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 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.

The drive south from Carmel started off well enough: Highway 1 is undeniably scenic, and as we followed the road along the coast to Big Sur the sunset seemed to last forever. From there, though, Santa Maria was still a hundred and forty miles away, and my God, we felt every last one of those miles.

Past Big Sur, Highway 1 became a hardened artery furred with parked cars and clogged by bloated RVs crawling through the switchbacks. We chafed behind one or another of these mobile roadblocks for hours, squeezing past whenever the road straightened for long enough to let our Aveo wind painfully up to overtaking speed. As the coast grew more rugged and the road more tortuous with it, the snaking traffic slowed to a 20 mph crawl. It was enormously frustrating.

At last though, as the sun finally set, the road broadened to four and then six lanes: we’d finally hit the 101 again. It was plain sailing from there to Santa Maria. Of course, all this meant was that we got to Santa Maria that bit sooner.

Have you ever been to a town which is just fundamentally charmless? Cumbernauld is one of them. Santa Maria is another. We arrived just after dark, found a Motel 6 just off the 101 — just to ensure that your expectations are suitably calibrated, that was the highlight of our visit — and headed into town to look for something to eat.

Christ, it was grim.

In a town of almost 100,000 souls (or rather, 100,000 people-shaped vessels — their souls must surely have been eroded away to nothing by the grinding tedium of living there), the 6-lane freeway masquerading as a high street was almost deserted. We tooled up and down Broadway and the only places open at 8pm or so on a Sunday night were fast food joints on the fringes of sprawling shopping mall car parks*. We peered in their windows as we drove past. It is not an exaggeration or a generalisation to say that every building was a squat concrete box, every car was a beater, and all the people were fat.

We plumped for a Burger King, parked in the car park to eat and then retreated to our motel for yet more True Blood. I think we were both a little disillusioned; our trip called for a hell of a lot of driving and so far had taken us through only a few places we’d genuinely wanted to go — the Oregon Vortex (seriously! Reading American Gods has vindicated my enthusiasm for roadside weirdness), San Francisco and Monterey — and none of them had quite lived up to our preconceptions. Newport and its New England horror story feel, had, I suppose, been a pleasant surprise, and our night in Marina had been so bad it couldn’t have failed to be entertaining, but it felt like we were clutching at straws a bit. It was time for a change. Tomorrow had to be better.

Santa Barbara was a mercifully short 90 minutes away, and for once we got there with plenty of the day left to look around. We’d arranged to meet Devon’s mum Deanna later in the afternoon, and with a few hours to kill before then we parked the car at the beach and strolled out along Stearn’s Wharf for lunch. The wharf is, of course, a giant tourist trap just like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco or Monterey’s Cannery Row, but it has been far more cannily managed and is populated only by a few seafood restaurants, a couple of reasonably tasteful souvenir shops and, holy of holies, an actual bait and tackle shop. The end of the pier is free of commercial distraction and we were able to sit in the sun with our bowls of clam chowder and watch the windsurfers and tour boats sail by, without a thousand other people trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Back on the beach we sat under a palm tree for a while, listening to an ageing hippie playing a cardboard guitar along to Paul Simon tunes emitted by a ghetto blaster strapped to his bicycle, then wandered into the bustling (but not oppressively so) town centre where Ash did some shopping and I had a look round the Spanish colonial revival courthouse. It was just what we needed after too many days spent in the endless Labor Day crowds.

We caught an electric shuttle bus back to the car park, picked up the car and drove up to Deanna’s sprawling place just outside of town. It was all remarkably familiar; normally my memory is so bad that even déjà vu is beyond me, but I was able to navigate right there from the highway and I parked our shitty rental Aveo in exactly the same place as our shitty rental Impala five years ago. The same cadre of dogs — with the addition of Kinley, a massive white hound whose breed I have temporarily forgotten (my awful memory has reasserted itself), but which had the aspect of a cheerful quadruped wookiee — greeted us enthusiastically, almost as if they remembered my visit five years ago too. Ash and I found Deanna in the kitchen, introduced ourselves, and accepted a bottle of beer and a glass of wine respectively. We clinked glasses, and the disappointments and frustrations of the last few days evaporated.

That night we ate steak & fries at a little quasi-western place along the road called the Nugget, drank ourselves into a warm fuzzy place and blethered endlessly about the trip so far, about San Francisco and Sonoma and California, and even the Scottish real estate market. It was a great evening.

Back at the house, we sank into the soft, innumerable pillows of the guest room and I was glad for the ‘night off’ from the holiday. Tomorrow was LA, its infamous traffic and yet another hostel. But it could wait.

* Seriously, take a look at the map — nothing but shopping centres as far as the eye can see.

Marina was sufficiently unremarkable that not only have I forgotten my initial impressions of it, but I was also unmoved to record any of them in writing at the time. The one notable thing (quite literally, since it’s the only thing I did note down) which happened there came at the end of a frustrating trawl through all of the town’s hotels and motels to find that all but one of them was fully booked over Labor Day weekend.

We rolled into the Old Marina Inn at about 9 pm. It was the last place in town, a standard issue single storey motel of indeterminate vintage, and the receptionist at the second-last place in town had called ahead to reserve us a room lest we arrive to find that yet again someone else had pipped us to the post. The Inn’s owner, a little old Indian lady, asked us apologetically for $130 dollars for the room. This was an absolute fortune compared to anything we’d spent on a single night so far, and there wasn’t even a “continental” “breakfast” of chemo-muffins and filter coffee in the morning. We balked.

“That’s a hell of a lot,” I told her. “Is there any way at all you can come down a bit?” (From whatever it is you’re smoking, I thought to myself.)

“I am sorry, it’s a very busy weekend. We only have one room left.”

I sighed.

“I can give it to you for $120 plus tax, but that’s all I can do,” she conceded.

“Okay, we’ll take it. Thanks.” We didn’t have a lot of choice.

I was staring idly out the reception window as she recorded our details and fiddled with room keys when a pickup rolled up outside. The driver got out, a short, swarthy dude with sunglasses on (this was long after sunset, mind) and a ponytail. I could make out a woman in the passenger seat.

The driver stuck his head round the door. “You got a room for two hours?” he asked.

Ash and I glanced at each other, registering disbelief and amusement in equal measures.

“No, not tonight,” the owner replied. “We are full.”

“Nothing at all?” he pressed, “normally it’s cool to rent by the hour here.”

I could sense the waves of cringe emanating from the poor owner.

“No, I’m sorry, sir. We have nothing.”

No wonder the place was so expensive — rented by the hour, our one night stay from dusk till dawn could’ve netted her a small fortune.

We dumped our gear in the predictably chintzy and over-decorated room (it was not unlike a ’70s porn set) and headed out to find somewhere to eat. Just as predictably, there was nowhere decent open, and so out of stomach-growling necessity we wound up at a Taco Bell lurking at the end of a nearby strip mall. Ash was almost enthusiastic; I was not. We ordered a few bean tacos (the safest thing on the menu, I thought) and through some breakdown in what seemed to me to have been a fairly simple transaction we watched with increasing bemusement as the staff plonked down taco after taco.

Ash and I conferred quietly. “Should we say anything? I’m sure we ordered, what, three tacos, right? Why the fuck won’t they stop putting more of them on the tray?”

Eventually the production line came to a halt, and as a coup de grâce a tub of cheese-topped refried beans was plonked down among the final tally of six tacos. Beans in that sort of poundage no longer constitute the safe option.

We staggered to a plastic table with the tray creaking under the weight of its burden and ate our bean feast in the fluorescent glare of the lights, laughing quietly to ourselves all the while.

* * *

Our first destination the next day was Monterey. I have a tendency to throw around the phrase “just like Amity Island from Jaws” like it’s going out of fashion[*,†] but Monterey fits the bill so completely I may finally be able to retire that particular comparison. The sun shone, the rigging of the yachts and dinghies moored in the marina clinked gently in the breeze, and hordes of tourists wearing inadvisably revealing beach clothing swarmed all along the waterfront.

Monterey is the setting for Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, so after we’d milled around the pier for a while we jumped back in the car and drove out to have a look.

With hindsight, we should have realised that it was going to be a bit crap. Just as Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco had lost any vestiges of its past glories and replaced them with NFL merchandising shops and pirate-themed family restaurants, Cannery Row is now more like Souvenir Shop Row. Doc’s laboratory is still there somewhere, although I couldn’t find it, and wherever the vacant lot had once been, I’m pretty sure it’s vacant no longer: every bit of spare land is a car park, a restaurant or a souvenir shop.

We gave up and headed south towards Carmel, another affluent little town on the Monterey Peninsula, and were immediately caught up in the massive exodus of tourists heading home after Labor Day. It was biblically bad traffic. We spent a frustrating, mostly stationary hour trying to escape the gravitational pull of Carmel’s woefully inadequate roads and heaved a sigh of relief when we finally hit Highway 1 again, filling up with some much-needed petrol on the way out of town. We rolled the windows up, turned the AC back on and hit the gas.

Our hotel was a few blocks to the north of Market Street, on the boundary between Chinatown and the originally Italian area of North Beach, where the CBD’s concrete monoliths gave way to more traditional Victorian tenements and terraces. The snappily-named Hotel North Beach was a grand old dame in the midst of a transformation into a slicker, more modern form, but some remaining period features like a wooden telephone booth and an old, boarded-up reception office on the first floor landing gave it an offhandedly noirish feel. The lack of an en suite in our room dated it in a less endearing way but still, it was a reasonable enough place for a few days. I entertained notions of the place in its interwar heyday, its poky rooms home to Chandleresque dupes and femmes fatales stealing furtive visits to the communal bathrooms as the footsteps of the house detective disappeared around the corner.

But I digress.

For the rest of that first day and night after we’d checked in we pottered aimlessly around the city centre, expecting that we’d stumble on some quintessential SF tourist attraction that we’d recognise instantly. The odd thing was that we failed to see anything familiar at all, and I’m still not sure whether this was just our ignorance or whether it’s something more intrinsic to the city itself. Yes, there are a few iconic, self-contained edifices like Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge which are intimately associated with the place, but I can’t help but think that the city’s real attractions are more nebulous: entire neighbourhoods like Haight-Ashbury, Nob Hill or Pacific Heights, or even just the geography of the place, the steep, narrow streets of Bullitt and Vertigo. Market Street and the city centre in general are sadly a little anonymous because of this. Grand, but bland.

In the event, we grabbed an enormous slice of pizza and a pint of foamy lager in a little pizzeria at the edge of the CBD and perched on stools by the open window, watching the last few office workers head home out of the city. At a loss for anything obvious to do, we pottered around randomly and eventually came to rest in a cinema to watch District 9 and had an early night.

The next day I was a little more enthused, having spent a bit of time in the morning reading up on some of those tourist attractions we’d singularly failed to find the day before. Ash wanted to do some shopping so when she headed south for Market Street I walked north to the Coit Tower, a monument to San Francisco’s firefighters up on Telegraph Hill, then over to Lombard Street to take a few pictures. The top of the street’s zig-zag section was packed with tourists perched precariously on walls and railings, trying to get a good photo, and coincided with a cable car stop which brought more people every few minutes. Rental cars carrying still more sightseers formed a solid procession down the street itself, edging gingerly down through the sharp bends, and the whole thing was dangerously close to a critical mass of cliché. I half expected us all to spontaneously combust in a messy tourist explosion.

Walking back to meet up with Ash I stumbled on the small but perfectly formed Cable Car Museum, and we set off together to see if we could get on a tour out to Alcatraz that afternoon.

We could not.

Today was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend and each and every one of the half-hourly tours was booked solid until Monday. Put out, we walked up along the quayside Fisherman’s Wharf instead, a row of piers which had achieved tourism enlightenment: whatever they had once been famous for, there was absolutely no trace of it left; instead, it was occupied entirely by things like Disney stores and coffee carts. The only indications that it might once have been renowned for its fishing trade was the preponderance of seafood restaurants and the fact that it happened to be right on the bay.

Happily, we found a cheap-ass water taxi tour which took us all around the piers of Fisherman’s Wharf for something like four bucks each. (It reminded me of taking a €1.30 commuter gondola across the Grand Canal, where the gondoliers roll their eyes in exasperation when half of their passengers turn round and take the same gondola straight back to the other side, just so they — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘we’ — can tick it off their Venetian to do list.) The little boat puttered out towards Alcatraz, then edged slowly round the pontoons of Pier 39 where the sea lions congregate in a smelly, honking mass, and finally dropped us off right back where we started. We grabbed a couple of overpriced drinks on the balcony of one of the innumerable seafood restaurants and watched the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge. The day had been successfully turned around.

The next day Ash wanted to visit Haight-Ashbury, a bus ride away to the southwest. It was filled with vintage clothes shops and ‘smoking’ emporiums hawking bongs, figurines of reefer-smoking aliens, and bongs shaped like reefer-smoking aliens. It was all a bit tawdry, and was one of the first places we’d come across other than the deep, dark woods of backcountry Oregon where I felt just a little unsafe. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but there was an undercurrent of poverty and edginess (and not the good kind) which made me a bit jumpy.

We called it a day after an hour or so and took the bus back to the hotel. Sitting in the room, we debated what to do: neither of us was particularly entranced by San Francisco thus far and we had nothing more exciting planned for that evening, and after humming and hawing for a while we decided to leave that day. From all I’ve heard people say about it, SF is a great place to live in but the few touristy days we spent exploring it weren’t enough to keep us there for another. We checked out, picked up the car and headed south on the 101 through a grey, misty afternoon. The cloud eventually cleared, and we drove on under a wedge of blue sky which crept up from the horizon until we caught the tail end of a sunny evening. It was good to be moving again.

* See, I couldn’t even muster a marginally witty title. That’s how little I know about SF.

All this is to say that for a second time, crossing into the Golden State was a disappointingly anticlimactic experience. A simple welcome sign marked the border; the scrubby, rocky landscape that stretched out before us and the sun which beat down upon it were indistinguishable from the Oregon side. There was no sense of occasion.

If I might give my rose-tinted enthusiasm free reign for a moment, I am appalled at this oversight. Where’s the Hollywood bluster, the Gold Rush swagger, the knowledge that the world can visit California and come away realising that the state is a world unto itself? More specifically, where is the life-size Terminator model bidding us welcome in a grating metallic voice? Where, exactly, is the somersaulting cheerleading squad spelling out the word ‘Californ-I-A’ with the flash of pearly whites and the shake of a pom pom? I wanted something, anything to give us some clue that we weren’t in Kansas (or indeed Oregon) anymore.

But there was nothing.

Surely, at the very least, the welcome sign could display something other than a crushingly literal “Welcome to California”. Can no-one at the tourist commission marshal a thought-provoking quote, or a pithy statistic? Here you go, guys, these are on me:

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.Edward Abbey

California: richer than 96% of countries in the world, and loving it.California Legislative Analyst’s Office (paraphrasing)

You’re welcome.

Just after the state line we were flagged down at a border post and asked to declare any fruit, vegetables or meat we might have been bringing in (to keep out invasive insect and plant species). We assured the border cop that we weren’t smuggling bananas in from Oregon and headed south. Mount Shasta, still streaked with snow, loomed large in the windscreen soon after we’d crossed the border, and the I-5 took us right into its shadow through a pass at 3,000 feet. Mount Shasta is, of course, where the not-at-all-mythical Lemurians live, having emigrated there from their ancestral home of Lemuria, the not-at-all-mythical lost continent which once bridged the Indian Ocean. The Lemurians are said to have a sixth sense, an extra-sensory perception conferred by “a walnut-sized organ that protrudes from the center of their foreheads.” Just to be on the safe side, we didn’t pick any hitchhikers.

The road took us south through the small but characterful town of Yreka and then onto Shasta Lake where we stopped to take some photos of the enormous Shasta Dam, both happily Lemurian-free despite their names. Perhaps the Lemurians are understandably hydrophobic, what with their apocalyptic submersion of their native continent some time conveniently before the dawn of recorded history.

As we headed further south, the mountains peeled off to the east and west and left us in the centre of a massive plain of olive groves. The land stayed like this for what felt like an eternity, and we eventually gave up and stopped for the night in the small town of Williams, about a hundred miles north of San Francisco.

What a hole.

Williams is notable for precisely nothing. Like Newport back in Oregon, again the streets were deserted other than for the occasional gun-rack-equipped pickup truck tooling slowly by, its driver craning his neck to eyeball the out-of-towners. We got a room at a Motel 6 next to what appeared to be a chemical plant, ate a colossal, starchy meal in Granzella’s, one of the town’s two non-franchise restaurants, and watched a True Blood marathon until we we were tired enough to fall asleep despite the rumblings of passing semi-trailers.

Our only real objective for the next day was to reach San Francisco and book into our hotel (note the luxurious absence of an ‘s’ for a change), but the closure of the Bay Bridge directly to the south caused us to take a detour west into the Napa Valley and then Sonoma County: wine country, and wine country’s less famous sibling. The Fidel and Raúl Castro of Californian wine-producing regions, if you will. Picking a winery almost at random, we parked the car and wandered into the reception. A bronzed, middle-aged woman greeted us briskly.

“Hi. How are y’all doing? What can I do for you?”

“Uh, I’m not sure, really.”

“Okay…”

“We just stopped because we thought it was the done thing. What normally happens at these places?”

“We do tours, and you can taste some of our wines.”

“Ah, gotcha. Sounds good.”

And so our guide took us for a walk, relating to us the history of the Cline Winery as we wandered in the sun through the collection of buildings dotting the property. It turned out that the owner, Fred Cline, is the grandson of a certain Mr Jacuzzi (of, you know, jacuzzi fame) and had bought the winery with money inherited from his grandfather. The winery apparently specialises in Zinfandels, but disappointingly, given its owner’s family tree, does not extend to making bubbly at all.

Slightly bizarrely, and providing evidence that eccentricity is alive and well among the moneyed classes, the winery also boasts a building housing the California Missions Museum. This is a collection of 21 scale models of the Catholic missions which used to dot California’s Camino Real, made for the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition and subsequently rescued from obscurity by the owner’s wife. Our guide showed us in, waved hello to the volunteer manning the desk, and waited with just a hint of impatience as we stopped to read the information displayed at each model. I was fascinated, but not by the models themselves.

“This is pretty weird, eh? I mean, they’re nice models and everything, but what made her want to open a museum dedicated to them, and only them?”

She smiled a brittle smile, clearly chafing at the need to showcase her employer’s personal mania. We dutifully snapped a couple of pictures, including one of the mission in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and said goodbye to the guy on the desk. He wilted slightly as silence descended once more on his miniature Catholic empire.

Back in the main building, Ash and I propped up the bar as our guide poured us shot after shot of Cline Cellars’ finest (“I’m getting a grapey sort of mouthfeel. Maybe I should try another”), and we stumbled away with a bottle each of white and red. Marginally tipsy, we perched on the low stone wall surrounding the car park and basked in the sun until the buzz had worn off. Next up: San Francisco.

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!