PART 2 OF A SIX-PART SERIES: Onwards, onwards! GEOFF HILL whizzes through the ageing heart of America, heading ever west...
Breakfast at Lou Mitchell's on West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago. Outside, the temperature was dithering above freezing, but inside, all was steamy and warm, and all the waitresses were somebody's mother.
At Lou's, they bring you your bacon and eggs in the skillet, then butter your home-made toast and turn the slices face to face, the way your girlfriend does when she brings you breakfast in bed.
In fact, the more I thought about the temperature outside, the more the thought of forgetting about Route 66 and staying in Lou's appealed to me.
"Hey, Sheri, how do you fancy adopting me?" I said to the waitress. "I'd love to, honey, but I got three kids already," she sighed. "Never mind, have some more coffee instead."
It was no use. I was just going to have to get on with it. I paid the bill and walked out into the freezing air just in time to stop a policeman giving the bike a parking ticket.
I climbed on, zipped up my leather jacket, and rode to Grant Park on the shores of Lake Michigan, where Route 66 began in 1926.
Then I turned for one final look at Lake Michigan, the last expanse of water I would see until the Pacific, and started on the long road west.
At first, the landscape west of Chicago was inhabited entirely by factories, a giant plastic chicken and a truck bearing the legend "Montana Joe's Little America Flea Circus".
It was, as you can imagine, something of a relief to arrive in Joliet, home of the forbidding prison where Elwood collected Jake in the Bluesmobile.
Sadly, I found it first time, thus depriving myself of the pleasure of riding around declaiming: "Joliet, Joliet, wherefore art thou?" Listen, when you're travelling alone, you get your kicks whichever way you can.
Past Joliet, you ride, literally, into America's backyard, rolling through tiny hamlets like Dwight and Odell, Cayuga and Chenoa, where you stop to let kids retrieve their ball from the middle of the road and have ludicrously polite discussions with ancient pedestrians over who has the right of way.
"After you. Nice motorcycle."
"No, please. Great Zimmer."
Here and there, you ride past one-man garages, with pumps outside still selling gasoline by Phillips 66, Mobiloil, Petrox, Sky Chief Supreme and Penn State: vintage toasts to America's great love affair with not only the car, but the fuels that run through its veins.
And at under a quid a gallon, you'd love it too.
Then, for a while, the little towns fell behind, leaving only the vast open expanses of oak-dark farmland.
On the left of Route 66, the railroad track, that other legend of American travel, ran parallel to the old road, flanked by a line of weathered telegraph poles. Their wires had been disconnected for decades, but they still tilted their heads this way and that, listening for news of Kennedy, Vietnam and the first man on the moon.
I rode the ancient road for miles under the moon, feeling like a ghost carrying messages that only the old telegraph poles could hear.
But then I realised that even ghosts could not have hands this cold. As night came curving around, I finally found an old motel in a town called Normal, and plunged my hands into a sinkful of hot water until I could feel them. Three words describe it. Bliss, bliss and bliss.
And then I went out to see if Normal was normal. It is, you will be glad to hear, perfectly so. It has a Normal Avenue, and a Normal Street, and when I went out for a pizza I came back instead with 2.54 children, a Labrador and a Volvo estate.
However, I spoke too soon, for the next morning I woke up in Normal to find the weather anything but. Lightning split the sky, thunder rattled the motel windows and commuters left the car at home and surfed to work, some of them failing to negotiate a particularly tricky whirlpool at the corner of Main and College and disappearing below the surface in a flurry of unhinged briefcases. Praise the Lord, then, that there was shelter at the Route 66 gas station museum run by Bill Shea in Springfield.
I found him inside his cavern of delight chatting to another septuagenarian. They were sitting on the back seat of an old Chevy, but the old Chevy was no longer attached to it.
All around him, in glass cabinets, on shelves and hanging from the ceiling, were thousands upon thousands of items of Route 66 memorabilia, from canvas water bags for crossing the Mojave Desert (Saturate before Using) to a row of complete petrol pumps.
Now 78, he had been collecting stuff from the road for 50 years, and showed no sign of stopping: he'd just bought an entire 1930s gas station from up the country, which he was busy restoring in the yard.
He already had a sign up, saying: Opening soon under old management.
I shook his hand and walked away, thinking that the next time I complained of getting old, I would give myself a good talking to.
NEXT WEEK: Springfield to Elk City, Oklahoma