Route 66 by Harley-Davidson - Telegraph Any motorcycle is better than a car, and not for blinkered, biker type reasons, it's because you engage with the environment and the people in a far more intimate way. When it rains, you get wet, when the temperature drops, you get cold, and if those sound like reasons to take a car, they're the opposite: modern riding gear protects you enough, but it means you feel the air and the weather rather than viewing it through a screen, understand what travellers before you went through and experience the environment instead of merely looking at it. Then there are the smells, from the moisture hungry lowland desert winds to the fresh pines and scented blooms as you climb to 7,000 feet on Arizona's Kaibab Plateau, so magnificently scarred by the Grand Canyon. If you're taking someone with you - and you should, this is something you have to share - then bear in mind, passengers on motorcycles don't get travel sick, and not all Route 66 is ruler-straight highway bisecting vast scenery, some of it snakes and wriggles through difficult, fascinating topography. The rolling, wallowing Cadillac of your fantasies is a vomit-inducing nightmare for passengers, and in a car you watch the world go by, on a motorcycle you experience it and have an adventure, in the scenery rather than observing it. Want to chat about the things you're riding past? Then get an intercom, there are several available with noise-cancelling microphones that let you speak clearly and easily. People talk to motorcycle riders, too. The bike's the catalyst, especially a big Harley-Davidson. Harley's touring bikes are built for American roads and excel at this kind of thing. Going solo I'd have chosen a Road King for its manageability and Sixties styling cool, but I was two-up with my wife, so we used an Electra Glide, itself an American icon and possibly the most famous motorcycle model in the world - perfect for the most famous road in the world. It's more comfortable and has more space for luggage, although surprisingly not enough, as the panniers are narrow and small. That's not a problem on the regular tours because a support vehicle carries the bulk of your luggage (as well as comprehensive extra equipment and even a spare bike). The Glide's suspension is crudely damped for a touring bike, let alone an £18,400 one. But the manner in which it lollops along with the engine thudding like a marathon runner's heartbeat, just 2,500rpm at 70mph, fuel tank good for 250 miles, is near-unique and the perfect motive companion on US roads. On Harley's Authorised Tours the bikes you get are this year's models and never with more than 18,000 miles on the clock, while the hotels are a level above the countless cheap and often decaying accommodation available from only a few dollars up. These are booked in advance, essential on the guided tours and a good discipline for continuing on the route at a reasonable and predictable pace - there's so much to see you could easily end up with a huge final dash to Los Angeles otherwise. On the authorised tours the party numbers are restricted to 15 bikes, a maximum 30 people, although some other operators try with up to 50 at a time, making fuel and food stops a nightmare of waiting and frustration. You are, of course, limited to the speed of the slowest rider, and even on this scouting trip with just us and a guide, his habit of riding at a pace suited to all riding skills meant the pace was always gentle. No matter, this wasn't a time trial. Our guide, Gary "Bear" Fleshman, had a knowledge of Route 66 was quite astonishing in its breadth and depth, and without him we'd have missed half the stops and places of interest, even with comprehensive research beforehand. If you'd rather ride alone or with a friend or two unguided, I'd still strongly recommend Harley's tours as they provide comprehensive information packs and satnav routes as well as looking after the hotels. It is, after all, a 2,500-mile ride over two weeks, and a heck of a lot of work on your own. Our trip was expertly organised by Harley's UK tour operator Orange & Black, and the only thing that went wrong was out of their hands, with United Airlines compounding a missed connection with staff so rude it went beyond offensive into the plain funny. That old picture which spiced up my engineering lecture turned out to be not so far off the mark. I rode the route from Albuquerque in New Mexico to Los Angeles because I regrettably couldn't spare the time to do the full 2,500 miles, but there's authenticity even in the tat. The gift shops you see in New Mexico don't look promising when you're worried Route 66 might have fallen victim to commercialism and exploitation, but talk to the people inside and you discover these are not cynical, profit-making machines but the sole source of income for families of Navajo Indians living on the reservation beside the route. And they've been around for a lot longer than Route 66... Like many businesses along the road they're struggling now as traffic has reduced noticeably since the hikes in fuel prices in the last three years, but all make an observation that really surprised me: tourists riding and driving the route are almost all foreign, mostly Germans, British, Australian, Japanese and other Europeans. Americans seem to care little about it, maybe because they have a different sense of history, maybe because it's in their own back yard. This could explain the lack of commercialism, but it's also a reason for the decay: by the 1990s, 90 per cent of the motels which once served travellers were gone, often simply abandoned. It's the same with other businesses, notably Whiting Bros whose fuel stations, motels and stores were regular features along the route - now they're all gone, leaving faded signs and shells of buildings. There's plenty of the original road remaining. Most traffic takes the faster interstates these days, but the single-carriageway original remains and most is still in use, albeit with new designations. The "Historic 66" signs you often see are all unofficial, placed by local councils but nothing to do with the modern American road system. There are also stretches of disused road, some of the first 1926 routing, often with the original Portland cement surface intact. It can take some finding but it's there, and cruising along on the Electra Glide exploring where Model Ts and old Harleys and Indians used to roll is special. Mostly the newer roads were built alongside the old as this saved on re-surveying, and in places you can see three roads side by side. Route 66 is a literal symbol of America's road to opportunity culture, but that also means casualties. We found one crumbling hairpin with an array of crosses randomly decorating the hillside below, many still maintained by the relatives who lost someone here decades ago. Often it was miners driving home late at night, road barely lit by 1930s headlights, who wouldn't see the hairpin until it was too late for their cars' feeble brakes, and they'd plunge to their deaths over the edge. It's all still there, the debris of the ancient wrecks, even the scores on the rocks where bouncing axles gouged the ground desperately clawing to stay on the road. Or you can ride the route for the geology as much as the stories of the people, through some of the most extraordinary terrain in the world. Climb into Arizona from New Mexico's deserts, mesas and disused uranium mines, not far from where the first atom bomb was exploded, up into Arizona where you have to divert 50 miles from Route 66 to see the Grand Canyon still being cut deeper by the raging Colorado River. Then down through the Mojave Desert, past ancient lava flows and volcanos, massive meteor craters, the Petrified Forest with its stone trees, the vast, striped sedimentary remains of displaced oceans and finishing in Los Angeles where the remnants of 66 have disappeared as man has built frantically on the San Andreas fault then kept his fingers crossed. Route 66 is a fabulous stretch of road to ride a motorcycle on. Yes, there are long straights, but you can ride up to 80mph in places without worrying about the police - speed limits are 75mph on interstates in Arizona and New Mexico and 70mph in California, while other sections are sinuous bike rider heaven. Many tours miss out the old 66 route to Oatman in Arizona, near the California border, in order to take in Las Vegas, which is nothing to do with Route 66. The Harley Authorised tours don't, and you shouldn't, the Oatman road is possibly the best of the whole trip for its curves snaking through rocks and mountains, and you'll miss that heart-wrenching, hellish hairpin, too. I met my hero and I wasn't disillusioned. Quite the opposite, I had no idea that Route 66 would be such an intensely rich, rewarding and relentlessly entertaining experience. It's an expensive thing to do but this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There are cheaper ways than Harley's, but from what I've seen they're lesser ways. I don't care what bike you ride the rest of the time, a Harley is the only one you should be riding on Route 66. You have to do it. Full details at www.harley-davidson.co.uk Thanks to David Grist at Harley's official UK tour operator Orange & Black.