We turned off the péage near Bergerac and, after half an hour of missed turnings and conflicting directions, found the villa in nearby Lanquais. Tom, who had already arrived, showed us up to the terrace at the back and pressed glasses of Bordeaux red into our hands.

Before we could settle in to this rural French idyll, though, there remained the little matter of picking Josh up from Bergerac airport. A couple of oncoming cars had flashed their lights at us on the road to Lanquais, reminding us that the Alfa’s headlamps remained defiantly unconverted from UK spec, and with no desire to be lifted by the Gendarmerie on our first day here, I called Josh to tell him the bad news.

Here is how that turned out:

Still, that minor unpleasantness behind us (who am I kidding? I’ll be getting stick for that ’till the day I die), we settled in to enjoy our first evening. We ate baguettes and camembert provided by Tom, watched as the bats took flight from the eaves of a neighbouring house at dusk and generally relaxed. And then we got shitfaced.

The next day we headed out for a stroll around sunny Lanquais, taking in the ch
âteau and the nearby lake. We were chagrined to find out that the lake was dedicated to a “miniature port” and that swimming was not allowed.

“Why not?” someone asked.

“Because of the eels,” Devon replied. “Because of the electric eels.”

That afternoon we took both cars to a Carrefour on the outskirts of Bergerac to stock up on food for the week, only le supermarché était fermé because it was Sunday. Thwarted, we drove in convoy to a nearby McDonalds, ordered a perfunctory few items between us, propped open our laptops and basked in the glow of the complimentary wifi. Jeff and Josh checked their respective fantasy football teams; I checked the progress of the Vuelta a España and more or less everyone checked their work email accounts. Disconnection anxiety reigned, but hey; it was sunny, and even McDonalds is bearable in France.

Unable to feed ourselves, that night we had dinner at the Auberge des Marroniers, the surprisingly cheap and even more surprisingly excellent restaurant at the edge of the village. And then we got shitfaced.

The week meandered on in a similarly relaxing fashion. We visited local villages (Limeuil, Lalindes and St. Emilion) and towns (Bergerac and Bordeaux); we canoed down the Dordogne, hauling the canoes onto a pebble beach along the way to stop for a thirst-quenching beer; we shopped at open air markets, speaking broken French to bemused stallholders; we ate croissants for breakfast, read the International Herald Tribune, played pétanque, picked apples in the garden and lazed in the sun. We drank like alcoholics and ate like kings.

Life in the villa was so achingly French that from a dreich Edinburgh viewpoint it seems almost absurd. The house was the very image of a traditional French farmhouse, at least as it exists in the mind of a British tourist, and the village around it was sun-drenched, rustic and quiet. Eerily so, in fact — we barely saw any of the inhabitants from day to day, and the village shop’s shelves were almost bare. Presumably our daily order of croissants and pains au chocolat was enough to pay the no-doubt piffling French mortgage.

All in all, the holiday was very good indeed, and by the end of it we were already discussing plans for the next one. My only regret is that the €6, 5-litre plastic keg of wine that Josh and I fought so hard to get into Devon’s carefully curated shopping trolley during our first visit to Carrefour was carelessly left behind. I was distraught. C’est la vie, I suppose.

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.

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.

At about 11.30 one of the nurses took me through to a second waiting room and handed me a backless surgical gown, a disposable paper robe to go over it, and a giant paper loincloth.

“Have you ever worn modesty pants before?” she asked.

A bit of fiddling and a few false starts revealed that they went on like a pair of string bikini bottoms. (I’d like to point out here that I’m inferring this similarity rather than drawing from any well of personal experience.) I can report that although they may protect one’s modesty they do very little for one’s dignity. Had the option been presented to me, I think I’d rather have gone commando. Presumably this is the very reason no such choice was offered.

I was left alone for another 20 minutes or so and then led along to the anaesthetic room by the same nurse. To jump up on the gurney under my own steam and clench my fist to offer the anaesthetist a suitable vein was a far cry from being wheeled passively down the last time, when the metal had gone into my arm in the first place; this time round I felt a bit like the Dish of the Day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, happily encouraging the sawbones to take a poke around my insides. I was hooked up to blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen monitors. “Christ”, I thought, looking at my 90 bpm pulse on the screen, “I’m going to have a heart attack. They’ll have to fix that too while they’ve got me under.”

It became a bit of a game to calm myself down, talking to the nurses and the anaesthetist to keep my mind off things, all the while keeping an eye on the ECG. I was at a rather healthier 70 bpm the last time I remember looking at the monitor. Not exactly Lance Armstrong, but respectable, I thought, under the circumstances. Eventually the anaesthetist told me he was starting the flow of the anaesthetic. No-one asked me to count backwards from ten or anything, so I decided instead to narrate how I felt as it took effect. “Wow, it’s cold. I can feel my vein inside my arm. And it’s prickly! A bit like pins and needles or something. It’s warming up; it must be more or less body temperature now. I’m starting to feel a bit woozy. Wait, am I? Yes, I am. Woo. I—”

In hindsight I must have seemed a bit weird.

I dribbled back awake in the day surgery ward. I didn’t have the same on-off-on sensation as last time, where it had seemed as if no time elapsed between conking out and waking up; instead, it felt more like I’d fallen asleep normally and had woken up after a few hours. A nurse came over to check me out and feed me some painkillers. A few hours later, when I was up and about and not losing my place in the middle of sentences, the same nurse presented me with my drugs ‘n dressings take-away bag and I was hurriedly discharged to free up the bed.

My Dad gave me a lift back to the flat in Glasgow and Ash kept an eye on me that night. I was a zombie for the next two days: the first I spent on the couch, comfortable in ascribing my lethargy to the residual effects of a general anaesthetic, but by the time I’d narco-slept my way through a business meeting the morning after (wherein the acquisition of our company was relayed to us, no less, and where despite my more than passing interest I could not keep my eyes open) I was starting to wonder what was going on.

“Seriously, I’m constantly on the verge of passing out,” I told a workmate as I popped another of the Tramadol painkillers the nurse had given me. “I have no idea why.”

And then later that day I looked up Tramadol. It’s an opioid, or synthetic opiate. “Ah,” I thought, “right.”

I took no more Tramadol after that, and coincidentally had a massive crap the next day. Yup, same side effects as morphine.

* * *

I was changing my dressings the other day, and I tell you, it’s pretty bizarre when the sight of staples in your arm is no longer a Big Deal.

“Any chance of a CT scan?” I asked, ad nauseum.

The A&E doctor eventually had me sent for an X-ray. This was not fun. It was, in fact, the least amount of fun I’d had since falling off my bike in the first place. I was wheeled through to an adjoining room and then had to get into a chair by the X-ray machine under my own steam. My God, it hurt. I wasted no time in relaying this to the nurse, switching seamlessly from another appeal for a CT scan.

“I was down here the other week at your radiology department, you know—oh, you want me to get up? OH JESUS CHRIST.”

She directed me to position my elbow at a 90° angle on the end of a table. Eyes watering, I tried to do so.

“Just a bit more.”

“Argh.”

She moved the X-ray machine into position, moved off to the control panel, and returned again. She took another X-ray and helped me back onto the wheelchair. I repeat the next exchange verbatim:

“How does it look?” I asked.

“It’s pretty bad,” she said. “It looks like it’s broken in maybe 5 places. You’re doing well—most people would have passed out from the pain by now.”

Dripping with sweat, throat dry and smashed elbow cradled pathetically in my lap, I almost laughed. My night was made.

A surgeon named Mr Woods came along to take a look at me a while later. I was a little more lucid by then; the general horror had worn off and a sort of self-deprecating coping mechanism had taken over. I was going to be polite and helpful if it killed me. He prodded around the elbow a bit, mulled over the X-rays on the A&E PACS workstation, then called his boss. I heard some murmuring about coming in that night, but in the end he came back across to tell me that they would operate first thing tomorrow morning. I must admit, it sounded daunting.

“Your arm is broken in about 7 places.” (This figure seemed to vary based on who was doing the talking.) “We’re going to clean out the puncture wounds, then put in a couple of plates to fix your humerus back together. It’s about the worst fracture of this type I’ve seen, and there is a small risk of nerve damage or infection. We’ll take you up to the ward, then come and get you again in the morning. No food or drink until then, okay?”

Dehydration from those few glasses of wine, and nothing to drink since then bar a couple of fingers of water to wash down the painkillers meant I was absolutely parched. “Nothing at all? I’m really, really thirsty.”

“We’ll put you on a drip. That should take away the thirst.”

He wrote “ORIF→” on my right wrist, the arrow pointing to my elbow, and explained that this meant “Open Reduction, Internal Fixation,” or an open surgery to set and fix the bone with plates and screws.

The A&E doctor came back then to put on a temporary cast, incredibly managing to do so with almost no motion of my arm, and then a nurse came back to hook me up, putting a cannula into my left arm and attaching it to the first of an endless stream of bags of saline solution. I was left alone for a while and called Ash to explain the accident and my current sorry state. With that done, I sat back to try to relax a bit. The muscles in my arm would occasionally spasm, twitching the bones and making me wince involuntarily. I looked around to take my mind off it. With the cubicle curtain left open, Mr Woods, still at the A&E desk and looking at something on the PACS, could see me peering over at his monitor.

“Want to see the X-rays?” he asked.

“Can you get me a CT scan as well?” I checked. “No? Then the X-rays will do.”

I was wheeled over on the trolley, and he swung the screen around so I could see it. This is what he showed me:

X-ray (before): “There is some…deformation.”

I was momentarily lost for a polite way to respond.

“Holy shit.”

They wheeled me to a quieter cubicle to let me get some sleep, then I was taken upstairs and into a ward with three other sleeping casualties. It was about 4 am, and the operation was supposed to be at 9 am the next day. I slept as well as I could, waking up to take a couple of awful, jarring trips to the toilet with the whole of my awareness concentrated on my upper arm, where I could feel the bones rotating uselessly against themselves despite the cast. I collapsed back into bed to wait for the morning.

The boat puttered out into the river and meandered through the islands, some of which were so small as to have enough room for a single house and absolutely nothing else. There’s something almost fictional about a little wooden cabin perched on a collection of rocks in the middle of a vast, lazy river, almost as if no-one would ever have imagined actually building such a thing.

A few of the islands were big enough to support almost-villages, and they looked like fantastic places to spend the summer. The cost of doing so is, of course, equally fantastical — it’s something like a million bucks to buy an island with a handy cottage on it. Some of the (rich, lucky) islanders live in their cottages all year round, and in the winter they commute to the mainland over the frozen river on snowmobiles. This seems both completely insane and utterly cool to me.

We jumped back in the car and hit Kingston by the mid afternoon. Ash was driving and showed me around the university quarter and the student ghetto, filled with frathouses and beat-up cars of earlier or later vintage. We met up with Helen, a friend of Ash’s from Peterborough who’d decided to get the hell out before she found herself still tending bar at the Only twenty years down the line. We gave her and her dog Luca a lift out to a little country park just outside of town and ambled around for an hour or so, coming across a deer and her fawn crossing the path at one point, and silently cursing the fact that I’d forgotten the camera.

We drove back to Peterborough for another few days of loafing on the patio, drinking at the Only and meeting Ash’s old friends all over the place. (And, incidentally, we did a bit of spontaneous quad-biking on Ash’s parents’ land. Not since I fell off one of these crazy-ass motorbikes gone wrong as a child of 12 have I been on one, and let me tell you, the fear remains.) Ash’s parents were great — ferrying us around, feeding us to bursting point and generally being superb hosts. We packed up on the Saturday afternoon to leave for Toronto, and said goodbye.

After we’d landed and picked up the car, we aimed for Niagara Falls, about an hour and a half away through a homogeneous (and isotropic, come to that) plain of farmhouses, grain silos and cornfields. Some of Ash’s family lived on our route in Fonthill, a quiet little town of wooden bungalows and local shops — Moe’s Charcoal Emporium, Uncle Bob’s Twine & Hats, that sort of thing — and we stopped there to say hi to her relatives, then fuelled up on coffee and doughnuts* before hitting the road again.

We hit the outskirts of Niagara Falls around 6.30 PM. It wasn’t quite what I expected: strip malls yes; strip clubs, not so much. Giant billboards pointed the way to casinos, wax museums and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not with far more enthusiasm than the stiffly official road signs announcing “The Falls”. We found and checked in to the laid-back and rickety Lyon’s House Hostel, and the manager gave us a rundown on the town. “Niagara Falls is a cross between Disneyland and Vegas,” he drawled, and went on to warn us about the panhandlers and general unsavoury types we could look forward to meeting. We trotted off in the fading light towards the Skylon, cutting an omnipresent ’60s dash in the skyline.

Along the way to the falls, we stopped to watch another bizzarely theatrical spectacle: Jay Cochrane, a 63-year old wire walker, does a 330m tightrope walk from the Skylon to a neighbouring casino twice each day. We sat rapt for about five minutes. Shortly after that, the realisation dawned on me that short of plummeting to a messy death in the car park below, he was unlikely to do anything more spectacular than occasionally stand on one leg, backed by the theme music from Superman. Just like Monty the croc in Brisbane, the attraction isn’t in the skill of the performer but in the secret, guilty hope that something hideously awful goes wrong. I felt like a bit of a fraud after that (and frankly, we were bored), so we took our leave and walked on down to the falls.

They were alright, I suppose.

I jest a bit. The falls are an awesome spectacle: the American falls crash down on the jagged remnants of two rockfalls from last century, while the Horseshoe falls generate a massive pall of mist that makes the air heavy with moisture. The only problem is the same as that of the Grand Canyon; yup, the falls are very, very high but unfortunately the gorge itself is much wider, so the relative scale makes them look that bit less impressive. Another odd thing is the predisposition of those companies eyeing tourist dollars to build observation towers that rival the gorge itself in size — the Skylon on the Canadian side and the Prospect Point observation tower on the other. Why can’t we just stand out on the edge of the gorge, damp with the spray, and take it all in as it is? I wondered if we even needed the wall along the promenade…surely we, as a relatively successful species in whom evolution has instilled a healthy distrust of cliff edges, can be trusted not to accidentally throw ourselves over the edge, and anyone determined enough could scale it in seconds anyway. All the steel and reinforced concrete just seemed to get in the way, literally and metaphorically.

Anyway, despite all this ranting it was well worth going to see. We took the Maid of the Mist out into the river the next morning, and spent the rest of the day trying to work out why Niagara-on-the-Lake is so popular (going to see where the rich people live and where you’ll never be able to afford a house must constitute a valid tourist activity). For all my whingeing, it’s been a pretty good start to the holiday. Canada is growing on me!

* Tim Hortons — serving Canada doughnuts, coffee and grammatical ambiguity since 1964.

• Glasgow, UK; Charlotte, NC; SC; Greenville, GA: June 9^th – 11^th
• Greenville, GA; Decatur, Mobile AL: June 11^th – 12^th
• Mobile, AL; Pass Christian, MS; New Orleans, LA: June 12^th – 13^th
• New Orleans, LA: June 14^th
• Houston, San Antonio, TX: June 15^th – 16^th
• Roswell, NM: June 17^th
• Santa Fe, Albuqurque, NM: June 18^th – 19^th
• Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, AZ: June 20^th – June 21^st
• Hoover Dam, (Downtown) Las Vegas, NV: June 22^nd
• Las Vegas, NV: June 22^nd
• Las Vegas, NV: June 23^rd
• Barstow, Santa Barbara, CA: June 24^th – 25^th
• Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, CA: June 25^th – 26^th

And here are Josh’s and Dave’s own accounts and pictures:

• Josh’s blog and pictures
• Dave’s blog and pictures
• and lastly, some more of Dave’s pictures hosted on my Flickr account

I won’t mention it again. Honest.