Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [56]
I loved the stalagmites and stalactites, and I particularly liked the huge pendulum in the main cave. It was supposed to rotate in concert with the spinning of the earth, but the ball at its end was the wrong weight – it should have been a thousand pounds heavier – so it didn’t work. To compensate, someone would just give it a shove every now and then to get it going. Fantastic – the idea of a wee guy whose job it is to slink along when nobody’s looking and give it a big push.
However, the climax of any visit to the caves is a light show that has to be seen to be believed. To the accompaniment of a musical soundtrack that culminates in ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a fella flicks switches on a board to light up various stalagmite and stalactite sections in garish colours, ending with the American flag superimposed on one section of rock. I couldn’t understand why people thought something as staggeringly beautiful as a cave needed a light show to improve it.
Sometimes there’s a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I’ve ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns are the pinnacle of that tack.
Relieved to be moving on, I rode through the village of Bourbon, where the huge water tower, built in 1853 and labelled with the small village’s name, has delighted countless tourists and passers-by over the years. (Bourbon called itself a city, but with just over 1,300 residents and occupying little more than one square mile, and no cathedral or university, it’s a village in my book.) A few miles further, I arrived in Cuba, Missouri, where I spent the night.
I woke the next morning feeling depressed and fed up. I didn’t think I could take another shitty, grey, rainy day, freezing my bollocks off on the bike. Route 66 wasn’t meant to be like this.
Then I opened the blinds and let out a big ‘Oh yes!’ The sun belted into the room. It was a glorious, warm, bright day. My mood immediately changed. I was even upbeat about the itinerary for the morning: a visit to the world’s biggest rocking chair. Another bit of tack, I thought. But it might be a laugh.
The rocking chair is in the town of Fanning, right alongside Route 66. And would you believe it, it’s the most beautifully made, smashing piece of (giant) furniture. It was the brainchild of a funny, big man called Danny Sanazaro, and it really is vast: forty-two feet tall with thirty-one-foot rockers, each of which weighs a ton. Standing beside it would make anyone feel like they’d woken up in one of those 1950s B-movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man. In the grand Route 66 tradition, Danny commissioned it to persuade drivers and riders to stop at his store. It was designed by a local acquaintance with no formal engineering training, and built by the owner of a local welding company. The designer’s plans were off by only a fraction of an inch, Danny told me. The chair was formally unveiled on April Fool’s Day, 2008 – a particularly nice touch.
Unfortunately for Danny, apparently there’s a sixty-foot chair somewhere in Italy. But when I visited, the back of his rocker still boasted ‘World’s Largest’, not ‘America’s Largest’, so I guess that news of the Italian titan hasn’t reached Fanning yet.
Danny let me climb up on a ladder to sit on the seat so that the camera crew could film me saying that I was going to stay up there until someone made the biggest coffee table in the world and brought me a cup of tea. It had been a long time since a piece of furniture had made me so happy. I spotted one great failing, though: it didn’t actually rock.
After climbing down, I had a pootle around Danny’s store, which also included a taxidermy place and an archery range. He invited