At last our intrepid traveller, Geoff Hill, and his borrowed Harley-Davidson Road King come to rest at California's Pacific coast.
America's long love affair with the automobile has produced some beautiful children and it seems, as I ride into Seligman, Arizona, on the evening of its annual fun run, that most of them are sitting along the long main street.
There are cruising Corvettes, Mustangs and AC Cobras, little deuce coupés and big limos, hot rods and street racers, convertibles and sedans - and not one, but two half-size Chevvys lovingly hand-built by a man from Los Angeles. Where else?
There are engines which purr past like fireside tabbies and engines which roar like angry lions. And there are engines bearing mute witness to the fact that their owners are boring farts who polish their cars, chrome their engines down to the last nut, bolt and washer, then take them everywhere on a trailer so they can win the concours award. God forbid they should actually get behind the wheel and enjoy driving them.
Sadly, I can't stay and party all night. Because of the event, the only motel I can find is 35 miles away. It's recommended in Jack D Rittenhouse's 1946 guide to Route 66, and I really must dig him up and have a word with him. Only the lack of a good lawyer prevents me from naming it, but suffice it to say that the curtains are held up with sticky tape and the television is lovingly inscribed with the names of several previous occupants.
When I turn on the shower, a screeching and howling like many cats being slaughtered by a posse of flatulent banshees is followed by spurts of water at temperatures from freezing to boiling. The next morning I spurn the shower and go for a swim in the motel pool, emerging covered in a thin film of oil and with an impressive collection of dead insects in my hair. I have to have a shower after all.
Never mind! Later in the day I arrive in California! California! The promised land! Like the pioneers and the Dust Bowl families, I had been whipped by wind and soaked by rain, baked by deserts and frozen by mountain nights since I set out for it.
I climb the dreadful road to Oatman, then descend the even more dreadful road down, and face the California state border guards who in the past had prowled the lines of jalopies waiting to get in, turning away anyone with plants or animals or a hint of disease which might bring pestilence to their golden land. Like the pioneers and the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath, I cross the state border, bath igratitude in the waters of the Colorado and am glad the worst is over. Then, like the pioneers, I look west and realise the worst is yet to come.
The Mojave Desert . . . like many men before me, I look out at the bright, cruel sands and beyond to the jagged mountains a thousand feet higher than the ones I've just crossed . . . and beyond to a range yet higher which still carry the snows of winter.
My precursors had trembled. Some had left their prairie schooners or steaming jalopies and just walked out into the burning sands, never to be seen again. I think about it for a while and decide to have breakfast.
This being California, I have wheat and milk and honey, raisins and freshly squeezed orange juice, wholemeal toast and marmalade.
California! Goodbye to grits and hashbrowns! Goodbye to fried eggs and Polish sausages and pastrami and salami and all those other amis! Goodbye to fat people feeding quarters into slot machines and farmers who had never seen the ocean!
California! I can almost smell the salt sea breeze from here. I stride to the Harley and ride west, where in the crucible of the desert my bright new future will be forged.
For all that day I ride across the burning Mojave sands. Every change in engine noise becomes a breakdown. Every twitch in the suspension and a wheel is just about to come off.
By nightfall I'm in Barstow checking in at the El Rancho Motel, which has a sign outside pointing out helpfully that it's almost exactly halfway between London and Tokyo.
"Boy, am I glad to get out of that desert," I say to the man behind the desk. "What's on the other side of Barstow?" "More," he says.
On the morning of the third day, past Chino, I finally find the land of milk and honey, where the Dust Bowl families found their first steady employment since leaving Oklahoma.
In little motels, the doors of the rooms are draped with orange blossom and bougainvillaea. And there is a field of strawberries, with a man at the edge of the road selling them fresh.
Even though you're still 60 miles from Los Angeles, you can already see the smog, feel the urban sprawl gathering around you as the freeways pour into the city.
Then I catch the first sea breeze and, with it, that unique smell of California which I remembered from when I lived here 21 years before and which occasionally comes to me in dreams: a combination of citrus, cocoa butter, fresh sweat, hot sand and salt sea air.
And then, at last, the sudden blue smack of the ocean! How my heart lifted to see it! As the sun sinks over the Pacific, I ride to Santa Monica Boulevard where Route 66 ends the journey it had begun 2,448 miles ago in Chicago - and where I now end it too.
I sit on the grass under the waving palms, and think how trips like this can change a man. For one thing, it will take a while to get used to waking up every morning and realising that I don't have to ride a motorcycle for hundreds of miles through icy rain, savage wind or baking heat.
I look down the coast at where I had lived for a summer when I was a young man, and then out at the ocean as it finally accepts the dying sun, and realise that my life will never be quite the same again.
But then I think for a while, and realise that it had never been quite the same before.