The Roquefort Files

After the tourist emboli of Fisherman’s Wharf and Cannery Row and the enforced crawl through Carmel’s Labor Day traffic, the open road looked pretty good. From Williams to Monterey was only a couple of hundred miles and yet we’d taken the best part of four days to cover it. Our plan was to dash as [...]

The day we bolted early from San Francisco we got as far south as Marina, a small coastal town on Highway 1. We passed through Santa Cruz on the way, a big surfing town and apparently a bit of a counter-cultural centre, but it was already getting late and we didn’t want to stop having [...]

We hit San Francisco during the rush hour and, after threading our way along the Golden Gate’s constricted lanes, plunged straight into the congested heart of the city. We headed for Market Street (thanks to the onerous one-way system, we found ourselves unwittingly heading for it a number of times after first finding it), a [...]

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always had this awestruck mental image of California as being a sort of promised land, a blue-sky’d, blue-sea’d capsule of American culture where everyone and everything eventually washes up on the way to the Pacific. Having been there to see it for myself once already I really should know better than [...]

We followed the 101 down the Oregon coast for a hundred miles before turning east towards Roseburg. Ash drove, and I was left to take the odd photograph, man the iPod and take in the scenery. The view from the passenger seat was dramatic: the sky was still patchily grey, with lazy, white capped waves [...]

Washington state rolled by without incident, all tree-lined freeways and unremarkable towns. I’d like to say that we hit Oregon before we knew it, but by God, we knew intimately about every minute we spent on the road courtesy of our bottom-of-the-barrel automotive contraption. Our Chevy Aveo was emphatically not a car in the accepted [...]

Ash arrived on the Friday before the last weekend in August. The month itself had been so full-on that I’d barely had time to register that my time was up; it took a chance meeting with Neil & Vanessa on Saturday (“hey Ash, look — it’s some guy in a Mogwai T-shirt. Wait a second…”) [...]

We were staying at the Alexandra Hotel in St. Julian’s, a once-grand place that just reeked of faded glamour. The lobby fittings were all marble and brass and the hotel’s bar, the optimistically named Park Lane Cocktail Bar, must have been quite the hang-out back in 1975. Our bed’s headboard had a built-in push-button FM [...]

We grabbed a taxi from the airport to our temporary lodgings in St. Julian’s, part of the conurbation around the capital Valetta, and plunged straight into gridlock. I’d lost track of the date (and the time of day, to be honest) and we were stuck in the middle of the Monday morning traffic, along with [...]

The coach from Göreme crawled back into Istanbul as the day was starting to warm up. Either I’d relaxed during the two days in Cappadocia or my initial culture shock had worn off, but the city felt far less hectic and more welcoming than it had done when we’d first arrived. It still bustled and [...]