We looked through the door of his room to see him lying utterly motionless. He may have been groaning slightly, but if so I couldn’t hear it over our laughter.

“Are you hungover?” we asked.

“Yes.” he replied.

We discussed what to do — wait for Josh to get up? Go for a wander and meet up with him later? — but as we talked he emerged from his room and shuffled painfully to the couch. He was in no fit state to face the outside world, so we decided to leave him to recuperate and meet him later.

Before we left though, Jeff and I both felt the need to relieve ourselves. Urgently. We two might have dodged the hangover bullet, but five pork-based meals in two days was wreaking its own particular form of havoc with our digestive systems.

“I wouldn’t go in there for a bit,” Jeff said as he emerged from the bathroom. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any choice. My need was pressing.

Christ, it smelled bad. It smelled even worse when I’d finished. There was a little mains-powered air freshener in the hall, but I’d found the scent so overpowering that I’d turned it off the night before when we’d arrived back from the club. Without Airwick’s finest to mask the smell, the eye-watering fumes from the toilet were in full noxious bloom. I was glad to be getting out of there.

Just as we were leaving, Josh stood up unsteadily. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, walking hurriedly down the hall and into the pestilential bathroom.

Poor guy. Jeff and I left to the sounds of retching, and I shudder to think of what Josh must have experienced in that thrice-curséd bathroom.

We ate lunch at a place called café café*, sitting outside and watching a variety of rich people come and go. As we waited for our tardy but tasty mains to arrive, a Ferrari pulled up and then growled off; a chopped VW rat rod driven by an extremely tattooed chap did the same, and to cap it all, a convoy of three Rolls Royce Phantom coupés rolled up together and parked across the street. The people sitting at the tables either side of us were expensively dressed and well coiffed, and the whole scene had a not-so-quietly-rich air about it. In Britain it might all have been considered a tad vulgar, but Praguers clearly have no problems showing off their wealth!

After lunch we walked over to the Old Square again to climb the tower of the old town hall and looked out over the city. The view is amazing, really; Prague could double as the Vienna of The Third Man or the Venice of Casino Royale (or, indeed, the Prague of Casino Royale), and the almost mundane baroque buildings are punctuated by gothic eye-poppers like Our Lady before Týn and sci-fi monuments like the TV tower. I’m not a great fan of heights, but I could have stayed up there for hours. We pottered around the old town taking a few more pictures and then headed back to retrieve Josh, who’d gotten as far as the pizza restaurant immediately outside the apartment building before stopping for lunch. We joined him for a Coke before we had to leave.

“I’m just waiting for Jaroslav to come out of the front door, stony-faced, with his eyes streaming,” I said.

Like a Buck Rogers freeze-frame ending, we laughed.

* Turns out café café is a sort-of gay hang-out which is also “straight-friendly”. It’s a shame Josh wasn’t with us – he’d have been right at home.

The castle is an odd place. It’s more of a walled town than a castle, at least compared to a typical British example, and the diversity of the architecture inside is mind-boggling. The main square has Romanesque colonnades, the none-more-Gothic bulk of St. Vitus’ Cathedral, and pastel baroque facades all over the place. We ordered thimble-sized coffees at a café in the shadow of the cathedral and flicked through the guidebook to work out what to do that day.

After a stroll around the castle square, we decided to head onwards to Letná Park, a tram ride away to the east and apparently home to the best beer garden in Prague. Until 1962, Letná also boasted (if that’s the right word) the largest statue of Stalin in the world, standing 15m high and weighing 17,000 tonnes. Completed in 1955, it was dynamited seven years later as Khruschev tried to erase Stalin’s imprint from the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

The marble plaza where the statue once stood is a pretty decrepit place these days. In the statue’s place there’s a giant, industrial-strength metronome which hums back and forth to symbolise the passing of time, but in aesthetic terms it’s a bit of a disaster, looking and sounding more like a chairlift than a work of art. The marble blocks were graffiti-covered and broken, and their edges had been worn down by the trucks of the skateboarders who have colonised the place. Here and there, discarded needles lay in the cracks between paving slabs.

It should have been depressing, but I was caught up in a weird sort of appreciation for the history of it all: the Stalinist mania of the giant statue and its hasty destruction only a few years later, and now the feeling that the city has turned its back on this particular corner of Letná Park as an unwelcome reminder of unhappier times.

We found the beer garden at the other end of the park, looking a little run down and almost devoid of people. We decided instead to eat at a swish little bistro opposite before heading onward to Petřín Hill.

Jez had suggested Petřín to us, telling us we should “walk up Petrin Hill, next to the castle, beautiful part of Prague,” adding into the bargain that it was “good for girl watching.” I’d love to make a fruity comment at this point about the laydeez, but the truth is that I was far more excited about not walking up the hill but rather taking the funicular railway to the top. And the funicular was covered by our three-day travel passes to boot — bonus!

Yup, I’m a dork.

There was a minor drama on the way there (read: Jeff and I laughed like drains, Josh frowned resignedly) when I mistakenly decided to get off the tram one stop too early. Jeff and I leapt nimbly through the closing doors, only to turn around and see the tram moving off with Josh still on board. We caught up with him at the bottom of the hill, took the funicular up and walked back down, stopping at a café on a terrace overlooking the city. We ordered three beers and the waiter came by a few minutes later to deliver them.

“Ah, great. Thanks. Děkuji!” I said to him.

Looking blankly back at me for a second, he replied, “You’re welcome. Prosim.”

I turned to Jeff and Josh. “You know, every time I try to say ‘thank you,’ whoever I’m talking to looks at me like I’m mental. Then I ask them how to say ‘thank you’, and everyone pronounces it a little differently.”

“Maybe you have the pronunciation wrong,” Jeff replied. “Maybe instead of ‘thank you’ you’re actually saying ‘suck my balls’.”

We walked back to the flat, crossing Charles Bridge and clutching our wallets and passports as we did so. Every single guidebook mention of the bridge screams “pickpockets! Pickpockets!” in a hysterical tone and so we crossed it in military fashion, each man covering the next and staying vigilant against this criminal scourge. We were, of course, perfectly fine.

After stopping off in the flat to put on our party pants we headed out for the night, watching that night’s game over dinner (sadly, we managed only a double-porker on this, our second day in Prague) and then wandering out of our Old Town comfort zone to try out a few bars at Jez’s recommendation.

This did not go according to plan.

We decided to start with Pivnice U Rudolfina over by the Rudolfinum concert hall. In his pre-holiday pep talk, Jez had characterised this pub as “a trad Czech beer hall, filthy cheap (like 30p a pint), great beer, you get thrown out if you drink at less than a pint every 15 mins. You will be the only non-Czechs there.”

“Sounds like a challenge,” we thought, and set off to find it. And find it we did, shuttered and dark, having closed half an hour earlier. On our way there we’d passed Tretter’s, another of Jez’s suggestions, but it had been quiet and intimidatingly flashy looking. With no real idea of where to go, we chose a nearby middle-of-the-road bar for a couple of consolatory pints and then headed back out.

Finding ourselves just south of Charles Bridge, we came across the queue for what was clearly a very popular club. This was the line for Karlovy Lázně, a multi-floored, super-sized European version of Espionage and by some accounts the biggest dance club in Europe. My kryptonite, in other words.

The queue was long enough to make us go next door instead, to a place called Klub Lávka set in an old building overlooking a weir running across the Vltava. We wandered inside and spent fifteen minutes being ignored at the first bar we came to, before realising that we’d somehow managed to walk straight past the door staff without paying the cover charge. Not that it seemed to make a blind bit of difference; the staff at the next bar further into the club served us without a second glance at our armband-less wrists.

We cleaved to the bar for a bit, spent a while watching a latin dance competition in one of the rooms upstairs, with Josh cutting a mean rug between competitive dances, and then moved downstairs to the main area for…more dancing. I am a categorically awful dancer, but if the music is acceptable then I’ll get drunk and make a half-hearted effort to avoid being a complete party pooper. For a while at least the music in Lávka was reasonable, and the bar provided us with a steady stream of sickly sweet Desperados to satisfy the other half of the equation: Jeff and Josh danced; I “danced”, and everyone was more or less happy. We even started chatting to a Russian girl in Prague on holiday who enthusiastically encouraged me to shake my hips.

God, it makes me shudder even to think about it.

Anyway, we danced/”danced” some more, and with his masterful dancefloor skillz, Josh actually seemed to be getting on rather well with this young lady. Jeff and I raised our eyebrows significantly at each other.

Then she said, “Excuse me, I must be going,” and left. Just like that. Shortly afterwards, the bar ran out of Desperados. It was a sign to leave, and we took it.

“Děkuji,” I said to the waiter as he brought the bill. He looked nonplussed.

After lunch we headed back to the square for the USA-Slovenia game, where the normal tourist attractions — a centuries-old astronomical clock and the black Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn — were temporarily playing second fiddle to a big screen suspended on a frame of scaffolding and flanked by a pair of cars on raised stands. This was the marketing gut-punch of the ‘Hyundai Fan Park’, where Hyundai’s sponsorship of the World Cup was emblazoned loud and proud across every flat surface.

We grabbed pints in plastic cups, found a reasonable place to watch, and settled in for the game. First though, we had to sit through the ads. In place of the usual pre-game punditry was a constant stream of car adverts: it was very much like that sequence in The Shining in which a crazed Jack Nicolson methodically smashes his way through the bathroom door with a fire axe, only this time the axe is a Hyundai commercial and the bathroom door is your sanity.

But I digress.

When the whistle blew for half time the temporary bars set up around the square became instantly clogged with people. We decided to head elsewhere for the second half.

The Golden Tiger was a smoky, wood-panelled bar a few streets away from the square. Our guidebook (a newly purchased replacement for one Jeff had left on the plane) told us that Václav Havel entertained Bill Clinton here sometime back in the ’90s, and that it was very much a traditional Czech drinking den. We were shown curtly to a table in the corner, whereupon Josh held up his hand showing two fingers and a thumb and the barman nodded his head in understanding.

“The book has a bit about Czech pub etiquette,” Josh explained. In short, the rules are:

• Hold up a thumb for one drink, a thumb and a finger for two, and so on;
• Your drink will be replaced once you there’s an inch or so left;
• Place your beer mat on the top of your glass once you’re finished and ready to pay up.

This is a country in which beer-drinking has been optimised.

We settled in for the afternoon. It was nice to see a bit of the traditional Prague, for better or for worse: the beer was great, the atmosphere was genuine and the company was racist, although to be fair it wasn’t a native Praguer but a Serbian who served up that particular slice of authenticity. Jeff turned to our neighbours at the next table to make a comment on the game, and got chatting to this one chap who at first claimed his home country to be “part of the old Yugoslavia,” and who seemed to have some difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the YR was indeed F.

“Which part of the old Yugoslavia?” we asked.

“Serbia,” he told us. “Oh dear,” I thought.

Shortly after that he made a horrifically offensive remark about African footballers. We drank up and left after the game finished.

We rounded off the day with a pig-derived sausage from a stand in the Old Square and watched the last game of day (England-Algeria) under a threatening sky. A few drinks in an Irish bar finished us off and we called it a night, stopping only for another pig-based sausage at a stand in Wenceslas Square. Groaning like sausages about to split, we rolled home.

Jeff and I had flown out of Edinburgh, arriving half an hour before Josh’s Heathrow flight, and with some time to kill I fished out the Czech pronunciation guide I’d printed out the previous night. It seemed prudent to memorise a few useful phrases before we attempted to make our way in a Czech-speaking city. Some phrases seemed easy enough: ano for ‘yes’, ne for ‘no’, and prosim (pronounced “pro-seem”) for ‘please’, for example. ‘Thank you’, though, was a bit trickier.

“‘Thank you’ is…well, according to this, it’s pronounced ‘dye-koo-yi’. ‘D’, ‘e’ with a sort of inverted circumflex, ‘k’, ‘u’, ‘j’, ‘i’. I tried it out. “Děkuji. Děkuji. Okay then.”

“What is it?” asked Jeff. “Děkuji?”

“Yup, sounds about right.”

We were interrupted by Josh’s arrival from baggage collection, tottering under the weight of an enormous backpack, and after we’d finished mocking him for it we bought a three-day travel pass each and headed for the bus into town. After finding the right bus stop, the journey was fairly straightforward: the bus took us to the western terminus of an underground line, and from there we took the metro all the way to Můstek station on Wenceslas Square, right in the centre of Prague. We took the escalator up into a warm but overcast day. The square was more of a rectangle, a bustling and slightly down-at-heel avenue that sloped downwards from the grandiose National Museum at the south end towards the Old Town at the north.

“We have to call Jaroslav [the flat's agent] to let him know we’re here,” said Josh. We waited as he made a quick phone call and then set off to find the apartment.

“Where’s the flat?” we asked him.

“Number 47, Wenceslas Square,” he replied.

It might be worth mentioning at this point that Jez, whose work brings him to Prague many times each year, had given us some suggestions for things to do and places to avoid in the city. He said, for instance:

Wenceslas Sq is unpleasant, try to avoid in general.

Huh.

We found the flat over on the west side of the square, through an arcade and in a little courtyard off the square itself. There was no-one there to meet us, so Josh called Jaroslav again and we waited for him to arrive. We looked around: there was a pizza restaurant with an open-air deck at the back of the courtyard and an internet café across the way.

“This doesn’t seem so bad,” I thought.

As we waited, a shaven-headed, hook-nosed guy came through the arcade and made a bee-line for us. He looked like the kind of guy who broke legs for a living.

“Hello,” he said. “I am Jaroslav.”

We introduced ourselves and followed him into the building where he called the lift. The lift arrived, and it was tiny: Josh and his massive backpack alone could have filled it, but Jaroslav encouraged the three of us inside and then slid in beside us. We were squashed against the walls and each other like three sardines sharing a tin with a piranha. And an enormous rucksack.

“The lift,” Jaroslav said jocularly, swivelling his head as if to draw our attention to its size. Perhaps he thought we hadn’t noticed. He pressed the button for the fourth floor, but instead of moving smoothly upwards the lift started to oscillate up and down as if on a straining piece of elastic.

Josh looked unhappy.

Eventually the lift started to ascend, the slipping clutch or stretching cable or whatever finally gaining some purchase, and slowly climbed to the fourth floor. It stopped, hopped up a few inches, and stopped again. The doors slid open and we exited as quickly as was seemly.

The flat itself was fairly nice, in a wipe-clean sort of way, and after signing the rental agreement and being shown around by Jaroslav, he asked us what were doing in Prague.

“Are you on stag do?” (I am not exaggerating the lack of the indefinite article.)

“No, not really; it’s more of a boys’ holiday,” we told him. A ‘mancation’, as Josh later put it.

“Okay, you need anything — taxi, food, or anything else — you call me.” The emphasis, however slight, was all Jaroslav’s. “Anything”? What the hell did he mean? Strippers? Hookers? Drugs? Broken legs?

“Er, thank you. We’ll let you know.”

He took his leave and we all breathed out. We flipped coins for the choice of beds, unpacked our stuff, and wandered off out for the day.

(To be continued.)

• 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.