The Roquefort Files

We left the Getty about lunchtime and drove through the endless sprawl of suburban Los Angeles, letting the cruise control keep us at the double nickel and trying to get the measure of our new car. The city eventually petered out into the desert, and we stopped at Barstow for a late lunch of burger-n-fries [...]

The drive From Santa Barbara to Los Angeles went smoothly enough; mid-morning, the traffic was still reasonably fluid and we made it to West Hollywood without too much drama. We dropped the ‘car’ off at a Hertz branch at the Renaissance Hollywood and lugged our bags the few blocks west to our humbler lodgings. Just [...]

This is yet another brief interlude in the infinite saga of our West Coast road trip. In case you haven’t been following, we went from Seattle to Santa Barbara in about 8 days at the beginning of September, and I’ve taken about three months to write about it so far. At the current ratio of [...]

After the tourist emboli of Fisherman’s Wharf and Cannery Row and the enforced crawl through Carmel’s Labor Day traffic, the open road looked pretty good. From Williams to Monterey was only a couple of hundred miles and yet we’d taken the best part of four days to cover it. Our plan was to dash as [...]

The day we bolted early from San Francisco we got as far south as Marina, a small coastal town on Highway 1. We passed through Santa Cruz on the way, a big surfing town and apparently a bit of a counter-cultural centre, but it was already getting late and we didn’t want to stop having [...]

We hit San Francisco during the rush hour and, after threading our way along the Golden Gate’s constricted lanes, plunged straight into the congested heart of the city. We headed for Market Street (thanks to the onerous one-way system, we found ourselves unwittingly heading for it a number of times after first finding it), a [...]