The Roquefort Files

We had the best part of a day to kill in Phoenix before Ash’s flight home, and having stayed in a reasonably priced hotel in the posh suburb of Scottsdale, we decided on a low-pressure day of pottering around our immediate environs rather than chasing any particular tourist attractions. Admittedly, this decision was motivated as [...]

We headed south on the I15 out of Vegas, aiming for Williams, Arizona (yup, another Williams), where we planned to stay the night before heading up to the Grand Canyon. It was going to be a long day: we had at least four hours of driving ahead of us, not counting any time we might [...]

Vegas telegraphs its proximity, long before there’s any sign of the city itself, by the gigantic billboards which line the I15. Ads for casinos, concerts, erotic shows and shooting ranges — money, sex and guns, more or less — lead the way towards the mother of all billboards, the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” [...]

We left the Getty about lunchtime and drove through the endless sprawl of suburban Los Angeles, letting the cruise control keep us at the double nickel and trying to get the measure of our new car.

The city eventually petered out into the desert, and we stopped at Barstow for a late lunch of burger-n-fries [...]

The drive From Santa Barbara to Los Angeles went smoothly enough; mid-morning, the traffic was still reasonably fluid and we made it to West Hollywood without too much drama. We dropped the ‘car’ off at a Hertz branch at the Renaissance Hollywood and lugged our bags the few blocks west to our humbler lodgings. Just [...]

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 [...]