In the Arizona town of Williams, the motels promise me the American world - Jacuzzis, doughnuts and the forgotten rumble of a road named Route 66. I bed down in the Route 66 Inn, its room numbers shaped like highway signs but its interior as homogenous as that of any motel.
Outside my window a pair of 1950s cars furnish the entrance to Pete's Route 66 Gas Station Museum. Down the road, a Route 66 gift shop fills an entire block. There's a Route 66 Cafe, at least two more gift shops and a soda fountain where every price ends in 66 US cents.
In this virtual theme park of a town it's almost possible to forget that Route 66 is now less a motorway than a memory, gone from most maps and bullied into virtual insignificance by five replacement interstate highways.
Once stretching nearly 4,000km between Chicago and Los Angeles, Route 66 was known affectionately as the Mother Road, even America's Highway, but it's now little more than Memory Lane. Its surviving pieces are fragments, the largest of which is near Williams. The town was once the gateway to the Grand Canyon but it now gets its kicks almost entirely from Route 66.
Williams' claim on Route 66 fame is twofold: on October 13, 1984, it became the last town on the road to be bypassed by the interstate highways; and the last traffic light on Route 66 is in Williams. The light still functions, at an intersection outside the tourist centre. I stand at the corner and try to admire this piece of traffic history but quickly feel ridiculous. I cool my embarrassment with a cherry malted shake inside Twisters Soda Fountain, its gift shop a mass of tourist plunder: mugs, replica petrol pumps, shot glasses, clocks and Marilyn Monroe lamps.
The following morning I head briefly onto the sterility of Route 66's nemesis, Interstate 40. It, too, points to Los Angeles but without any passion; it's simply a job for this overcrowded road. Sixty-five kilometres from Williams I turn off the I-40 and onto the beginning of Route 66's longest remaining section of road, stretching 255km.