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 sense of the word; that appellation I reserve for machines which go where you point them, when you want them to, and labelling it a simple appliance would have done too much of a disservice to toasters, kettles and the like. The little Chevy tramlined all over the place, pulling to the left on braking and the right on acceleration. I say “acceleration”, but I’m getting ahead of myself; really, what I mean is “upon depressing the accelerator”, because actual acceleration was tardy and meagre in its eventual arrival. Road noise was incessant and intrusive and the handling was, not too put too fine a point on it, utterly, irredeemably shite.

The solitary, almost desultory up side was that the radio had an auxiliary input port for an iPod or the like. The radio consequently spent a lot of time in the upper reaches of its volume range in an attempt to drown out the unceasing drone of the tyres.

But I digress. Hideous as our time on the road was, this was a road trip, and we had places to go. Our plan was to head south on the I-5 through Oregon, stopping for the night in the capital Salem and then again near the border with California to break up the journey. We arrived in Salem’s environs without too much fuss and then somehow managed to miss it entirely. “We, ah, don’t seem to be seeing signs for Salem anymore,” I shouted above the road noise and the attendant tinnitus, as a supposed 10-minute journey into town stretched out uncomfortably.

Ash consulted the map. “I think we’ve driven straight by it,” she shouted back. “Oh well.”

We decided to just keep on going, turning west at Albany towards the Pacific Coastal Highway — the 101 itself. I mentally hummed Phantom Planet’s California. It’s not a cliché if no-one else can hear, you see.

In the late afternoon we arrived at Newport, a small, windswept town perched on a cliff overlooking grey Pacific waves breaking white in the breeze. We came to rest on a road right at the cliff’s edge and opened the doors to admit the cold salty air along with a lingering, fishy undercurrent, and got out to have a look around. It was a striking place. Inland to the west the sky was a cloudless, precise gradient from deep blue overhead down to a pale horizon, while over the sea the sun illuminated the clouds and the waves in an improbably perfect sunset. The street on which we’d parked was sparsely lined with plain wooden houses behind scrubby, sandy verges and was disconcertingly deserted: not a person or car moved.

I jogged up the road to the first of a couple of hotels and left dismayed by the prices. The next one was a little better but still more than we were willing to fork out on the first night, and so we headed on down the road into Newport proper, stopping at more or less every mo- and ho-tel we came across. Each time we came away disappointed. Despairing somewhat, we gradually descended the ladder of hotel quality until we arrived at the Bates Park Motel with a very palpable bump. It was listing visibly and was decorated in faded, peeling white and blue paint.

“Jackpot,” we agreed.

I crept gingerly into the damp, silent reception, noting with interest the ‘Oregon Meth Watch’ window sticker, and rang the bell. I waited.

The door behind the desk opened and the owner stepped out with a friendly smile. My apphrehension evaporated. “How can I help you?” he asked in an incongruous Caribbean accent.

“How much for a room?” I asked.

“Forty-five dollars,” he replied.

“Hmm. I wonder…”

“Okay, thirty-five.”

Score.

“We’ll take it.”

The room was actually quite nice, for 1989, and in the morning we took a quick walk into town to look for some breakfast. The weather was overcast and misty, and the few townsfolk we passed were uniformly surly people wearing checked lumberjack coats and trucker caps, for that authentic Steven King feeling. We drew a blank on breakfast; lots of shopfronts were boarded up and vacant, and other than the bizarre juxtaposition of an adult video shop and a hectoring Christian signpost denouncing it, there didn’t seem to be much to entertain us in Newport. We jumped in the ‘car’ and headed south along the 101.