Route 66 and all that.

Amarillo, Texas. It’s a musical name and Neil Sedaka’s old Amarillo song swirls through the mind, an agreeable brain worm.

Amarillo is a pit stop for us on the way to Santa Fe.

We don’t do massive drives. That is not what a road trip is about. It is

not a race. It is an adventure. We drive one day in three. We visit and explore for two days out of three. So here we are in Amarillo, very comfortable indeed in an airy big room at the Residence Inn by Marriott, looking out across the highway to a pleasant park. The hotel has an excellent pool, good breakfasts, good Internet, and good laundry facilities.

It is here I can do laundry, write, swim, and rationalise the luggage. Bruce can wipe the white lines from his eyes by reading the NY TImes and the Economist. We can take the olive green Rogue to the carwash. We can shop for sundries, post things home, and cook for ourselves.

We use the business centre for some tax documents. We shop so Bruce can cook our favourite spag bol with the green vegetable pasta I hope has become available in Australia.

There’s a tortilleria in the big Amigo supermarket - a big kitchen area where women in hygiene caps are rolling, spreading, kneading and packing tortillas hot from the oven. One of the cooks sees me watching and starts calling out something in Spanish. Me? Are you talking to me? It takes a while to get the message. She’s calling me over to sample a hot tortilla. She provides honey to put on it. Oh, my. Oh, my. This is heaven. Mexican food. Mmm.

On our first night we go to a local steak house. I want to eat a really good Texas steak in Texas. This we do in the family-owned Hoffbrau Steak House - and it is a fine steak. But the most interesting element of the evening emerges in the form of our fleet-footed and cheerful waiter. He gives his name as Sway. Truly? How do I spell it, I ask. Sway sways.

When I inquire as to his background, he says he has an interesting surname, too. It is High, His name is Sway High. True story. Ironically, he has no great interest in music.

And that is what we do in Amarillo.

We’d been warned of the smell of the stockyards in Amarillo but don’t get a whiff until we are packing the car and then it is just a faint pong on the wind.

So off we drive, down Helium Road and out along what is fondly remembered and celebrated as Route 66 and into the flat, flat landscape.

And there is none other than a Firearms Superstore. It is massive. How many guns must be in there? Thousands upon thousands. Shudder.

And here comes a vast expanse of mini storage sheds. The phenomenon of mini storage, the incredible scale of it right across the USA, long has had me intrigued. It is the ultimate symptom of the consumer society, the shopper with nowhere to put everything and an inability to part with things. Excess of material objects. The grand national overflow. Outsourcing the clutter. It is not cheap to maintain mini storage so people are paying to keep the things they don’t need.

Here on the plains out of Amarillo is one of the world’s glorious follies of surplus - the buried Cadillacs.

Our there in a clearing in the sea of sorghum crops is a line of Cadillacs sticking up out of the ground.

Over the years, the graffiti artists have gone to town on them decorating them in their own styles and strident colours. But taggers like tagging art. Talentless little creeps that taggers are.

Now they are the power of the Cadillac art, layering the cars with coat after coat. They were at it when we drove up. Lots of them with their spray cans hissing frothy colours over the top of the last colours.

The car metal is quite fat with the layers of paint. Spray cans lie all over the place. Lazy, messy taggers. But the cars look fabulous. I’ll give them that. They have emerged as a lasting and gloriously eccentric piece of interactive public art.

Some of the painters have added their touches to the sorghum crops

around the cars, so one comes upon very happy-looking painted plants into the bargain.

It’s quite a sight.

Back on the road,we hum along the plain which is as flat as a flat plain can be.

We see huge silos, cotton crops, sorghum crops, wind farms, cattle.

Oh, here’s another of those endless wind turbine forests stretching to the horizon on a treeless plain.

Ugh. What’s that smell? Oh, gawd, it is bad.

It’s the stockyards of which we have been warned. The poor doomed cattle are hanging around in a mass of huge pens eating grain and hay and, er, shitting. It’s the stench of shit and fear. Bad smells don’t get more putrid. It is nauseating. Long after we’ve passed the stockyards, the ghastly odour lingers in the car and clings to the nostril. I bring out the boronia oil.

Meanwhile cotton crops are rushing by, and a little town called Vega which is still on Historic Route 66. But Historic Route 66 is a small, old road. Route 40 has replaced it

and it bypasses little towns like Vega.

The original Route 66 runs alongside interstate Route 40. Sometimes it us under Route 40. Often it is commemorated with signposts. It is one of the great legends of mobile USA, the wonderful route which went right across the land and was sometimes known as The Mother Road. We all remember the TV show and the song: Get your kicks on Route 66.

Bruce remembers travelling it a number of times in the family car as a boy as the family moved across country to different military bases where his Colonel father was posted. He tells of five-day 2500-mile trips, bickering in the back seat with his sister, crammed in the car complete with family cats, goldfish, and turtles.

The wide open spaces continue. We’re actually on a Rocky

Mountain plateau, part of a great geological uplift which created the Grand Canyon, says Bruce.

The windmills go on and on. At

some perspectives, they align in a row, their combined blades looking like dandelion heads. We study the various aspect of them. We have plenty of opportunity. They are the landscape for very many miles.

They go right into the town of Adrian. Turning, turning, turning.

Cattle share the prairie with the turbines.

So do lines of huge power pylons, standing in the landscape like exuberant ladies, arms outstretched with their electric bounty. Finally, the landscape changes to low mesas and open valleys. The real look of the old American west, says Bruce.

Now we are seeing buttes and mesquite bushes on the plains. Old fashioned windmills are out in landscape. It’s dry, not unlike Australian countryside.

Mesas are neatly edged on the skyline like stair steps. There’s an isolated farm in the distance. Jaris Ranch says a sign hanging over a gateway. Big property.

We hit the Deaf Smith County Line. Odd name.

There’s Route 66, Exit 0.

Hah, it is the New Mexico border.

I was last in New Mexico when I was 14, says Bruce wistfully.

Cattle on the landscape. Some of them lounging around beside an old-fashioned farm windmill. But there’s another wind farm on the horizon. More giant turbines. A range of hills over there.

Bruce reflects that many of the atomic bomb scientists would have come this way en route to their secret laboratories at Los Alamos.

The first big hoarding turns up. So far the road has been OK but not great.

The traffic has been more trucks and caravans than cars. Now it seems to be lots of trucks. One carries Idaho potatoes. One carries logistics supplies. We assume they may be computer things. Many of the trucks are white or silver and unmarked. We start imaging their contents. Furniture. Lingerie. Kitchen sinks. Potato crisps. We pass one with no mystery cargo. It is loaded with Mercedes cars.

There are mesas to the left of us, buttes to the right. It is dry. The landscape is sprinkled with mesquite.

The road dips into a valley with a bridge. There’s a thin line of water underneath. Vultures wheel overhead.

Pinto ponies are out there on the landscape, grazing on the saltbush-like ground cover. There’s a small ranch. Now farmland.

Sorghum Crops. Cotton fields.

Our petrol is low. Only 34 miles of range left, according to the Rogue’s mileage calculator.

Ack.

Suddenly there seems no sign of urbanisation. But Bruce knows Tucumcari is near.

Cattle, horses…

Finally a sign for Tucumcari brags it has 24 restaurants. It must also have petrol.

In we go. It’s a sad little town. Scruffy. Lots of portable homes. Empty ruins of an old motel.

It is one of the casualties of old Route 66. Even the old out-of-town service station is a ruin. Clearly petrol and Tucumcari’s life is back on the new highway. We swing back on the new road and find a very grand and fancy petrol station. It has swaggering men in cowboy boots and hats. Hell, they are actually cowboys. One of them tips his hat and calls me young lady. I am in love. The cowboy looks like Brad Pitt in the film Thelma and Louise.

The McDonalds seems the only option for lunch. We grab a quick coffee and a Southwest salad. It is as good as it always is.

But, look, in joyful incongruity, there's a new motel with a Statue of Liberty holding aloft a triumphant Route 66 sign. Hope lives in Tucumcari.

Back on the road among the trucks and trucks and trucks - with red-sided mesas out the window.

We’re eating up road in the great American west, says Bruce. Indeed we are.

A little town called Newkirk is tucked between two mesas.

Dry creek bed. Bruce says they are called arroyos.

Mesas with cascades of shale.

Grief, cyclists way out here.

Black cattle dotted on the landscape.

Rusty junkyard. Dead cars. What an odd place to put them.

We’re picking up Santa Rosa radio. It is half in Spanish. It plays us Mexican music. Seems apt.

Over a hill, Santa Rosa glints into sight. It seems to be a sedate desert town, sprawled around a lake and the Pecos River. More houses out of town. Proud structures in a rocky landscape.

Rows of wooden telegraph poles look like crucifixes.

And we’re back in the flatlands.

Livestock. Wind farm on the horizon.

Vast saltbush-like landscape. Desert junipers. Mesas appearing in the distance.

A failed Phillips 66 petrol station, wan and derelict and, oh, here come more hoardings. A barrage of them.

Mexican imports, toys, beautiful crosses, snake stuff, Mother Road souvenirs, guy stuff, girl stuff… They are all for the same business - Cline’s Corner. It’s coffee has been worth stopping for since 1934, says one.

This is now Villanova State Park. Cattle on the landscape. Blue ranges on the horizon suddenly seem close.

We can see the old Route 66 running right beside us. It is a small road compared to the Route 40 it became.

It would never have borne the heart-stopping truck jockeying we are now experiencing. These big blokes who are on the road for a living can get grumpy and impatient. Who knows what set them off but these drivers seem to be in a dangerous competition. Their manoeuvres at high speed are just hair-raising. We grit our teeth and go for it when we find a moment to overtake them. Phew.

Here comes the famous Cline’s Corner of all the hoardings. It is a bit underwhelming after all the advertising.

We don’t check it out. We take the north 285 turnoff to Santa Fe, which brings us on to a two-lane highway just like the old Route 66 and straight away we’re stuck behind a grey nomad’s huge caravan. It’s the only other car on the road but there's no passing on this narrow, windy, undulating road.

Oh, well.

Dry pastures are all around us. Cattle. A red lake. Ruins. We chug along patiently for miles. Then, with a roar of her powerful engine, the Rogue overtakes and we have the road and the view ahead to ourselves.

Blue hills, red mesas and the emergence of strands of gorgeous golden trees.

They’re cottonwoods in early autumn colours. To think we saw cottonwoods in their bright spring greens in Wyoming. Now, months later as our trip brings us in a circle around the country, we see them in another hue. It reminds us that we

are on the homeward-bound leg.

The time, like the olive green Rogue, has gone fast. Sometimes we have felt that there is no other life than this transit world on the road, from place to place and hotel to hotel. The contrasts, the beauty, the fun, the oddities, the glory of landscape, the roads, the roads, the roads.

Now we are seeing handsome adobe houses tucked in the landscape. More and more. These are lovely. The ochre hues, the rounded forms, the integrity with the rocky environment. The sense of space.

This is another world. It’s called El Dorado.

We turn south on 25 and there is more adobe, more adobe, commerce and our destination.

Santa Fe. We have arrived.