red convertible. And that sort of corporatisation was exactly what killed the Mother Road. It had transformed the drive from Chicago to Los Angeles from a cobbled-together passage through small towns with family businesses into a sanitised procession along freeways interspersed with strip malls, fast-food chains and plastic motels.
So it was a relief to meet a bunch of fellow trike riders. They had some extraordinary custom machines, some factory ones and some home-made ones with bits and pieces of cars and other odds and ends. Like me, most of the riders refused to call their bikes trikes. Many of them were older people and had moved on from bikes to trikes, which pleased me as patron of the British Disabled Trike Society. A lot of the guys had been injured in motorbike accidents and couldn’t balance on two-wheelers any more, so they’d gone down the trike route. Anything to keep biking.
One of them had created his trike by sticking a wheel on either side of the rear wheel of his Honda motorbike (actually, I suppose it was technically a quad, because it had four wheels). It was a splendid, neat-looking machine, still powered by the original rear wheel; the extra wheels simply acted as stabilisers.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. ‘Why did you change your bike?’
‘My left leg had given up the ghost,’ he said. ‘It would go to sleep, so I would stop at the traffic lights, put my feet down and the bike would collapse on top of my leg.’ He’d come up with the perfect solution to keep biking.
Another wee man was there with his wee girlfriend, who had only one leg and one arm. She had a wee trike of her own, but had come on the back of his this time. They told me they still went everywhere together, and they were bursting with positive energy. Happy-go-lucky and delightful, they would be an inspiration to anyone.
Then there was Catfish Larry, the owner of a big, beautiful, yellow trike. He told me the hilarious story of how he got his nickname, but all I can say here is that the clues were to be found in a catfish and his big bushy moustache. It was not that clean. In fact, it was downright dirty and great fun, but not wanting to offend anyone of a delicate disposition, I’ll leave