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‘Do you love it as much as he does?’ I asked the three brothers.

‘Oh yeah, definitely,’ said Mario Junior, with the others nodding in agreement. ‘As you said, there’s no cure for our illness. But it’s a good illness to have.’

‘And I’m very happy that they learned all the skills,’ said Mario. ‘They started following me and doing everything. And they’re doing it just the way I like to do it. They’ve got the same patience now. And I’m very, very happy that they went along with it. Because they are my good boys, my good sons.’

My last destination before the end of Route 66 was strangely appropriate, given that I’d started this journey reminiscing about an encounter at Mary Shelley’s graveside in Dorset. I pulled off Santa Monica Boulevard into Forever Hollywood, a grand, sixty-two-acre cemetery that boasts both Renaissance villas and palm trees. Only in Hollywood, I thought.

As I’ve said, I’m a taphophile – a lover of graveyards. And with the graves and cenotaphs of Rudolph Valentino, John Huston, Jayne Mansfield and Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone, among many others, this particular graveyard was a real treasure trove for someone like me. For instance, I learned that Jayne Mansfield was only thirty-four when she died. And Douglas Fairbanks Junior’s mausoleum looks like something that might have been built for the Tsar of Russia. It even has a lake in front of it. Then I saw a particularly interesting gravestone. The guy’s name – DeVito – had been engraved on it, as had his date of birth – 1944. But there was no date of death. I thought he must still be alive, and had arranged his grave exactly how he wanted it while he still could. Next door was another tombstone, this time with a picture of a guy with a moustache. Again the year of birth was 1944 and again there was no year of death. I reckoned they were a couple who had seized the opportunity to invest in two prime plots in the cemetery, overlooking the lake.

Another interesting grave – belonging to a girl called Bianca – featured an angel with a broken guitar. The epitaph read: ‘She lived to love, She loved to rock.’ There was also a comment about the devil, so I guessed Bianca must have been a bit of a rocker. That pleased me.

Finally, I wandered over to the crematorium, where some big women were consoling a wee man. Everyone looked deeply sad, and it was a timely reminder of what graveyards are really all about.

Now I had to face the inevitable: it was time to bring this great, exciting, fascinating journey to an end. It was Bobby Troup’s song that first prompted me to take a long ride down the Mother Road, but ‘Route 66’ had one crucial flaw. According to the song, the road runs from Chicago to LA, but the reality is ever so slightly different. Officially, Route 66 has always ended fifteen miles beyond the City of Los Angeles boundary, in Santa Monica, so if I was going to do this properly, that had to be my final destination.

For the very last time, I swung my leg over my trusty steed – the trike that had carried me more than two thousand miles from Chicago. Then I slipped into the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and rode towards the setting sun. I enjoyed every second, every yard of it, but I remained very vigilant because I didn’t want a repetition of an incident that had occurred a few hours earlier, when I was nearly wiped out on the Pasadena Freeway. Out of nowhere, a lunatic had veered towards me from my right-hand side and missed my front wheel by inches. Any closer and he certainly would have killed me. No doubt about it. I would have been mincemeat.

I’d had a few other hairy moments on California’s freeways, too. This state clearly needed a campaign to teach people how to drive properly. They needed to learn that giving way every once in a while didn’t make you any less of a man. I think the way they drive is a manifestation of a rampant selfishness among some Californians. Certain types of people are attracted to the state, and they show their true