Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [78]
Common wisdom has it that the 178 miles of Route 66 that run across the Texas Panhandle – that square block of land jutting up from the northwest corner of the state – is the most boring drive on the entire journey, if not the planet. There’s some truth in that. Texas isn’t a place that tolerates any deviation, and the road is as flat as a pancake and almost uniformly straight right through the state. Water towers, windmills, grain elevators, deserted towns and the whistling wind provided the only relief from the thrum of tyres on the road.
Distances between places stretched out as if Route 66 had been squeezed through a mangle, emerging flattened and with fewer interruptions. Sixteen miles into the state, I pulled into its first town, Shamrock.
Now, I always hesitate to criticise any town, as I grew up in one that most people would describe as a slum. But Shamrock, Texas, is a horrible place. Although it allegedly has a population of a couple of thousand people, it was like a ghost town when I visited. And, God help me, the hotel I stayed in was possibly the worst part of the whole place. Lying on my bed that night, I gave my current situation some thought. I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that Route 66 was a glorious place where they could always get their kicks, because that patently wasn’t true. The road was dying. Nevertheless, some wonderful people were trying to keep it alive, and in some places they were succeeding. In others, like Shamrock, they most certainly were not.
The next morning, I asked the waitress if I could have two fried eggs over easy and some bacon. It seemed a fairly modest request, but she just shrugged and said I could only have what was on the menu. The choice was between some soggy old thing that looked like an omelette or some wee shrivelled sausages – or both – served on a polystyrene plate with white plastic knives and forks and a polystyrene cup of coffee. Anyone who travels Route 66 needs to prepare themselves for a bit of that on the road. And if, like me, they’re a bit spoiled, it gets hellish.
After breakfast, I went to look at a rather beautiful art deco building that had been restored. The U-Drop Inn – originally a restaurant and a petrol station – was one of the icons of the road. Built in the early 1930s from a design scratched in the dirt beside a nearby motel, it had a tall tower over the petrol station and a beautifully detailed café that was called ‘the swankiest of the swank eating places’. It was also the only café for a hundred miles, so it was highly successful in its day. But like many of the establishments along Route 66, it sank into disrepair with the demise of the road. Thankfully, though, it was eventually recognised as architecturally significant and restored with the help of a local bank.
Apparently the U-Drop was best viewed at night, illuminated by its neon strips, but even in the day it was an impressive building from the outside. But it was no longer a petrol station or a restaurant. It wasn’t even a museum. They had tarted it up, then shut it to the public, which confused the hell out of me.
I have a bit of a problem with art deco buildings in general. They’re interesting when you drive past, but that tends to be the end of the story. Take the Hoover Building in West London. Everybody raves about it, but how many of them have been within five feet of it? They’ve all seen it from a car, but then whoom, they’re past it. That’s fine – no one needs to go up and lick it to like it. But art deco lovers get on my tits. They’re the kind of people who read Lord of the Rings and like movies about little ginky punkies attacking wanky wonkies. I wouldn’t let my corpse be taken to a movie like that. And I feel pretty much the same about art deco. It’s for dead people. You’d be amazed at the number of funeral parlours that are art