The weather brightened and the forest closed in around us as we turned inland, following minor roads back towards the I-5. The landscape eventually opened up, the trees retreating up the valley slopes to reveal yet more epic scenery. So unremittingly spectacular was the view, in fact, that we eventually stopped caring about it. You’ve seen one sweeping plain bordered by majestic mountain peaks and dotted with regal stallions grazing peacefully in the afternoon sun, and you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all.

In amongst all the pastoral beauty, we came across a string of industrial emplacements dotting the landscape. I don’t know what they all were, exactly — generic factories or mills of some sort, I supposed — but they were shocking in their abruptness and incongruity. They were all alike, with big piles of shale, gravel, logs or whatever other raw material they happened to process piled up next to an array of rust-coloured buildings emitting smoke or steam. The surrounding land would be exposed, hard packed earth scoured clean of plantlife and enclosed by a chain link fence. The car park would inevitably be occupied exclusively by full-size pickups. Just as soon as we’d caught sight of one of these blots on the landscape it would be hidden again by a bank of trees, and we’d settle back into the beautiful monotony of pristine meadows and picturesque vales.

We spent a quiet night in Grants Pass, staying at a Knights Inn motel. It was short on both luxury and punctuation, but then the former was a necessary side-effect of our (lack of) budgeting and the latter is apparently endemic to the region. Most disappointingly, the decidedly literal approach to exterior decorating displayed by some of the original members of the Knights Inn chain was absent. Appropriating some chemically-enhanced super-muffins from the breakfast bar in the reception the next morning, we headed towards our first honest-to-God tourist trap destination: the Oregon Vortex.

Excuse me while I compose myself for a hopefully deadpan explanation of what, exactly, the Oregon Vortex is.

Ah, fuck it. I can’t.

The Oregon Vortex is an ingenious roadside attraction trading off a combination of optical illusions, bad science, apocryphal legends and sheer luck. Sometime in the 1890s, near the town of Gold Hill, a wooden cabin owned by a gold mining company was washed down the side of a hill by a mudslide and smacked into a large tree near the bottom. The cabin was left crumpled and bent out of shape but otherwise intact. Separately, the hill and its environs were reputedly avoided by the local Native Americans, who called it the ‘forbidden ground’.

Then, in the 1920s, a ‘physicist’ (just to warn you, the inverted commas are going to fly thick and fast in this paragraph) named John Litster turned up. Litster noticed that the odd perspectives and background angles of the twisted ‘mystery house’ gave rise to optical illusions such as people within the house changing height or leaning at a slight angle when they should by rights have been standing straight up. By happy coincidence, he then happened to ‘discover’ a hitherto-unknown phenomenon he called the ‘vortex’, a spherical region of space centred on the house whose radius roughly corresponded to the ancient ‘forbidden ground’. Its effects were, he said, to refract light within the sphere so that the optical illusions in and around the house’s weird angles were not a simple result of forced perspective but instead an awesome disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field.

A canny Scot, Litster then opened the site for public viewing in 1930. For a small fee, of course.

If there was ever a canonical American Roadside Attraction, the Oregon Vortex is it.

The road from Grants Pass to the vortex (God, I feel daft typing that in over and over again) took us back into the forest, and if Newport had been Steven King territory then this neck of the woods was bordering on Deliverance. The trees closed in over us and the road seemed to narrow as we drove onwards. The few houses we passed were trailer-tastic, accessorised with shuttered windows and satellite dishes, their yards littered with broken down farming machinery.

We reached our destination just as paranoia was setting in, paid our $9.50 and joined the tour. There was no self-guided option; the effects of the vortex were clearly so subtle as to have to be explained rather than just being self-evident. Anyway, our teenage guide took us through the tour with a great deal of enthusiasm, if not particularly persuasively (“Can you see that she’s shorter now? No? Anyone?”), and I did my best to bite my sceptical tongue. I will admit to being a little disorientated within the house itself, but then that’s because it fell down the side of the mountain during a mudslide, hit a tree and came to rest a crumpled mess with its floor at a 30° angle. I’m fairly sure space-time was not being refracted through an anomalous bubble of inexplicable magnetic interference. But then hey, I’m just a physics graduate.

Maybe I’m a sucker for these little enclaves of credulity and wonder, but I did kind of enjoy it, as did Ash, and in a certain American Gods way, the Oregon Vortex is really the ideal tourist attraction.

We got back into the penalty box and headed south: next stop California!

The solitary, almost desultory up side was that the radio had an auxiliary input port for an iPod or the like. The radio consequently spent a lot of time in the upper reaches of its volume range in an attempt to drown out the unceasing drone of the tyres.

But I digress. Hideous as our time on the road was, this was a road trip, and we had places to go. Our plan was to head south on the I-5 through Oregon, stopping for the night in the capital Salem and then again near the border with California to break up the journey. We arrived in Salem’s environs without too much fuss and then somehow managed to miss it entirely. “We, ah, don’t seem to be seeing signs for Salem anymore,” I shouted above the road noise and the attendant tinnitus, as a supposed 10-minute journey into town stretched out uncomfortably.

Ash consulted the map. “I think we’ve driven straight by it,” she shouted back. “Oh well.”

We decided to just keep on going, turning west at Albany towards the Pacific Coastal Highway — the 101 itself. I mentally hummed Phantom Planet’s California. It’s not a cliché if no-one else can hear, you see.

In the late afternoon we arrived at Newport, a small, windswept town perched on a cliff overlooking grey Pacific waves breaking white in the breeze. We came to rest on a road right at the cliff’s edge and opened the doors to admit the cold salty air along with a lingering, fishy undercurrent, and got out to have a look around. It was a striking place. Inland to the west the sky was a cloudless, precise gradient from deep blue overhead down to a pale horizon, while over the sea the sun illuminated the clouds and the waves in an improbably perfect sunset. The street on which we’d parked was sparsely lined with plain wooden houses behind scrubby, sandy verges and was disconcertingly deserted: not a person or car moved.

I jogged up the road to the first of a couple of hotels and left dismayed by the prices. The next one was a little better but still more than we were willing to fork out on the first night, and so we headed on down the road into Newport proper, stopping at more or less every mo- and ho-tel we came across. Each time we came away disappointed. Despairing somewhat, we gradually descended the ladder of hotel quality until we arrived at the Bates Park Motel with a very palpable bump. It was listing visibly and was decorated in faded, peeling white and blue paint.

“Jackpot,” we agreed.

I crept gingerly into the damp, silent reception, noting with interest the ‘Oregon Meth Watch’ window sticker, and rang the bell. I waited.

The door behind the desk opened and the owner stepped out with a friendly smile. My apphrehension evaporated. “How can I help you?” he asked in an incongruous Caribbean accent.

“How much for a room?” I asked.

“Forty-five dollars,” he replied.

“Hmm. I wonder…”

“Okay, thirty-five.”

Score.

“We’ll take it.”

The room was actually quite nice, for 1989, and in the morning we took a quick walk into town to look for some breakfast. The weather was overcast and misty, and the few townsfolk we passed were uniformly surly people wearing checked lumberjack coats and trucker caps, for that authentic Steven King feeling. We drew a blank on breakfast; lots of shopfronts were boarded up and vacant, and other than the bizarre juxtaposition of an adult video shop and a hectoring Christian signpost denouncing it, there didn’t seem to be much to entertain us in Newport. We jumped in the ‘car’ and headed south along the 101.