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Moving on from Shamrock, I rejoined Route 66, which for most of its distance through Texas runs beside the interstate as a service road. The landscape, as flat and featureless as ever, rolled on. But the wind – Holy Mother of Jesus – was something else. Several times I thought I was going to be killed when side winds hit me, blowing me off course like a big hand sweeping me across the road. I was really frightened a couple of times, but after about half an hour we arrived in McLean under a very hot, blazing sun.

McLean was my mother’s name, and although she had no claim on McLean, Texas, I wondered if there might be a connection. Pulling into the small town, I asked an old man in a truck if he knew where the name stemmed from, but he didn’t have a clue.

‘I have lived here for fifty-three years,’ he said. ‘It used to be a good town but it’s pretty dead now.’

I later discovered more than the old fella had learned over the previous half-century. Until 1901, the area where McLean now stands was nothing more than an unnamed cattle loading station on the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (nicknamed the Cry and Pee, because of its initials). Then an English rancher, Alfred Row, donated some land near the loading station, thinking it might make a good site for a town. He was right – it grew quickly and within two years it had several banks, a post office, a newspaper, a wind-powered water pump, various stores and stables. By 1909, it was well established as a busy loading point for the railway, handling crops as well as animals, and requiring four telegraph operators to deal with commercial communications. Three years later, Alfred Row visited his relatives back home in England. For the return voyage, he booked a passage on a ship making its maiden voyage. That ship was the Titanic, and Alfred was last seen on an ice floe, frozen to death, hugging his briefcase.

McLean continued to prosper after his death, profiting from the oil boom in the 1920s and 1930s, and serving as the site of a camp for German prisoners-of-war in the 1940s. Any escapees were easily recaptured and were usually quite pleased to return after a few days on the bare plains of the Panhandle.

In 1984 McLean was the last Texan town to be bypassed by the interstate, and its sad decline began. Interstate 40 is about a mile away, but it seems like another world. Much of the town is now deserted. According to the mayor, who runs the Cactus Inn Motel, a marvellous old place, the population is significantly less than the official figure of eight hundred, although she was fully in favour of young people leaving the town to improve their prospects.

Nowadays, many of the buildings in McLean are abandoned. Petrol stations no longer pump gas, restaurants haven’t served food for years, and plenty of houses have boarded-up windows and doors. On one tumbledown shop – above a fading mural featuring Elvis, a Chevy and a waitress on roller skates – a banner still proclaims McLean ‘the Heart of Old Route 66’. I could imagine those days when the town was booming, when solid lines of cars streamed in from New Mexico to the west and Oklahoma to the east and the local petrol stations and diners were open around the clock to cater to travellers and tourists. Now it’s a very different story. The main street is littered with the wreckage of the past and the concrete landscape is slowly being reclaimed by weeds. For photographers, it’s a treasure trove of atmospheric pictures of urban decay, but I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live there.

Nevertheless, McLean still has several places that make it worth a visit. Next to the Cactus Inn Motel, the Red River Steakhouse serves steaks that are so juicy and tasty that many of its clientele regularly drive the hundred-mile round trip from Amarillo to eat there. It also has charming waitresses and a fantastic atmosphere, so it takes some beating. Inexpensive and mind-blowingly good, it proves that you can find good food on Route 66, even though it can be a long search sometimes.