Texas takes the clutter out of life, as Geoff Hill's Harley ride along Route 66 takes him away from the east.
The town of Erick, Oklahoma, is so small that "Welcome to Erick" and "Thank You for visiting Erick" are written on the front and back of the same sign. Inside the only motel, a man called Harley was standing behind the desk. It seemed like a good omen.
"Anywhere good to eat in this town, Harley?" I asked him as I checked in. "No," he grinned. "This here's a little ole redneck town, so they've no need for good food."
He handed me a plank on which had been roughly written the words, MOTER CYCLE.
"Here, Geoffrey, you park your stand on this so it don't dent the ash-felt." I parked my moter cycle on the plank and went out looking in Erick for some bad food and a beer. I found both and went to bed a happy man.
Next day, half an hour after breakfast, I was in Texas. Not the DIY store where they have every widget in the world except the one you want, but the real one, where it's illegal to carry a cigarette in a public park, but not a handgun, where they are so polite that, by law, criminals must give their intended victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and explain the nature of the crime to be committed.
Indeed, it was not long after I crossed the state border before I discov ered my first crime. Someone had stolen all the trees, hills and fields. Immediately I had the feeling I had left behind the cluttered east and was facing something raw and primeval, a land in which there was only the sky and the horizon, and the road to Amarillo, where I was planning to get me a free steak at the Inn of the Big Texan. There were only two catches - one is that it's 72oz, the other is that you have to eat it in an hour . . . plus a baked potato, shrimp cocktail, salad and a roll, with butter.
Surprisingly, several have done it, including a kindly 63-year-old grandmother, a baseball player who did it in 11 minutes, a 385lb wrestler named Klondike Bill who ate two, an 11-year-old boy whose parents watched in disbelief, a man who ate it raw and a local chap who has done it 21 times.
"Anyone tried it recently," I asked the girl as I checked in next door at the Big Texan Motel. "An Australian guy tried it yesterday. He barfed everywhere," she said sweetly, handing me the key to a room on the second floor.
"Is it true it's still illegal here to shoot buffalo from the second floor of a hotel or break wind in an elevator?" I said.
"It's okay, we don't have buffalo or an elevator."
I wandered into the dining room of the Big Texan filled with resolve. Until Daryl the waiter brought out a raw steak on a tray with the trimmings squeezed around the edges. It looked like a meat doormat without the welcome sign.
"Daryl, I have a problem. My mother always told me to finish what was on my plate, but she didn't mean me to explode in the process. And I don't like the look of that shrimp cocktail."
"Don't worry," said Daryl as he took away the doormat and put it back in the fridge, "I'm not too fussy on shrimp cocktail myself."
I had a 7oz one instead, went to bed and went off next morning to take a look at one of the weirdest sights of Route 66: 10 Cadillacs buried nose down in the desert. They are all that is left of the first American space programme in the 1950s.
President Eisenhower, a notorious tightwad, was reluctant to spend huge amounts of money on real rockets and reckoned that, since America was the finest country in the world and Cadillacs were the finest cars in America, they would do nicely if the windows were wound up tightly.
Amarillo, sitting on the world's largest helium deposits, was chosen as the launch site.
On May 21st, 1956 the Cadillacs were filled with helium to make them lighter, powered up by ethyl nitrate and lined up on the launch pads.
"Ready for take off!" said the drivernauts in very squeaky voices, and the 10 went powering into the clear blue sky, only to plunge into the earth in a neat line two miles outside the city.
Fortunately, every single one of the drivernauts was unhurt: after plunging through the windscreens, they floated around for most of the afternoon until rescued by the Amarillo Butterfly Collectors' Club.
Oh, all right then: the truth, if you want to be so pedantic about it, is that the Cadillac Ranch was the 1974 brainchild of Stanley Marsh III, for whom the Cadillac represented the American dream in all its aspects of aspiration, fantasy and excess.
Marsh, a helium billionaire, rancher and art collector, lives with wife Wendy in a ranch-house named Toad Hall. As well as llamas, peacocks and tattooed dogs, he kept a pig called Minnesota Fats as a drinking companion until it died after eating too many chocolate Easter eggs. Marsh had him stuffed with beans and hung from the office ceiling.
So, the next time your wife calls you weird, tell her she doesn't know the half of it.