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 driven only a few tens of miles. Instead we kept going until Marina, when the petrol gauge fluttering above ‘E’ finally forced us to stop.

Marina was sufficiently unremarkable that not only have I forgotten my initial impressions of it, but I was also unmoved to record any of them in writing at the time. The one notable thing (quite literally, since it’s the only thing I did note down) which happened there came at the end of a frustrating trawl through all of the town’s hotels and motels to find that all but one of them was fully booked over Labor Day weekend.

We rolled into the Old Marina Inn at about 9 pm. It was the last place in town, a standard issue single storey motel of indeterminate vintage, and the receptionist at the second-last place in town had called ahead to reserve us a room lest we arrive to find that yet again someone else had pipped us to the post. The Inn’s owner, a little old Indian lady, asked us apologetically for $130 dollars for the room. This was an absolute fortune compared to anything we’d spent on a single night so far, and there wasn’t even a “continental” “breakfast” of chemo-muffins and filter coffee in the morning. We balked.

“That’s a hell of a lot,” I told her. “Is there any way at all you can come down a bit?” (From whatever it is you’re smoking, I thought to myself.)

“I am sorry, it’s a very busy weekend. We only have one room left.”

I sighed.

“I can give it to you for $120 plus tax, but that’s all I can do,” she conceded.

“Okay, we’ll take it. Thanks.” We didn’t have a lot of choice.

I was staring idly out the reception window as she recorded our details and fiddled with room keys when a pickup rolled up outside. The driver got out, a short, swarthy dude with sunglasses on (this was long after sunset, mind) and a ponytail. I could make out a woman in the passenger seat.

The driver stuck his head round the door. “You got a room for two hours?” he asked.

Ash and I glanced at each other, registering disbelief and amusement in equal measures.

“No, not tonight,” the owner replied. “We are full.”

“Nothing at all?” he pressed, “normally it’s cool to rent by the hour here.”

I could sense the waves of cringe emanating from the poor owner.

“No, I’m sorry, sir. We have nothing.”

No wonder the place was so expensive — rented by the hour, our one night stay from dusk till dawn could’ve netted her a small fortune.

We dumped our gear in the predictably chintzy and over-decorated room (it was not unlike a ’70s porn set) and headed out to find somewhere to eat. Just as predictably, there was nowhere decent open, and so out of stomach-growling necessity we wound up at a Taco Bell lurking at the end of a nearby strip mall. Ash was almost enthusiastic; I was not. We ordered a few bean tacos (the safest thing on the menu, I thought) and through some breakdown in what seemed to me to have been a fairly simple transaction we watched with increasing bemusement as the staff plonked down taco after taco.

Ash and I conferred quietly. “Should we say anything? I’m sure we ordered, what, three tacos, right? Why the fuck won’t they stop putting more of them on the tray?”

Eventually the production line came to a halt, and as a coup de grâce a tub of cheese-topped refried beans was plonked down among the final tally of six tacos. Beans in that sort of poundage no longer constitute the safe option.

We staggered to a plastic table with the tray creaking under the weight of its burden and ate our bean feast in the fluorescent glare of the lights, laughing quietly to ourselves all the while.

* * *

Our first destination the next day was Monterey. I have a tendency to throw around the phrase “just like Amity Island from Jaws” like it’s going out of fashion[*,†] but Monterey fits the bill so completely I may finally be able to retire that particular comparison. The sun shone, the rigging of the yachts and dinghies moored in the marina clinked gently in the breeze, and hordes of tourists wearing inadvisably revealing beach clothing swarmed all along the waterfront.

Monterey is the setting for Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, so after we’d milled around the pier for a while we jumped back in the car and drove out to have a look.

With hindsight, we should have realised that it was going to be a bit crap. Just as Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco had lost any vestiges of its past glories and replaced them with NFL merchandising shops and pirate-themed family restaurants, Cannery Row is now more like Souvenir Shop Row. Doc’s laboratory is still there somewhere, although I couldn’t find it, and wherever the vacant lot had once been, I’m pretty sure it’s vacant no longer: every bit of spare land is a car park, a restaurant or a souvenir shop.

We gave up and headed south towards Carmel, another affluent little town on the Monterey Peninsula, and were immediately caught up in the massive exodus of tourists heading home after Labor Day. It was biblically bad traffic. We spent a frustrating, mostly stationary hour trying to escape the gravitational pull of Carmel’s woefully inadequate roads and heaved a sigh of relief when we finally hit Highway 1 again, filling up with some much-needed petrol on the way out of town. We rolled the windows up, turned the AC back on and hit the gas.