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 far as Santa Maria for one final night in the wilderness before we hit the more familiar territory of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. First, though, we had to get there.

The drive south from Carmel started off well enough: Highway 1 is undeniably scenic, and as we followed the road along the coast to Big Sur the sunset seemed to last forever. From there, though, Santa Maria was still a hundred and forty miles away, and my God, we felt every last one of those miles.

Past Big Sur, Highway 1 became a hardened artery furred with parked cars and clogged by bloated RVs crawling through the switchbacks. We chafed behind one or another of these mobile roadblocks for hours, squeezing past whenever the road straightened for long enough to let our Aveo wind painfully up to overtaking speed. As the coast grew more rugged and the road more tortuous with it, the snaking traffic slowed to a 20 mph crawl. It was enormously frustrating.

At last though, as the sun finally set, the road broadened to four and then six lanes: we’d finally hit the 101 again. It was plain sailing from there to Santa Maria. Of course, all this meant was that we got to Santa Maria that bit sooner.

Have you ever been to a town which is just fundamentally charmless? Cumbernauld is one of them. Santa Maria is another. We arrived just after dark, found a Motel 6 just off the 101 — just to ensure that your expectations are suitably calibrated, that was the highlight of our visit — and headed into town to look for something to eat.

Christ, it was grim.

In a town of almost 100,000 souls (or rather, 100,000 people-shaped vessels — their souls must surely have been eroded away to nothing by the grinding tedium of living there), the 6-lane freeway masquerading as a high street was almost deserted. We tooled up and down Broadway and the only places open at 8pm or so on a Sunday night were fast food joints on the fringes of sprawling shopping mall car parks*. We peered in their windows as we drove past. It is not an exaggeration or a generalisation to say that every building was a squat concrete box, every car was a beater, and all the people were fat.

We plumped for a Burger King, parked in the car park to eat and then retreated to our motel for yet more True Blood. I think we were both a little disillusioned; our trip called for a hell of a lot of driving and so far had taken us through only a few places we’d genuinely wanted to go — the Oregon Vortex (seriously! Reading American Gods has vindicated my enthusiasm for roadside weirdness), San Francisco and Monterey — and none of them had quite lived up to our preconceptions. Newport and its New England horror story feel, had, I suppose, been a pleasant surprise, and our night in Marina had been so bad it couldn’t have failed to be entertaining, but it felt like we were clutching at straws a bit. It was time for a change. Tomorrow had to be better.

* * *

Santa Barbara was a mercifully short 90 minutes away, and for once we got there with plenty of the day left to look around. We’d arranged to meet Devon’s mum Deanna later in the afternoon, and with a few hours to kill before then we parked the car at the beach and strolled out along Stearn’s Wharf for lunch. The wharf is, of course, a giant tourist trap just like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco or Monterey’s Cannery Row, but it has been far more cannily managed and is populated only by a few seafood restaurants, a couple of reasonably tasteful souvenir shops and, holy of holies, an actual bait and tackle shop. The end of the pier is free of commercial distraction and we were able to sit in the sun with our bowls of clam chowder and watch the windsurfers and tour boats sail by, without a thousand other people trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Back on the beach we sat under a palm tree for a while, listening to an ageing hippie playing a cardboard guitar along to Paul Simon tunes emitted by a ghetto blaster strapped to his bicycle, then wandered into the bustling (but not oppressively so) town centre where Ash did some shopping and I had a look round the Spanish colonial revival courthouse. It was just what we needed after too many days spent in the endless Labor Day crowds.

We caught an electric shuttle bus back to the car park, picked up the car and drove up to Deanna’s sprawling place just outside of town. It was all remarkably familiar; normally my memory is so bad that even déjà vu is beyond me, but I was able to navigate right there from the highway and I parked our shitty rental Aveo in exactly the same place as our shitty rental Impala five years ago. The same cadre of dogs — with the addition of Kinley, a massive white hound whose breed I have temporarily forgotten (my awful memory has reasserted itself), but which had the aspect of a cheerful quadruped wookiee — greeted us enthusiastically, almost as if they remembered my visit five years ago too. Ash and I found Deanna in the kitchen, introduced ourselves, and accepted a bottle of beer and a glass of wine respectively. We clinked glasses, and the disappointments and frustrations of the last few days evaporated.

That night we ate steak & fries at a little quasi-western place along the road called the Nugget, drank ourselves into a warm fuzzy place and blethered endlessly about the trip so far, about San Francisco and Sonoma and California, and even the Scottish real estate market. It was a great evening.

Back at the house, we sank into the soft, innumerable pillows of the guest room and I was glad for the ‘night off’ from the holiday. Tomorrow was LA, its infamous traffic and yet another hostel. But it could wait.

* Seriously, take a look at the map — nothing but shopping centres as far as the eye can see.