Anyway, at 9.15 on Tuesday morning I found myself down at the cook school with a bunch of other initiates, drinking coffee and wondering exactly what was in store for us.

I’ll cut to the chase.

Langoustines.

Langoustines were what was in store for us.

Sure, there was a load of other stuff like gnocchi, tiramisu, mascarpone mousse, sautéed endive and the like, and some of it was pretty challenging to put together, but none of these things required quite the same commitment as our crustacean friends.

At the very start of the class, Ryan, one of the tutors, brought a polystyrene crate out of the walk-in fridge and plonked it on the worktop in front of us all. He popped open the top and plucked out a langoustine, a six-inch long mini lobster/giant prawn with two long, slender claws and a multitude of gently squirming legs. Holding it by the torso, he gestured as he talked, explaining (to our universal horror) how we were to prepare them, and then directed us back to our stations.

I turned round to put on my apron, and when I turned back I was confronted with three live langoustines, coiling and uncoiling fitfully on the chopping board. I sighed and picked one up by the thorax. Its black, beady eyes swivelled around and its legs pedalled the air. I took hold of the tail with my other hand as Ryan had done – Pinchy was cold but very much alive, and I could feel his clawed legs working away inside my fist.

I took a firmer grip around the tail with my left hand and the torso with my right. Pinchy’s tail curled round against my fingers.

Then, as demonstrated a few minutes previously, I twisted him firmly in half to the sound of splintering chitin and tearing flesh. I fairly dropped the newly bisected crustacean onto the chopping board. The tail curled up instantly, while the feelers, claws and legs on Pinchy’s business end continued to twitch away, innards exposed where the tail had been attached just moments ago. “That’s just reflexes,” Ryan said mildly as he passed.

“Fucking hell,” I confided to the woman at the station across from mine. “That was fucking mental.”

“I know!” she agreed, then squealed as her own langoustine writhed out of her grip and dropped to the floor. “Shit.”

Okay. Deep breath. Next bit.

I picked up Pinchy’s dismembered tail, only for it close around my fingers. Sharp points at the bottom of each segment of the shell poked into my fingers. (The woman across from me later showed off her blue catering sticking plaster, covering the cuts which her own notionally dead prey had inflicted, post-mortem.)

“Ah, fuck. Fuckity fuck,” I moaned as I pried the tail straight. I spread out the five flukes, grabbed the middle one, broke it free and pulled it out along with the intestine, a translucent three-inch tube dangling from the tail fin. I dumped the guts into the bin, dropped Pinchy: part II onto the chopping board and breathed out. It hadn’t been in the same league as, say, slaughtering a fatted calf you’ve raised from birth in front of the kids (who incidentally, named her Daisy within minutes of meeting her and have since bonded with her in a touching display of affection) and then having to explain to them the nature of life, death and where baby calves come from, but it certainly focused the mind on what has to be done in order to get something even as insignificant as a single langoustine onto the plate.

We cooked the tails, cracked open the shells, chopped up the meat and wrapped it in hand-made pasta to make ravioli. They were delicious.

You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that cost alone: you bore it with me, dear reader, in the form of two thousand words of bicycle-related self-flagellation.) To recap: I’d found the last singlespeed French freewheel in the world, hooked it up with two spliced-together BMX chains, and replaced the original drop bars with a pair of hipster-ready bullhorns.

I started to commute by bike, a lovely trip through Vancouver’s leafy suburbs and across the Fraser River to Richmond. The weather was uniformly balmy, and over my couple of months of cycling to work I even acquired what might reasonably be called a suntan.

Unfortunately, the bike did not fare so well. In short order, both of the original 27″ wheels were knocked quite badly out of true; the bearings in the last French freewheel in the world gave up shortly afterwards and the pedal bearings followed. To ride the bike was to be assaulted by the scraping of brake pads against wobbling rims and the grinding of shafted ball bearings.

In repairing her, I caved. I drank the hipster Kool-Aid. I took the blue pill. More specifically, I bought deep-V track wheels, blue-striped tyres to match the frame, an indestructible Shimano freewheel, extremely awesome keirin-style pedals, and matching toe clips*. My bike was indistinguishable from a Commercial Drive hipster chariot, and my journey to the dark side was complete.

It was brilliant. For my last six weeks in Vancouver I descended (even further) into the domain of the bike nerd, taking part in a couple of Critical Masses, a couple of rides with the Vancouver Bicycle Club and one Midnight Mass, a small-hours ride around the traffic free city in the company of various bike messengers, fixie riders and sundry other ‘alternative’ types.

Then, of course, came the end of my stay in Vancouver, and I had to decide what to do the bike. Short of lugging it all the way down the west coast of the ‘States, there wasn’t much I could do other than leave it with someone in the city. Monica’s boyfriend Pete, a stand-up type of fellow with a keen cycling glint in his eye, offered to become the bike’s foster carer and so I left it in his capable hands. He has promised to keep ‘er oiled till I return, and I can’t ask for more than that.

* There’s a weird hero-worship within the singlespeed world for Japanese keirin components, which are stamped with the letters ‘NJS’. This says nothing about quality or suitability for purpose, only that they’re unlikely to spontaneously disintegrate, and yet an NJS-branded part will inevitably cost more and inspire a larger degree of singlespeeder lust. Hilariously, my NJS toe-clips were race approved, even if the rest of the bike emphatically was not.

• Me
• Chris
• Neil
• Devon
• Jesus
• my Dad
• 2010

In amongst all this, Coba Fynn have been recording an album; I built a cyclocross bike and then abjectly failed to enter any cyclocross races; the Project is finally under way again; and just the other day we took the Antiquary pub quiz by the scruff of its neck and gave it a thorough hiding. Good times! (And though that sounds sarcastic, it is not meant to be so.)

We drove to Phoenix airport a few hours before Ash’s flight, orbiting its confusing one-way system twice before finally finding the entrance to the car park. We had time for a coffee together before Ash had to pass through security; we waved to each other as she passed out of sight into the airside area, and then I was on my own.

It was a novel feeling. Even now, at the tender age of thirty-one, I couldn’t think of a time before when I’d been genuinely alone in a foreign country, neither waiting for a friendly face to show up nor stopping over en route to some other final destination. I mean, I feel weird enough going for a pint on my own, so God knows how I was going to deal with a solo road trip covering five hundred miles of desert. I pulled myself together and wandered slowly back to the car, mulling over my planned route in my head. My rude approximation of an itinerary was to drive that night from Phoenix to Gila Bend, on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, before hauling ass to Yuma near the Mexican border the next day and then on to San Diego the day after that. I’d arrive in LA with a day to spare.

The light slanting into the open-air parking level was starting to redden as I reached the car. It was four hundred and seventy-eight miles to Los Angeles, I had a full tank of gas, it was dusk and I was wearing sunglasses. “Hit it,” I grinned to myself.

Then I thought, “fuck, where are the car keys?”

I patted my pockets frantically. Thank Christ. I’d put the keys in my left-hand pocket instead of the usual right-hand one. Shaking my head, I cleared the detritus of two weeks’ motoring into the boot and dropped the hood. I started her up and rolled slowly out of the garage, blipping the throttle as I cleared the raised exit barrier, and drove off into the sunset.

It was murder. I was driving directly into the rays of the setting sun, able to gauge the road’s rough direction only by the actions of the car in front. I’d occasionally take refuge from the blinding light behind a semi-truck but with the hood down I was subjected to the constant drone of its exhaust and the tyre roar of eighteen wheels. After forty punishing miles I turned south towards Gila Bend, onto a much quieter road. I’d have jumped for joy, only the sun chose that moment to drop below the horizon, so instead I had to stop to raise the hood as the temperature dropped with it.

I was looking forward to Gila Bend, a tiny place of only two thousand people, but then I’d chosen it for a reason. I had one particular motel in mind for that night: the gloriously mental Space Age Lodge, a ’60s throwback to the days when the desert was awash with test pilots and rocket scientists. I rolled up after dark and strolled into the lobby, gawked at the murals of astronauts, satellites and shuttles, haggled the receptionist down from $110 to $60 for the night and conked out in my disappointingly non-space-themed room.

The next day was a designated ‘only in America’ day. With the prospect of two hours of undeviating desert highway between me and Yuma and no-one else to leaven the boredom on the way there, I’d trawled RoadsideAmerica.com looking for distractions I might check out en route. With the resulting a hit list of weirdness in my pocket, I took a walk around town the next day to get the ball rolling.

Gila Bend itself was a gratifyingly bizarre little place. The municipal airport, a dusty little strip of tarmac serving microlights and Cessnas, had a couple of deactivated ‘Nam-era fighter jets parked casually by the access road. A Shell station near the motel was guarded by junkyard statues of a diplodocus, a striking rattlesnake and a Saguaro cactus. And then, of course, there was the Space Age Lodge again, revealed by day in all its UFO-topped glory.

I filled up at the monstrous gas station and and left town around 11. My next destination was the ghost town of Agua Caliente, thirty miles down the road. Halfway there, though, I passed a road sign for a “Painted Rock Petroglyph Site”. Intrigued, I counted down to the relevant exit and turned off the highway, following the signs north for a quarter hour and growing distinctly nervous as I found myself further and further from the main road. My mind ran riot thinking about the relative probabilities of freak mechanical breakdowns, punctures and encountering gun-toting survivalists. Eventually, though, I hit the signposted turn-off and trundled a further half-mile along a gravel road to arrive at the site itself.

I got out to look around and slammed the door behind me. Before it had even clicked home, I involuntarily yelped “No!” and grabbed at it — too late! — to stop it closing. I didn’t know if I had the keys on me. A rummage in my right-hand pocket yielded a few coins but no keys, and a glance through the window told me that the ignition was empty. Where the hell were they?

I looked around. I was ten miles from the interstate, I hadn’t passed a single car on the way here, the car park was empty and I had precisely zero items of any use on me. No water, no phone, and no money. I stood there for a moment, thunderstruck. I was well and truly shafted.

Then, with a sheepish feeling of déjà vu, I patted my left-hand pocket to produce the telltale jingle of a set of keys. I couldn’t believe it. Twice in two days.

Sadly, against the high drama of that emotional battering the petroglyphs themselves were as a candle to the sun. I followed the path around a sandy mound covered in black rocks on which a myriad of shapes had been carved — animals, people and other stylised glyphs — and was rather disappointed by the noncommittal explanations given for them on the nearby information boards. Any one of three separate peoples could have made these, they said, and basically we’re not even going to guess which.

The heat was getting oppressive, so after leaving a scrawled signature in the guest book and feeding a couple of bucks in change into the honesty box I plodded back to the car. I got in, started her up, put the ‘box into reverse and gently depressed the accelerator.

There was an immediate cracking noise. Shocked, I jumped on the brake, turned off the ignition and got out.

I’d broken part of the bumper.

The end of each parking space was demarcated by an old railway sleeper, and as I’d pulled up the lowest part of the bumper, a bit of flexible black plastic trim, had slid over it. As I reversed it had caught on the sleeper, flexed back beyond its breaking point and shattered in the middle. As far as I could tell there was no other damage, so I twisted off the most obviously dangly bits of the broken trim, dropped them into a litter bin and drove back to the highway, fretting all the way. It had been an emotionally trying visit.

I tried to put it to the back of my mind — there was nothing I could do about it, really — and to get back into the swing of things. I still had almost two hours of interstate ahead of me so I put the radio on and my foot down, and the drive to Agua Caliente went by mercifully quickly.

Unfortunately, so did Agua Caliente itself. It was, to all intents and purposes, a small ruined building near to a depressing little pocket of trailers in the middle of the desert. To call it a ghost town seemed faintly ridiculous, investing it with an unwarranted importance which dragged curious onlookers like me into the midst of this dead-end settlement in the middle of nowhere. I felt embarrassed for intruding on the quiet misery of its inhabitants and headed back to the highway once again. I had nothing else to distract me until Yuma, so it was radio on and foot down once more for the rest of the afternoon.

Yuma offered up one more ludicrous spectacle, bizarre and troubling in equal measure, before I stopped for the day. Just outside of the city lies Yuma Proving Ground, a vast military testing range, and just outside of that I found my objective: the Bond villain-esque atomic cannon! This gigantic gun was a product of the same era as the Space Age Lodge, that period when nuclear power promised to revolutionise modern living and nuclear bombs threatened to extinguish it altogether. The USA and the USSR competed to bolt atomic bombs onto and into just about anything which could be fired at, lobbed at or even buried under the enemy*, and incredibly, this decommissioned artillery piece sitting out in the desert represented the more conventional end of the spectrum.

I furtively snapped a couple of photographs, half expecting men in black to drag me off to be waterboarded for daring to photograph this footnote of the atomic era. A signpost showed the way to a heritage centre within the proving ground itself, but I already felt ghoulish enough for having made this detour in the first place, so instead I spun the car round to take the road back to Yuma. I found a motel just off the highway and had an early night.

I spent the next day in San Diego, and my visit was low-key to the point that the most interesting thing I can relate about it was that the downtown Motel 6 is really nice. Seriously, it was newly decorated in a sort of Ikea/2001: A Space Odyssey manner, simple and cheerful with lots of bright colours and minimalist trappings, and as I slumped on the bed to watch an online Arrested Development marathon I was so worn out by hours of monotonous desert driving that I didn’t even feel guilty about missing out on anything more edifying that the city might have had to offer.

I drove to LA the next day and my two days there passed in a soporific blur too, enlivened only by the nerve-wracking return of my slightly broken rental Mustang to Budget Beverly Hills. When the receptionist returned from inspecting the car with nary a mention of scraped bumpers or broken trim and returned my credit card deposit I answered with a robotic “Why thank you. Have a pleasant day,” and left as nonchalantly as possible. Drive it like you rented it, indeed.

I spent that evening watching airliners cruise in to land at LAX from my hotel window, silhouetted against the backdrop of a cinematic sunset. My own plane left the next day. I needed a holiday to recover from this one.

fin

* Torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, ground-to-air missiles, landmines, depth charges and, of course, the atomic cannon all got the our-friend-the-atom treatment at one point or another in an attempt to one-up (or rather, blow up) their Cold War rivals.

The correct road out to the dam took us through Boulder City — the dormitory town built to house Hoover Dam workers, and one of only two places in Nevada where gambling is illegal — and onto a road high above Lake Mead. It was a videogame landscape out here, a fractal-seeming rocky desert devoid of vegetation, set off by the solid turquoise of the lake and the searing blue of the sky.

Ash was sceptical about our need to stop. “We’ve already seen one dam,” she pointed out. “And it’s really fricking hot out here.” She was right on both counts, but I was driving, and I drove us right up into the multi-storey car park beside the visitor centre. The heat was ferocious once again and leaving Ash in the meagre shade from the 11 o’ clock sun afforded by the visitor centre, I took a few pictures before we beat a hasty retreat back to the car. I was less taken this time than previously; the sheer enormity of the Shasta Dam back in California may have spoiled my ability to appreciate concrete engineering on anything other than mind-boggling scales. The Hoover Dam is an incredible piece of work, but it’s…well, it’s just small by comparison.

We crossed the dam and drove up out of the canyon, its broken, rocky terrain persisting for a few miles before the horizon opened up once again to reveal a scrubby plain. The road ran in relentless straight lines, south-south-west for an hour then veering eastward at Kingman to join the I40. We drove on autopilot with the roof up, the air-con at full blast, the radio burbling* and the cruise control keeping us at a steady sixty-five plus ten percent: one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road was all it took to keep our mobile isolation tank shiny side up and heading in the right direction. Dust devils whirled in and out of existence off in the distance, faintly ominous as they did so. The road went on.

Stopping after a couple of hours for petrol in a one-horse town of rusting corrugated iron and bowed wooden porches, we realised we’d hit Route 66, because the name of every shop in the place was prefixed with “Historic Route 66”: “Historic Route 66 Gift Shop”, “Historic Route 66 Barbeque”, “Historic Route 66 Guns & Ammo”, that sort of thing. We filled up and would have burned rubber out of there had the traction control not intervened to limit our progress to ‘rapid but orderly’.

The light was failing as we arrived in Williams. It was the terminus for the Grand Canyon Railway and was a quietly thriving little town, slightly run-down in places but otherwise a world away from our previous nameless pit-stop. We’d booked a motel room here before leavin Vegas and after checking in and dumping our gear we walked back into town for the evening. Williams did not disappoint: we ate (where else?) in a diner named Cruiser’s Café 66 then decamped to play pool and get hammered in a cowboy bar called the Canyon Club where a fight was always just around the corner. Perched at the bar, we talked to a railwayman named Travis who could almost have been a latter-day Steinbeck character: escaping from a drug habit in California, he lived in an RV park at the edge of town and took shift work on the railway to fund a quiet life at this junction between Route 66 and the Grand Canyon tourist trail. We left very shortly after a minor fight did break out and walked back to the motel through the back streets.

Our visit to the Grand Canyon the next day was anticlimactic. We’d underestimated some of the distances involved in this last leg of the trip and would have to drive straight from the canyon to Phoenix so that Ash could catch her flight home the next day. With this in mind we were up at the canyon by lunchtime and on the road again less than an hour later. Ash had been not unimpressed as such, but underwhelmed; I’d been here before, of course, and so the impact was dulled a little by familiarity, but still I struggled to rise to the occasion. Too many days of plumbline-straight desert roads were taking their toll and the inexorable daytime heat made us sluggish and irritable. We walked down into the canyon a little way, hugging the rock to let a horseback expedition pass, took a few photos and left. The ‘Grand Canyon’ box had been ticked.

We shot south as fast as we reasonably could; Phoenix was two hundred and thirty miles away and even pushing the bounds of legality it would take us at least four hours to get there. Ash drove first, taking us down the 180 towards Flagstaff. I was in awe, yet again, at the vastness of the land we were covering. The road travelled through — in fact, the Grand Canyon, Williams and Flagstaff all lay within — the Colorado Plateau, a gigantic state-sized geographic area drained by the Colorado River, and our corridor through it was marked by wide-open plains and, later, forests of short pine trees. The towns along the way sprawled out without any planning; after all, with the plains carrying on for miles in every direction, there’s no shortage of space. The comparison to the crinkled landscape of Scotland with its towns crammed into glens and huddled along the coast is stark.

Rolling through one of those woods near Flagstaff, I noticed we were about to veer off the road.

“Ash! The road!”

“Shit, sorry,” she said, steering us back into the middle of the lane. “Did you see the wolves? The wolves hypnotised me!”

We laughed. I’d seen the wolves too, padding around at the forest edge and watching us as we drove by.

“Maybe I should drive now?” I suggested, and we swapped over at the mouth of a fire road a half mile or so further on. Checking first for lupine observers, of course.

We stopped briefly in Flagstaff, almost deserted on a Sunday evening, grabbed a sub and hit Interstate 17 to Phoenix. We had 145 miles to go (along with a drop of almost a mile in altitude) and the pink clouds of the sunset combined with the endless blacktop and red rock canyons to lend an oddly post-apocalyptic air to the proceedings. Cue Terminator music.

We hit the south end of the Strip as dusk drew in, and, shielded from the setting sun by the world’s most ridiculous skyline, I tentatively rolled down my window to find that the temperature had dropped to a bearable level.

Rolling to a halt at a red light near Caesar’s Palace, I turned to Ash. “Let’s do it. Let’s put the roof down!” I was jumping in my seat like a ritalin-deprived five year-old. The image of an al fresco cruise along Las Vegas Boulevard with the desert breeze gently ruffling our hair had lurked at the back of my mind like a gilt-framed picture postcard since I’d booked the car a month previously. It was now or never. “Quick, before we’re moving again!”

We swung the roof catches away from the windscreen and I pressed the roof button to fold the canvas top up and away behind the seats. Revealed to the pedestrian masses and the envious gazes of our fellow road users, caged as they were in their plebeian sedans and SUVs, we composed ourselves.

“I don’t care how cheesy we look. This is awesome.”

The lights changed and we were carried northwards with the sluggish traffic, following the Strip through the great mass of ‘theme’ casinos and out into the low-rise, low-rent stretch of motels and wedding chapels which leads to downtown Vegas. We didn’t have a room booked — with the exception of San Francisco and Los Angeles, we’d been more or less winging it the whole trip — and if memory served, we would be able to find somewhere reasonable out here among the blue-hairs and mobility scooters. We pootled around between hotels, plumping for Four Queens as the cheapest one we could find at short notice*. As an added bonus, it boasted a hilariously vulgar gold-trimmed carport in which I could smugly mind the ‘Stang while Ash booked us in, as documented at left. Classy!

Having parked our lowly V6 next to a bright white California Special in the hotel’s attached multi-storey car park (redistributing a bit of self-satisfaction from me to its more fortunate owner in the process), we pottered around Fremont Street for a while, the heat still beating relentlessly against us. In the end we gave up and retreated to the hotel to spend a quiet night ordering room service and channel hopping. Neither of us was in a casino frame of mind just yet.

The next day we took care of some errands we’d been putting off: Ash searched for a phone to call home while I lugged a rucksack of dirty washing off to a series of shuttered laundromats, finally finding one open forty-five minutes and a pound of weight in sweat distant from the hotel. The heat was absolutely punishing.

We regrouped in the afternoon to grab a shuttle bus down to the Strip. Without a plan as such, we just ambled down one side and back up the other, threading our way through casinos and malls along the way. Ash acquired a taste for daiquiris; I acquired a taste for buying checked cowboy shirts, and both of us acquired a distaste for constant pestering by sidewalk hawkers and the leaflet-muggers swarming around casino entrances. Vegas rivals Istanbul for the lack of respect for one’s personal space and the constant sensory battering meted out by the weather, the people and the environment.

In the evening we ate on the patio of a shiny new burger joint named Stripburger and settled down to watch the throngs come and go. There was some sort of incident on the near half of the dual carriageway of the Strip: a growing clot of police cars accreted around it as we ate and drank, although we didn’t see what had happened. (The news next day reported that there had been some sort of shooting incident.) Slightly disquieted, we called it a night and walked most of the way back to the hotel, giving in to the still-stifling heat and hailing a cab for the last half mile or so. A mere two visits and four days in Vegas have been enough to satisfy my need to experience it; I think a rational outlook and a cynical worldview nullify the strike-it-rich lure of the place. I’m happier with the cigar-smoking, fancy-dressed, ersatz Vegas in my head and of my youth.

Just to round things off in an appropriate manner, though, we gambled (and lost) a single buck on the slots in Four Queens. That’s a big fat tick-mark on our tourist scorecard.

On our last day we loaded up the Mustang and consulted our freebie rest-stop map of Nevada to work out how best to aim for the Grand Canyon, our last big destination of the holiday. Before we left, though, Ash wondered out loud: “So, do we want to have a go a firing a machine gun? Like the billboards said on the way into town?”

“We shouldn’t really.” I said. “Should we?”

We should. We did.

The Gun Store was an unassuming place, a featureless white building on a strip mall between an Italian restaurant and a pay-day loan office. We parked round the back and in the silence after stopping the engine we could hear the muffled reports of automatic gunfire coming from the back wall of the building in front of us. As we got out, an otherwise nondescript guy wearing paramilitary clothing strolled out past us to his car, a pistol in a holster on his belt. We walked round to the front door where a smiling young woman welcomed us.

“Hi! Have y’all fired a gun before?”

I explained my own limited experience, and Ash said that she had been clay pigeon shooting once before.

“What do y’all want to fire?” she asked, and handed us a laminated A4 page. It was, to all intents and purposes, the Counter-Strike weapon selection screen reproduced in the form of a diner menu and disturbingly, I recognised every last gun on it. (And they say videogames teach you nothing. Admittedly, videogames also taught Jez and I how to drive around the Nürburgring, and that did precisely nothing to mitigate the bowel-loosening terror of actually getting in a car with him to do it in real life.) They had A-Team M16s; they had Russki AK-47s; they had Godfather Thompson submachine guns; they had Dirty Harry Smith & Wessons, and lastly, taking pride of place, they had an honest-to-God machine gun.

“I want to shoot a handgun!” Ash said.

“I want an M4!” I said.

“Uh, handguns are quite difficult for first-timers because of the recoil,” the girl explained. “And an M4 is more expensive because it uses two-two-three instead of nine millimetre ammo. If you want a full auto, how about an MP5? They’re easy to get started with.”

We reconsidered our original choices. After all, neither of us had any real conception of what the hell we were doing here. She went through the prices and procedures with us, and directed us inside.

Inside was weird.

The long wall to our left was covered in gun racks and fronted by a glass display counter housing yet more guns, accessories and the like; on the wall behind us hung ear defenders and safety goggles, and through a window on the far wall we could see into the range itself, and from which the sound of shots — a constant tattoo of them — could be heard. Above the window were pinned ten or so example targets, A1 sheets of cheap paper printed with a variety of designs. They appeared to be arranged in descending order of good taste and decency: the first two were stylised silhouettes with numbered rings centred on them; the next couple were line drawings of some generic soldier or other, and after that things went downhill rapidly. In order of increasing tastelessness, they were:

1. Hostage scene with cowering female being held captive by a gun-toting fat man
2. Slavering comic-book zombie
3. Slavering comic-book zombie clutching assault rifle
4. Photograph of Osama bin Laden
5. Slavering comic-book zombie Osama bin Laden clutching assault rifle

Most of the people milling around were dressed either in black paramilitary clothes like the guy outside and packed pistols on their bat-utility-belts (i.e. the staff), or were Floridian tourist types with garish ’90s shirts and khaki shorts, regardless of gender, and carried briefcase-sized silver flight cases (i.e. the regulars). While we watched, one of them popped open his case to withdraw a matte black revolver, eliciting appreciative noises from a nearby member of staff. Dotted among the Floridians and the survivalists were a few normal people: us, the Vegas punters lured in by boredom, curiosity or giant billboards.

We equivocated for a few minutes over what gun to go for — seeing them all arrayed up on the wall made what we were about to do all the more pressingly real — and in the end we went with the girl’s advice and chose an MP5, the weapon of choice for armed police, special forces and tourists everywhere. One of the guys behind the counter had us fill in disclaimer forms and slid four curved black magazines over to us: two 25-round clips each for $1 a bullet. They were heavier than I imagined, and we cradled them nervously (I mean for God’s sake, do they go off if you drop them? Help us out here!) as we pointed to the two most abstract and least offensive targets. We picked up safety glasses and ear defenders and got in line to wait.

After a few minutes spent quietly discussing whether or not this was a really, really stupid thing to be doing, a young chap came to take us into the range, an MP5 sans magazine dangling from his hand in a louche fashion. He had us put on our glasses and ear defenders and gestured for us to follow him through an airlock-style pair of doors, designed to keep the sound of shots from deafening the waiting punters, and into the firing range where he showed us to a booth. It was loud. The constant rat-tat-tat of tourists suckered in by the “Try a machine gun!” billboards was punctuated every minute or so by the colossal bang of one of the regulars firing something much bigger.

The next few minutes proceeded in a sort of dreamlike, on-rails manner. Our chaperone explained how to fire the MP5. “You want to lean forward; squeeze, hold and release the trigger. Squeeze, hold, release. Aim to fire between two and six shots per burst.” He demonstrated. “Place your feet a shoulder width apart, tuck the gun into your shoulder and lean forward into the recoil.”

As we watched, he wheeled the target hanger towards us and hung one of the targets upside down with the ‘head’ pointing towards the floor. “Everybody always aims for a headshot, but automatics tend to kick up as you fire. Some people hold down the trigger for too long, and that happens.” He pointed to bullet holes in the ceiling.

“Who wants to go first?”

Ash did. He took a magazine from her, slotted it home and cocked the gun in the blink of an eye, then handed it to her as she took up position in the booth. “Can I rest it down there?” she asked, nodding at the waist-level barrier which formed part of the booth.

“Sure,” he said, and so she hunched over to balance the gun with its magazine touching the counter, braced herself, sighted along the barrel and squeezed-held-released the trigger.

The sound was deafening. There were three enormous bangs in rapid succession, each accompanied by a ping as a still-glowing cartridge casing was ejected from the gun. Ash twitched as if given an electric shock. The target had acquired three tiny holes, one through the head and the other two distributed apparently at random. For all the sound and fury, the end result was deceptively insignificant.

Ash carried on through the magazine, firing successive bursts of two or three bullets, and a final click as the gun locked itself open signalled the last bullet after only thirty seconds or so. “You’re doing great! Girls are normally better at this than guys,” our host told her. He took the gun, swapped the empty magazine for a full one, and handed it back. In another thirty seconds it too was empty. Ash’s target was wheeled back towards us and replaced with mine. Again the magazine was replaced and he handed the gun to me.

Like the magazines had been, the gun was heavier and bulkier than I had imagined it might be. I was too tall to rest the gun on the counter as Ash had done so I stood leaning forwards, almost on tiptoes, and snugged the gun into my shoulder. I hunched over and squinted through the sights. The aiming post at the end of the barrel seemed massive, obscuring half the target, and it wavered as I tried to get comfortable with the weight of the gun. I breathed in and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked wildly, pushing back into my shoulder but also wanting to jump around in my hands. I blinked involuntarily and my nose burned with the acrid smell of the gunpowder. I’d fired two bullets, one hitting the general region of the target’s head and another up and to the left. I lowered the barrel to peer at the target, and breathed out.

The violence of the experience had been terrifying. In objective terms, this was a relatively big gun firing a relatively small bullet and so it was about as manageable as it could possibly have been, but still the recoil, noise and shock generated by a single shot was astonishing. I carried on, fitfully firing groups of two or three rounds and even, once, a single shot. Our guy took the empty gun to replace the magazine and in my second attempt I managed to control the recoil better to keep the hits more tightly grouped.

I handed the empty gun back. The barrel and breech were smoking slightly, the booth was filled with gun smoke, the floor was littered with empty cartridges, and I was shaking.

“Here,” our guide said, whipping out a magazine from a thigh pocket and slotting it home. “This one’s empty. Want to take a photograph with the gun to show the folks back home?”

Christ, not really, I thought. But we did it anyway, taking turns to clutch our rental machine gun and attempting to assume a less surprised expression for the other to snap a photo.

We stepped back into the calm of the outer office. It had taken us less than five minutes to be given a crash course in submachine gun handling and to fire a hundred bullets between us. We shook our tutor’s hand and left, holding up our targets to see the dots of sunlight where we’d hit them. We were exhilarated and appalled in equal measure. How do you rationalise this sort of thing? How do you buy a gun, knowing the sheer power and violence you hold in your hand?

(And yeah, Ash was much better than me.)

The city eventually petered out into the desert, and we stopped at Barstow for a late lunch of burger-n-fries at In-N-Out. The words “Maybe we can sit outside at one of the tables,” died in my throat as we opened the door and the car’s bubble of air-conditioned comfort evaporated instantaneously. Christ, it was hot. The 40-degree temperature and scorching sun had us coated with a film of sweat within seconds. To a Scot used to bone-chilling winters and year-round rain, the sheer impact of a normal day’s weather out here is staggering. It’s like hunkering in front of an open electric oven at full bore, or pointing a brace of hairdryers at your face: this is weather to be measured in kilowatts rather than centigrade.

Once inside, we ordered from the famously brief menu (burger, cheeseburger, fries and/or drinks) and sat down to salivate in anticipation. I’ve waxed rhapsodic about In-N-Out before, but it bears repeating: this is perfect fast food. Crisp, cold lettuce, onions and tomato; tasty, non-greasy hamburgers and excellent fries. If this isn’t enough for you, you can flip your cup over to reveal the bible reference on its base and marvel that a simple In-N-Out burger-n-fries might be the most faithful representation of all that’s right and all that’s wrong with America. (Obviously, I have fine-tuned my original thesis — “zOMG!! In-N-Out is awesome!” — over the intervening years.)

Our immaculate burgers finished, we dashed back to the car. Against Ash’s better judgement and hoping that the wind would keep us cool, I dropped the roof (the combination of the open road and a convertible pony car was too much to resist) and we burbled off into the Mojave Desert towards Vegas.

We’d been taking turns to drive, and were both getting the hang of the car. Ash took to it like a duck to water, used to driving lumbering automatic beasts like V8 Cadillacs and old Chevy pickups, but I had taken a while to get a feel for it. Now that I had, though, I wanted to see what our Mustang could do.

I pulled us off the highway onto a side road just past a sign for the town of Zzyzx (lexicographically speaking, the last place in America) and parked on the sandy verge. I switched off the traction control and thumbed the overdrive button hidden on the far side of the gear lever, turning it off. I had a need to burn rubber. Ash rolled her eyes. “Just be careful, okay?”

The road was clear as far as the eye could see, and the eye could see pretty far on the rolling desert plain. I mashed the throttle to the floor; the engine roared, and we jerked forward with a disappointing absence of smoking tyres. The speedo swept upwards past 60 mph and I eased off once it became obvious that nothing particularly earth-shattering was going to happen. The sad truth was that short of a transmission-(and rental agreement)-busting brake stand, 210 horsepower in our tonne-and-a-half car wasn’t enough to spin the wheels on the asphalt. So I did it in a gravel lay-by instead. It wasn’t really the same.

Bored of the I15, we followed this desert road for a few miles as it shadowed the interstate. The road had a few gentle curves, and the Mustang’s underlying character became evident. It wasn’t bad per se, but it had an odd tendency to undermine each of its basic competencies with a single glaring fault. There was plenty of grip, for example, but there was no feedback at all through the steering wheel so that instead of ‘handling’ it had ‘guessing’. The 244-cube V6 would hustle the car along quickly enough when prodded but sounded unhappy when doing so. The ride was comfortable for the most part, but the solid rear axle would smash across any potholes with a horrific bang. The interior was well laid out but the visibility to the sides and back was less than great. And so the list of almost-theres went on.

It all added up to a frustrating driving experience: a car which could shift when you really needed it to but which discouraged you from doing so on anything other than a straight road of millpond-like flatness. The Trøll, God rest its soul — and bear in mind we’re talking about a seventeen-year-old car first manufactured thirteen years before that — would have run rings around the Mustang in just about any real-life driving situation but one: the one where an arrow-straight road of freshly laid asphalt spears off toward the horizon. And putting it like that, I suppose the Mustang was exactly what it should have been.

“Wait, wait — go back,” Ash said suddenly. I stopped and she pointed behind us. “That road sign is full of bullet holes!”

It was indeed. We got back onto the I15 and stayed on it all the way to Vegas.

I struggle to know exactly how to write about or describe Los Angeles. Selfishly, I want to draw some neat conclusion about it, to summarise it in a pithy paragraph or two that I can write down here and give myself a satisfied pat on the back, but after three visits I still have only the faintest idea of what the place is about. What I can do in a couple of paragraphs of at least some marginal degree of pithiness is to report what Ash & I did there, so let’s stick to that.

We spent the days doing some of the generic tourist stuff: we took a tour bus around Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Sunset Strip; we rode a city bus along an unexpectedly circuitous route through the ‘hood and out to Santa Monica, and we traipsed along Hollywood Boulevard and wondering exactly why it’s relevant any more.

In the evenings we geeked out and indulged our private LA flights of fancy. We ate in the 101 Coffee Shop from Swingers, a salubrious little diner whose walls were plastered with photos from the 1970s and where studiedly uninterested hipsters perched on the bar stools to pick at omelettes and apple pies. We drank beer at a streetside table outside Mel’s Diner on Sunset, where, four years earlier, Josh, Dave and I had our holiday bookended perfectly by the appearance of Road Trip’s Breckin Meyer. Lastly we visited the Viper Room, the music venue owned until recently by Johnny Depp and the scene of River Phoenix’s untimely demise, somehow managing to talk our way around the cover charge on the way in. We got smashed on expensive drinks (taking the shine off our crafty avoidance of the entrance fee) and listened to a succession of really quite good bands. Then, with the hand of history weighing heavy on my shoulder and six bottles of Corona equally heavy on my bladder, I made a lengthy visit in the same toilet where poor old River Phoenix took his last earthly trip to the bog.

In short, we did just what you might expect a couple of Amerophiles to do in la-la-land, and of course, we left as intrigued and nonplussed as when we’d arrived.

On the morning of our last day, we picked up our new ride from Budget in Beverly Hills, slap bang in the 90210 area code. In a fit of unashamed fanboy enthusiasm, I’d hunted down a convertible Mustang from this one particular branch of Budget; nowhere else can you be guaranteed a particular model of car and if you tick the horribly vague ‘convertible’ box on the rental form you’re far more likely to be lumbered with an execrable Chrysler Sebring or a dull-as-dishwater Toyota Solara. I’d been waiting for this since finishing up in Vancouver, and I couldn’t suppress a shiver of anticipation as we walked out to collect our honest-to-God pony car from the rental lot.

We were not disappointed.

It looked pretty fucking good sitting there in dark blue. Despite being a lowly V6 — the original ‘secretary’s car’ — it was still a rear-wheel drive convertible rocking a 4.0 and a 5-speed slushbox, and it was bang on the money for road trippin’. We lowered the top, started her up and rumbled out onto Sunset. Set phasers to cliché!

Unfortunately, reality intruded on our dream cruise as soon as we left the car park. Our last stop in Los Angeles was the Getty Center, up in the Santa Monica mountains. Deanna had suggested that we visit it if we had the chance: “Even if you don’t go to look at any of the art, the architecture is stunning.” Cretins both, neither Ash nor I had any idea what the Getty Centre actually was, but the magic word ‘architecture’ sold me on it straight off the bat. The only problem was getting there.

We were sucked out of the rental lot on Santa Monica Boulevard and plunged straight into the infamous LA traffic without much control over where we were going, buffetted from lane to lane against our will. From the driver’s seat the Mustang was huge and unwieldy, a hulking brute with numb steering and visibility-hampering retro styling. The open top exposed us to the baking morning sun and a honking, distracting sea of hostile drivers. Surely it’ll get better, I thought. I’ll get used to the size of the car and the steering will firm up once we’re on the freeway. When we finally got to that freeway, the 405 that would take us north to the Getty, I put the foot down to propel us up the on-ramp and into the faster moving traffic. The engine revved, the auto box kicked down, and yet we ambled up onto the 405 at more or less the same speed.

Oh dear, I thought.

We arrived at the Getty within about ten minutes and I put my worries about the car to the back of my mind. Set within the rocky confines of a canyon in the Santa Monica mountains, the Getty wasn’t much to look at. It looked exactly like a multi-storey car park, in fact, down into which we were directed by one neatly-dressed attendant after another. After fiddling for a few minutes to get the car’s roof back up, we took a lift back to ground level with a few other visitors, only to be corralled into a queue by yet more smartly attired attendants.

We looked around. We were in a monorail terminal, all marble and steel and fastidiously clean, and surrounded by the neatly trimmed hedges of a sculpture garden. Visitors and staff members alike were all smiling beatifically and seemed content to wait for the train. I was acutely aware that Ash & I were a polite question away from being discovered as unbelievers.

“Have you been to the Getty before? Just my little joke — of course you haven’t. No-one who comes here ever leaves.”

A driverless train arrived after a few minutes; we were shepherded on board, and it left the terminal to travel slowly along a track which rose up over the highway. The view was spectacular.

The monorail slowed to a stop after a few minutes and its doors opened to disgorge us into a stark marble utopia. I was utterly bewildered — what was this place? After all the gentle cajoling into this car park or that tram, the expanse of marble and geometric buildings framed by a cloudless blue sky was overwhelming. We picked up a leaflet and wandered up the stairs to the main plaza as we read it.

After our worries that this might be some sort of Scientologist retreat, or that the monorail had been going to open a hidden set of bomb bay doors and drop us into a hundred foot ravine, it turned out that the Getty Center was just an art gallery. That is, if ‘just’ is not too mean a word for a $1.3 billion edifice which evokes ‘city of the future’ and ‘Blofeld’s lair’ in equal measures. Everything within it was artfully placed: sun-dappled boulders and pebbles in the garden’s stream create a ‘sculpture’ of sound; red and white flowers punctuate the lush greenery; cubist buildings frame incredible views of the city below and mountains above. It was fantastic, in the true sense of the word. And you know what? Deanna was right — we barely even looked at the art.

I do, of course, plan to finish rather more quickly. For the sake of my sanity if nothing else.

But that is not why I’m writing this today. The reason for this entry is altogether sadder.

The Trøll pines for the fjords no longer.

I took the Saab for a long-overdue MOT after we got back from the States, and it failed: the brakes were shot, some lightbulbs were out, and the windscreen wipers no longer wiped. Now to be honest, it has suffered roughly the same magnitude of MOT failure every year since I bought it — the brakes in particular are less durable than a cheese & pickle sandwich — but I’ve grumblingly stumped up the cash each time. This year, though, age has finally caught up with the old girl and even if the MOT failures were attended to, the electric windows would still be jammed open by half an inch, the sills would still be rusting and the paint would still be flaking off the bonnet.

I parked the Trøll in the car park at work so that I could think about what to do with it without fear of the DVLA nicking me. “J’accuse,” it said (or the Swedish equivalent), each time I walked past the window to get a coffee.

A couple of weeks later, Mike the building manager started tactfully enquiring as to its disposition. “Is it buggered, aye?” he asked.

I could not disagree. I drove down into Leith, to the nearest scrapyard I could find, and parked the Trøll on the scales. 1,250 kilos; a featherweight by modern standards, and the reason why its quarter-million-mile engine could still move it with a surprising turn of speed when required, and also why the terrible brakes could still bring it to an eventual halt afterwards. I moved it off the scales, handed the scrappie the keys and took the £85 he offered me in return. “It would’ve been a hundred, but we charge three quid to recycle each tyre,” he told me, and turned back to his newspaper.

And that was it. I walked out of the yard, turned to take one last look, and left, saddened.

Postscript: The Trøll’s demise must have been the final straw: now the whole of Saab has gone to the scrappie.

Post-postscript: Now with added pictorial pathos!

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 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.