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.

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 wondered 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.

California is perhaps the only state that I had some preconceptions as to what I expected it to be like, and as we crawled along the last stretch of the 101, it felt authentic. The freeway was four lanes wide in each direction, crowded with cars, and cut through sandy, rocky passes. Winding boulevards lined with bungalows snaked up the hillsides away from the interstate. The sky was dotted with light aircraft and microlights.

We caught up with Brenna in Westwood – UCLA country – and were introduced to our Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority contingent for the evening. They were a smidgen…baked. We left them to get their shit together and Brenna herded us to an In-N-Out Burger, our first fast food of the trip.

I loved it. It was almost a religious experience.

The design of the place, both inside and out, was bold and unfussy. The menu had four things on it: burger, cheeseburger, double burger and fries. Apparently there’s a whole vocabulary of ‘secret’ key words that let the savvy customer customise their burger. In-N-Out Burger is exactly how Apple would do fast food, except without the price gouging.

Fed and watered, we collected our slightly more coherent hosts and got a taxi to a bar called Saddle Ranch, just off Sunset Boulevard.

The evening’s entertainment was primarily based around laughing at people falling off a mechanical bull. Dave and I helpfully obliged, but Josh rather unsportingly managed to tame the beast. Disappointingly, no bones were broken and the only casualty was pint of beer kicked over by the bull’s operator. I forgot to shout “Rawhide!” and whoop wildly, but there you go. Maybe take more than one evening of riding the mechanical bull (if that’s not prison talk, I don’t know what is) to turn me into a cowboy.

The next day, our last, was spent looking around LA. We had precious little drive to do anything more strenuous than some light sightseeing, so we climbed into the Impala and headed vaguely in the direction of Hollywood, tooling round Beverly Hills on the way at a kerb-crawling, and probably illegal, pace.

We stopped at a diner on Sunset for some breakfast and were sorting out the bill when the parking valet (who we’d ignored, having become sick of tipping absolutely everyone) dropped off a Merc for another customer. The customer was Breckin Meyer, who played the lead character in Road Trip. I can now die happy.

In the afternoon we walked along Hollywood Boulevard, visited the Bradbury Building and looked around the bustling but manky downtown area. With a couple of hours to kill before catching the plane home, we sat on Santa Monica beach, soaked up some sun and watched a seal play in the choppy ocean.

FIN