The Roquefort Files

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always had this awestruck mental image of California as being a sort of promised land, a blue-sky’d, blue-sea’d capsule of American culture where everyone and everything eventually washes up on the way to the Pacific. Having been there to see it for myself once already I really should know better than [...]

We followed the 101 down the Oregon coast for a hundred miles before turning east towards Roseburg. Ash drove, and I was left to take the odd photograph, man the iPod and take in the scenery. The view from the passenger seat was dramatic: the sky was still patchily grey, with lazy, white capped waves [...]

Washington state rolled by without incident, all tree-lined freeways and unremarkable towns. I’d like to say that we hit Oregon before we knew it, but by God, we knew intimately about every minute we spent on the road courtesy of our bottom-of-the-barrel automotive contraption. Our Chevy Aveo was emphatically not a car in the accepted [...]

Ash arrived on the Friday before the last weekend in August. The month itself had been so full-on that I’d barely had time to register that my time was up; it took a chance meeting with Neil & Vanessa on Saturday (“hey Ash, look — it’s some guy in a Mogwai T-shirt. Wait a second…”) [...]

(Holy crap. This is the most-delayed travelogue in RF history. I’ll try to keep it brief, so we can get onto the USA trip complete with muscle cars, evil genius headquarters, UFOs and machine guns.) My parents were over for the last week in August and after a few days of sightseeing in Vancouver, we [...]

(A brief intermission before I attack the mountain of LA/LV notes from September.) A few numbers for you: ten merry men. Three Norman bad guys. One Robin Hood. One cross-dressing ‘Maid’ Marian. One racially insensitive Azeem costume. Josh was up. It rocked.