• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I was mulling over all of this in the Ant Farm’s studio, but I have to admit that I was starting to tie myself up in knots. I had entered that realm that we Scots call wunnert. ‘Aye, he’s a wee bit wunnert,’ we say. It means lost and wondering, and it was old Uncle Willy who got wunnert: ‘Aye, you’ll get used to him, but he’s a wee bit wunnert, you know? He might take a piss in a frying pan, but don’t worry about him. He means well.’

It was clearly time to change the subject, and luckily I had the perfect thing. Somebody had told me the funniest joke a few days earlier: ‘Why do they give old men in old folks’ homes Viagra? To stop them rolling out of bed.’ I thought that was the funniest thing ever!

After another fifty miles through the mind-numbingly flat and plain landscape of this flattest and plainest part of Texas, I pulled up outside a café in the town of Adrian. I had reached a point in the journey that anyone who was fascinated by facts, figures and statistics – which I’m not at all – would regard as highly significant.

A sign by the side of the road said it all: ‘Los Angeles 1139 miles – Chicago 1139 miles’. I’d arrived at the exact midpoint of Route 66. It was just like anywhere else along the journey, but at the same time it was a funny position to be in. I’d been on the road for longer than I had left to run. It had taken me four weeks to reach the midpoint, and I had less than three weeks remaining. Arriving at the halfway point made sense of the road and gave me a feeling of achievement.

The café – called the Midpoint Café, of course – is famous for its ugly pies. Personally, I thought they should be far uglier than they were – all big and lumpy and burned. Like a lot of things on Route 66, there was a lot of talk, a lot of bragging, but not much when you got there. Compared to many pies I’d eaten in Scotland over the years, these were very good-looking pies. I had a cup of tea and a peach cobbler, and was a wee bit disappointed that its ugliness didn’t come up to scratch. Maybe they used to be properly ugly and now they were concentrating on making them nice. That would be a mistake. I was starting to like the shabby side to Route 66. Once I accepted that the road’s best days were well behind it, it was much easier to accept its limitations and get on with having a good time.

My next stop was the last town in Texas and the first in New Mexico – it straddles the border. This was a particularly poignant destination because, in its heyday, Glenrio was a thriving and hectic pit stop on Route 66. Some of the scenes in John Ford’s film version of The Grapes of Wrath were shot there, but it has never been a highly populated place. At its peak in the 1940s, it had a population of just thirty. But its famous motel had a big neon sign that proclaimed either, ‘First Motel in Texas’ or ‘Last Motel in Texas’, depending on how you looked at it. And the busy post office straddled the state line, with the depot receiving mail in Texas and the office distributing it in New Mexico.

Then, one day in September 1973, Interstate 40 opened. That day, Glenrio died. The stream of tourists who had flowed through the town along Route 66 en route to California or from the Pacific coast towards the American heartland dwindled to a trickle, then stopped altogether.

By 1985, that post office was the only business left open. It served a population of two. Today, among a string of dead or dying towns along hundreds of miles of the old road, Glenrio is the deadest of all. It now has just one resident, a softly spoken mother of two, who lives among the critters and the tumbleweed.

Roxann Travis told me she was in Glenrio on the day the highway opened. Her father’s petrol station became an immediate casualty. Now in her sixties, she is happy to live there alone in the house in which she was born, and she has no desire to move on.

‘My dad moved house here when I was a baby and built the station and the diner,’ she told me. ‘Every summer all the traffic would be lined up the highway, both directions. It