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By Root 850 0

lots of other novelties in the museum, like a hairy-arsed road runner with barbed wire for a tail, and a wee covered wagon made of spurred, rolled barbed wire by Sunny Mills of Amarillo. Looking at the First World War barbed wire reminded me of a song whose lyrics go something like, ‘If you want to see the captain, I know where he is’. Then it continues for a few more lines of ‘I know where he is’ before the refrain comes in: ‘He’s hanging on the old barbed wire’. Each verse follows the same pattern, except the person changes – ‘If you want to see the colonel’, and so on. It’s a bit of a boring song, but imagine singing it in the trenches when your friend was hanging upside down on the barbed wire. Grim times.

But by the time I’d scouted right around the museum, I had to admit it was a rather limited subject. All anyone really needs to know about barbed wire is that it can tear the arse out of your trousers, give a cow a good fright, entangle a Yorkshire terrier for life, and is nasty stuff made by greedy men.

Returning to the road and continuing my journey across the Texas Panhandle, at least there was no chance of getting lost. Route 66 closely follows the interstate, occasionally joining the freeway for a few miles at a time, and there were no other roads around to confuse me, which made a change. Quite how anyone riding solo on a motorbike through Missouri or Oklahoma manages to follow the road without getting lost is a mystery to me. In some parts, the path of Route 66 chops and changes so much that I frequently found myself lost, even with four of the production crew in a nearby car, all consulting satnavs, maps, books and all sorts of crap. Now, in the vast emptiness of Texas, at last I could relax and just follow the road.

Riding on, I passed several notable Route 66 landmarks. East of Groom, I spotted a leaning water tower that was one of the most photographed sights along the whole road – Texas’s version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. However, the Groom tower was purposely set at an angle by the owner of a local truck stop who had bought it to attract trade, so it was just another example of Route 66 tack in my book.

A mile or so further down the road stood a 190-foot-tall white crucifix that could be seen from up to twenty miles away on a good day. For a while, the crucifix, which was surrounded by life-sized statues of the Stations of the Cross, laid claim to being the tallest cross in the western hemisphere. However, the residents of Effingham, Illinois – which I’d passed nearly a thousand miles previously – put paid to Groom’s boasting by erecting a cross that was eight feet taller. (Although, in the typical style of American superlatives, neither was as tall as the cross at the Valle de los Caidos in Spain, also in the western hemisphere the last time I checked.)

After about an hour, I reached Amarillo, appropriately known as ‘Cow Town’. Near by, I passed a cattle ranch that has a larger population of cows than most towns have people in this part of America. Running alongside the road for several miles and stretching far into the distance, it is home to 28,000 beasts. The impact of the smell matched the scale of the operation, providing a succinct olfactory answer to the question: is this the way to Amarillo?

Those steers’ ultimate fate was laid bare in Amarillo’s temple to gluttony, the Big Texan Steak Ranch, a Western-style saloon restaurant with a twenty-five-foot neon cowboy standing by the side of the interstate. Here, the steak is free provided the diner eats it with a baked potato, salad, dinner roll and shrimp cocktail in less than sixty minutes. The catch is that the sirloin steak weighs in at seventy-two ounces, about the same as nine regular steak dinners, and you have to eat it on a raised platform under the gaze of the rest of the restaurant … and the world, via a live webcam. A few people, such as Klondike Bill, a professional wrestler, have managed two of the steak dinners in an hour. But since the Big Texan initiated its challenge, fewer than eight thousand of the fifty thousand who have