Route 66 Motorcycle Tour - Albuquerque to Los Angeles (Guided)

The second half of Route 66, guided, and the more spectacular of the two. Nine days from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, eight nights and around 1,410 miles, finishing with a farewell dinner at the Santa Monica Pier where the road officially ends.

Santa Fe comes first on a short 65-mile opening ride, then Gallup by way of the Cibola National Forest. Arizona delivers the oddities. The Petrified Forest comes first, where whole fallen trees have turned to coloured stone over 200 million years, then the Wigwam Motel at Holbrook, whose rooms are concrete teepees, and Winslow on the way to the Grand Canyon.

A helicopter flight over the canyon is offered as an option, and then the route reaches the best-preserved stretch of the old road anywhere, running through Seligman, Hackberry and Kingman before the switchbacks drop into Oatman, where wild burros still wander up and down the main street. The Hoover Dam and Las Vegas follow, then Amboy and Ludlow out across the Mojave, and the trip finishes over the curves of the Angeles Crest Highway and down into Los Angeles.

EAGLERIDER provides the motorcycle, the tour leader, all eight nights and the group dinners. Fuel, most meals and insurance sit outside the price. Riding days run from 65 to 283 miles. For riders who want the scenic end of Route 66 rather than the whole of it, led rather than self-navigated, this is the half with the canyons, the desert and the Pacific waiting at the end of it.