Driving for Loons

The American Southwest: Too many miles in too few days

(Click on Thumbnails for the big picture) 

It would make for better jokes to say that I only found out that I was going to have to do all the driving on the day I went to hire the car, but it didn't work out quite like that. Kevin mentioned it in an email about three days before I was due to fly. It now turns out that his belief that he couldn't drive in the US was based on a duff handout from UCSD, but since he hadn't got an International Driving Licence before leaving home the point is probably moot. He couldn't drive because he didn't have an appropriate driving licence, even if it wasn't the one he thought he needed.

Up to that point driving an insane distance in a very short time seemed quite sensible. I figured that Kevin and I could split the driving - three hours on and three hours off or something like that and so cover many miles despite being limited to 55 miles an hour. Now I was going to have to do the lot. Hoo-Boy.

Day 0 - Thursday 15 January 98

It takes a while but in the end I find the cheapest Car Hire place in the San Diego yellow pages. $129.95 to hire a small car with unlimited mileage for a week. They'll even send a driver to pick me up. Which is good, because I haven't the faintest idea where they're based. Which was bad since it meant that when it came to returning the car I had next to damn all idea where it was meant to go. It was also a bad because I had to stick in the flat for most of the morning waiting for the Raphael (I think that was his name, but it was probably spelt more Mexican) instead of wandering up to Starbucks for a grande mocha dusted with cinnamon, quite the most civilised way to start an American morning

It was about two hours before Raphael actually appeared, and twenty minutes after that, there I was in the office of South Western Rental filling in forms for a man called Shaun. The International driving license, obtained with some difficulty in the UK, is something they've never seen before, their computer doesn't want to accept the number of digits a UK phone number's got, or my zip code having letters in it. The usual stuff.

A car is waiting in front of the office. Darkish green, slightly metallic. It is about as small as anything being driven in the US. At one point we do spot something smaller, a tiny jeepish thing, but it's being pulled by an RV and not driven, so I say it doesn't count. I said 'driven'.^. It's called an Aspire, but it looks to me like a Ford Fiesta. Since it's America it is of course an automatic. The South Western clearly took my 'a small car' to heart. As I am signing the final documents Shaun asks where I'm going (any money you like says he was expecting the answer to be Disneyland) and is a bit taken aback when I say that we want to go to the Grand Canyon. To him this is a tiny urban runabout, not the sort of car you drive a thousand miles in! Unlimited apparently means unlimited in Southern California! He checks with his boss and agrees that we can have the car provided that we are to get it back into California if it breaks down out of state, and that we pay 30 cents a mile for everything over 1500. This seems OK, the car's so new that it hasn't even got license plates on, and 1500 miles sounds like a lot. So he makes sure that the oil is OK and hands over the keys.

I sit down, try to get used to the fact that the driver's seat is on the wrong side and so using the rear view mirror involves looking the wrong way. I can cope with this if I concentrate. I start the engine. The car will not go into gear. Just won't do it. Something's stopping the gear stick from going into drive. Shaun pops out - I've left my credit card on the desk, and explains that to get an automatic into gear you need to have your foot on the brake pedal. It makes sense - no clutch, but it's the first time I've driven an automatic, so how was I to know? Somehow I've neglected to tell Shaun that I've never driven on the right. I figure it would only upset him.

And off onto real American roads, with real American drivers. And immediately take a wrong turn. This is what you get for not asking 'what's the best way back onto the interstate?' I wind up driving under the interstate and parallel with it for a while, past the sort of houses that always feature in San Francisco car chases, until I find an on-ramp, and from there it's easy. There's a slight problem when it comes to getting into Kevin's apartment block, for which you apparently need to press a button on a radio tranmitter thing that lives on your keyring, and as the guest I don't have. I lurk in front of the gates for a while, until someone comes out, at which point I slip through the open gate.

And at last I go to get my coffee.

Day 1 - Friday 16 January 98

Today's destination is Las Vegas. Not because we really want to go and shove money into slot machines, and I wouldn't know how to start on a roulette table, but because there's a brand new Star Trek ride happening at the Las Vegas Hilton. And because it's a good first base - only a few hours from Zion National Park.

I'm all for setting off at first light, but Kevin feels that we should have a reservation, at least for Vegas. He plonks himself down with a guidebook and starts phoning round. Takes him some time, but in the end he finds a twin bedded room in the Fiesta Hotel and Casino for a not too ghastly price. I still don't know if this was unnecessary caution. I would have been happy to get out there and look around - surely even a Friday night won't have filled every hotel or motel room in Vegas in January? But it makes him happy, and we've plenty of time and all that.

We hit the road at about 8.45, heading east towards Interstate 15. I-15 snakes from San Diego north, skirting LA, through the desert to Vegas and then on to Salt Lake City. Might go on further than that, but I didn't see a signpost for anything beyond Salt Lake. Since we didn't get closer than 250 miles to Salt Lake City this shouldn't be surprising. The road surfaces in San Diego Country are horrible - slabs of concrete that set up a juddering rhythm in the car. The quality of America roads varies immensely. Some of them are wonderful, some are naff. None are quite as bad as York's, not even in deserted stretches of high desert. Speed limits also vary a lot. 55 is standard with 65 on freeways, but we encountered a single carriageway in Utah with a 75 limit. Pragmatism no doubt - no point sending patrol cars out to stop speeders bleeding miles from anywhere.

And a lot of America is miles from anywhere. We just don't have anything to compare with these truly wide open spaces. And they just get wider and opener at the trip goes on. The first stage of the journey is nothing special, all semi-urban America, with the only point of interest being Mount Palomar, where they have an observatory. I think it's the place that found a planet orbiting either 70 Virginis or 51 Pegusi, but can't be sure. After a few hours though we get past Barstow and into the high desert, which is just bleak. Mile after mile of scrubby bushes on a flat plain, punctuated only by billboards advertising Las Vegas casinos. At first this seems a hell of a place to start advertising - it's over 200 miles to Vegas, but then who travels this road? Pilgrims, either to the Temple at Salt Lake or the temple of mammon that is Las Vegas. There are no other destinations. The land is empty.

A little after Baker we stop at a rest area for me to ease the ache in my left contact. A man is selling silver jewellery under a sign forbidding the selling of anything in a federal rest area. The view of distant mountains is breath taking, at least by European standards. Contact refreshed we drive on. The views continue to be superb, and owing to the difference in driving habits on American roads there's actually enough time to observe them. We all know that the limits in the UK are 70, and that nobody bothers to obey them. You have to spend half your time scanning your rear view mirror for mad fellers in black mercs pulling 90, people drive too damn close and after a while your head begins to hurt. America's not like that. It's almost relaxing. Even if it on the wrong side of the road.

You can tell California-Nevada border quite easily because there, in the middle of nowhere, are two dirty great casinos, for the people who can't even be bothered to drive the final hour to Vegas. We stop at the stylised Western town, complete with rollercoaster for a burger. The one on the other side is built to look like two Mississippi riverboats at a landing stage. Burger dealt with we carry on down the road to Vegas.

We pass a freight train pulling about 90 cars away from Vegas. Everything's big out here. Vegas ultimately heaves into view. Gridlocked on the Vegas strip Kevin has time to work out here we are, and hence where we should be heading.. The Las Vegas Hilton. Central Las Vegas is every bit as ghastly as it looks on film.

The Las Vegas Hilton is newly home to one of those virtual rollercoaster rides. I don't really know if a correct term's been agreed yet. You go through a decent collection of Star Trek props into a lift from which you're taken to the transporter room of the USS Enterprise. There's an impressive transporter effect: I don't know how they did it, some combination of subsonics and electrostatics probably, but it genuinely feels like something's happening. And when the lights come back on the walls, the floor and ceiling have all changed. You get lead onto the bridge of the Enterprise where it is explained that you've been kidnapped by Klingons and the only way to save the universe is if you all go back through a spacewarp in a shuttle. There's a turbolift malfunction on the way there (and a very impressive one at that - it did feel as though the lift was falling) and finally everyone is herded into a shuttle which has to dogfight half a dozen Klingon spaceships and finally crash land in the Hotel's lift shafts. All done with a flight simulator kicking this way and that and video projection screens over about half the shuttle. Not high art, but fun enough if you're in the area. Good Star Trek related giftshop was well if that's your cup of tea.

And then to find the Fiesta. Turns out to be pretty far from the huddle of main Vegas hotel's and things. Great big flat low place. Vague Mexican styling to it, but mainly given over to slot machines, slot machines, keno (a lottery game) and some more slot machines. Tacky as anything. We discover that the car's rear left indicator isn't working. And in America left is the important one. This puts a kibosh on cruising the Vegas strip at night looking at all the neon. Dunno if we really missed something valuable, but it's not really my scene anyway.

The room is good. Very solid beds and a TV that shows 'The Simpsons'. I've driven 330 miles, so I figure that I'm entitled to collapse for a while. Kevin produces a screwdriver from somewhere are wanders down to the car to see if the lightbulb's gone or it's something more difficult. It turns out that the bulb's blown. We start to wonder about food.

The Fiesta has about six restaurants running from fast food to steakhouse. The most interesting is the semi-authentic looking Mexican (not tex-mex) place. Which naturally comes with a 45 minute wait for a table. They give us a pager that will vibrate when a table's free so we start thinking about lightbulbs again. We try the local gas stations to see if they have any spares. One has a hole in it's bulb rack that looks just the right size for what we need. In Las Vegas even gas stations have slot machines. We figure that we're best off finding a parts shop the next morning.

We wind up in the bar, reminding ourselves why American beer has such a poor reputation. A far better choice is the frozen Margarita, which is nice, but unfamiliar. I am intellectually aware of the fact that it contains alchol, but can't taste it. And if I can't taste it then I don't feel comfortable drinking it before driving. I can't tell how much is going into my system, and so can't tell if I've had too much. We get talking to C.J. a Vegas social worker, and her father Mr J. who lives in New York, but winters in Vegas, and wind up trying to justify British warm beer for a while before the buzzer goes off. I don't think we had them convinced.

I tell you the Mexican restaurant in the Fiesta provided the best damn Mexican food I have ever eaten. From tortilla chips with 26 different salsa to dip in them to very huge main courses and all that for under 20 bucks. That's the good thing about Vegas. A major restaurant in a hotel in the UK will be making money for the hotel. The equivalent in Vegas will be just there to make sure you don't leave the hotel, because when you do that you might be tempted to try another hotel's slot machines. And slot machines is where the profit is - not hotel rooms, not food. So if you don't play the machines you get a far better room or meal than you'd expect for the money.

Soundtrack for the day: LA Woman by the Doors

Day 2 - Saturday 17 January 1998

Finding a lightbulb is pretty easy. There's a part store down the road from the Fiesta, so we check out (without putting a nickel into a slot machine) and drive there. Getting served takes what seems like ages, hopelessly vague new starter on the checkout, but then the bulb is replaces, the light lights and away we go.

About 30 miles after Vegas you get the top lefthand corner of Arizona, which mainly seems to house a gas station and a 'Welcome to Arizona' station, and then it's starting to get more mountainous and into Utah, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints and several bits of impressive geology. We're initially headed for Zion, source of the Virgin river. There's an astounding bit of road on the way there, and for the life of me I'm not sure exactly which state it's in. I-15 follows the Virgin river for quite a way and at one point streams straight towards a mountain range at 70 miles an hour. Suddenly the road starts to climb into a gorge enlarged in the mountains. One minute you're in flat open desert, the next it's in the heart of the mountain. Such a contrast.

One of the amazing things about this part of the world, and there are so many, is the flatness. Not the flatness of the road, that tends to be pretty much up and down like a yo-yo, but the flatness of the mountains. All these impressive bits of geology just rise out of the plain and stop. At a perfectly uniform height. Were these flat toped mesas once atolls poking out of a primordial sea? Did they once have some softer stone on them that was eroded by winds and rain? A geologist would probably know, but I'm no geologist.

Zion National Park, close to the town of St George, UT, is small by American standards and has some gorgeous mountain scenery. The visitor's centre has a noticeboard up showing the 6 questions most commonly asked of the park rangers - who genuinely do look like the ranger from Yogi Bear. Utah is in a different time zone so 'Q: Is that the correct time A: Yes' comes first, followed immediately by 'Q:Where are the restrooms A: Outside, on your left, under the Restrooms sign'. You get the impression that the rangers have been asked everything before. Unlike the Grand Canyon, where all the roads and visitor facilities are at the top, Zion's access is at the bottom of a smallish canyon. You can climb up into the mountains beyond, and should I ever win the lottery, there's a fair chance I will. Instead we drive slowly up the river until the road ends, look around briefly at the top, take some pictures and drive slowlyback down again. Two deer graze fifty metres from the road. The Canyon bottom is forested, probably a really good place to camp in high summer, but now we pass the occasional pile of grubby snow.

There are a number of walks in the park, running from 30 minute trips to 5 hour expeditions. I like the look of the Canyon View Trail, which is helpfully on the way to the next park we intend to visit, Bryce Canyon. The road snakes up the side of the mountain, and the car for the first time doesn't seem to be enjoying it. We're pretty high up already and climbing pretty steeply. The automatic gearbox doesn't make it as easy to control the gearing as a manual would.

The road goes through a tunnel, 1.1 miles long and completed in 1930. Was it built to allow Model T Ford drivers to visit Zion and Bryce together? There doesn't seem much other need for it. There's a carpark on the far side of the tunnel, where we park and start to follow a footpath along the side of the canyon wall. I've said before that views were spectacular, but the views keep getting better. Creeping along the side of the rock, sometimes in underhangs, sometimes by sheer drops we finally made it to a flat point from which you could see the entire canyon spread out before you.

Alas we didn't really have time to savour it properly. The plan was to visit Zion in the morning and Bryce in the afternoon. What with the time zone changing it was about three before we made it back to the car. Pausing only to throw a snowball at Kevin (it's a rule: First snow of the winter, toss a snowball at someone. Unknown sea: Swim in it. Surely everyone has these rules?) we set off down a windy road leading towards the flat fertile land of southern Utah. Southern Utah is flat and fertile, but only in comparison to Arizona. There are trees, and farms that appear to grow crops, and real cows, not skinny desert things.

It's about five in the evening before we get to Bryce Canyon National Park, and we have a dilemma facing us. It will soon be too dark to walk in the park. If we want to walk in the park it will be hours of driving before we're even close to the Grand Canyon, probably we won't be there until getting on for dark if we stay the night at Bryce and look at it properly in the morning. Since the car's got to be back in less than a week and Kevin's got to be back at work before that we don't really have the time to take things at the speed I'd like. The dilemma is eased by the fact that there are no rangers in the hut, and so no-one's going to charge me money to go in there. We drive into the silent park and figure that we get a chance to look at it, and if we feel that it's worth the extra day we stay the night.

Bryce is beautiful. And very different to Zion. Where Zion is in the heart of a canyon, and so sheltered, Bryce is essentially a ridge looking down onto a canyon. And an amazing canyon it is. Zion is composed of a red sandstone, Bryce is a shocking unreal pink. If Captain Kirk had rocks that colour to contend with, you'd laugh at them. It took about ten miles of driving into the park before we saw any of this though. Until then it was just forest, with added snow. And forest, with added snow is good, but there's a lot of it about. Then you come around a curve and to your left it this amazing wall of canyon, rocks shrimp pink, looking like dribbled sand castles like the ones you made on the beach as a kid, or they make cathedrals out of in Barcelona. I'd say it was spectacular, but damnit, everything spectacular. I'm getting bored with the word. <looks in Thesaurus. Dramatic. Doesn't give the full effect.>

Beyond that there is a natural bridge, an arch cut by stream and wind into the living rock. A spur of rock once stuck out ahead of the path of a small stream. The stream won. A plaque tries hard to explain that while the thing is call 'Natural Bridge' it is not A natural bridge, since A natural bridge is carved with wind alone, and here a stream helped. Some fatuous eejit must have tramped about the south-west making up definitions like that. Probably the Surveyor's Office were desparate to get rid of him. 'Elmer. Why don't you get on that mule and go out into the desert and catalogue rock formations. Someday we'll have tourists out there, and if all we can say is "it's a rock" then we'll look pretty stupid.' And off goes Elmer, and the office is spared from Friday afternoons having to separate the box of paperclips into different sizes. Elmer probably got the best of the bargin.

Having seen the pink walls and the natural bridge and the snow, we feel that we're not going to get a lot more out of Bryce. For one, very important, thing it is bitterly cold. Bryce Canyon is about 8800 feet above sea level and is covered in snow. Even if we stay and walk in to tomorrow all the trails are covered in snow and we can't see were to tread. In the spring it's probably real nice. But in mid January I'd rather be in the big granddaddy of canyons.

As the light fails we start to leave Bryce and come across deer. Four of them are crossing the road directly in front of the car. These aren't big deer, I don't think the South West has anything we'd think of as big, about the size of a calf. We don't open the doors and they just calmly walk by and try to graze the dry grass at the base of the pine trees.

When they have passed we drive on, past a jogger in t-shirt and hot pants. I slow down to pass her, not to stalk, but if she has broken down and is running for help to give her a chance to wave. She doesn't. Must have been running in the snow for the run of it. And they say I'm odd. Past the airfield, where parked helicopters wait for spring and tourists to show the pink cliffs from the air. Can a helicopter even carry people at this height? Obviously, or they wouldn't be there, but it's surprising.

In the dark we speed south, towards Arizona. Occasionally a pickup comes up behinds us, it's lights, even on dipped beam, shining full in the face. No-one in Utah drives a car - it's an off road people carrier for the posh types, and a pickup for the normal folks. Occasionally we catch a flash of rock formations at the side of the road, but it's too dark to see them properly. I'm conscious of the fact that rural America does seem to close down for the night very early. I don't want to drive for too long, but neither do I want to stop too early. Kanab, Utah, presents itself around 7, but I'm inclined to push on that little bit further. Arizona's just a few more miles, and in Arizona there's a chance of getting a drink, Utah with its Mormon sensibilities makes it hard to buy beer, even ghastly American beer.

Just across the boarder, and you can tell that you're just across the boarder because suddenly there's a roadhouse with a neon sign screaming 'LIQUOR', is the town of Freedonia. To understand exactly why I stopped there you need to know a little movie history. The Marx Brothers were probably the greatest screen comedians of the early talkie era. One of their greatest films, Duck Soup, concerns the mythical Central European country of Freedonia. If we stay here we'll at least be able to get some postcards, 'Welcome to Freedonia' with which amuse some of our friends.

The Grand Canyon Motel, Freedonia, Az, costs less than half the Vegas hotel, and the TV has more channels. To be fair, there's no swimming pool, but the beds are hard and the room is warm. And that's what counts. They also have a friendly cat, and I say no evidence of a cat in Vegas. There only seems to be one restaurant in Freedonia, and only the one horse now that I think about it. The restaurant is almost empty, it's 8.30 and only one other table is occupied, and they seem to have finished their food and be chatting to the waitress rather than eating. The food is good, and the waitress chats merrily away about her hobby of holding up tourists for beer, how it's a nice place that's been in loads of movies, but they don't make many westerns these days and so on. Alas they have no beer. There's a Baptist Church across the way and apparently they'd disapprove. Kevin confuses her completely by asking for hot tea with milk. You can hear the cog wheels turning over as she says 'I guess we could put it in the microwave'. Fortunately whoever is in the kitchen has come across this outlandish idea before, and even has a dinky little one person teapot in which Kevin can dangle a tea bag. I stick to coffee, it being simpler.

No-one in Freedonia sells 'Freedonia' postcards.

Soundtrack for the day: A Million Miles Away, by David Byrne. No idea why, but it and Hanging Upside Down, both from the album Uh-Oh keep running through my head.

Day 3 - Sunday 18 January 1998

I often wake early in a strange place and this is no exception. At about 7 in the morning I'm showered and up. I take a look outside and find that the car is covered in ice. It's not snowed, but it has frozen quite hard. After the snow all over Bryce this shouldn't be a great surprise, but it is. Before Kevin wakes I walk a little way out of town. Another of these immense flat mesas fills the western horizon, like something straight of a cowboy flick or a Marlboro ad. Given the number of cowboy flicks and Marlboro ads shot in the area there's probably a good reason for this.

When I'm back Kevin is just getting dressed and I start pouring bottles of cold water over the car. It washes off the frost and promptly freezes into sheet ice. We start the engine and it eventually melts. There seems to be no way of returning the key to the motel office. There's a sign up saying that they are open from 4pm to 10pm and no sign of a letter box, though I could have been looking in the wrong place. Eventually I wind up leaving the keys in the unlocked room. We actually see another guest as we leave. Thought we were the only ones.

There are two routes from Bryce Canyon to the Grand Canyon, both of which involve route US-89. For some reason the Americas decided to have two of them, one of which goes West at Kanab, spends most of it's time running through Utah before cutting South towards Marble Canyon. The other heads South for a while longer, passes through Freedonia, has the turn off for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon (8600 feet, closed in winter because of the snow), and finally joins up with it's namesake at Marble Canyon. Quite why they couldn't think of another number I don't know.

In going to Freedonia we're rather committed to the southern route. This is fine as far as we're concerned. There's still quite a way to go to get to the open South Rim, and Kevin has calculated that this route saves us about 7 miles. He does this sort of thing. After a while of scrubby desert flanked by crumbling red cliffs we come to the Kaibab National Forest, an enormous great pine forest reserve thing that encloses the Grand Canyon and reaches most of the way to California beyond it, start to climb again and begin to realise that there's not so very much petrol in the tank.

That's OK, there's a gas station shown on the map Kevin's used for his calculations, where the turn off for the North Rim is. Perceptive readers may be going Uh-oh at this point, and they'd be right to. We get there, it seems to be deserted. Obvious really when you think about it. If the North Rim's closed then this road won't get most of it's tourist traffic. And if most of it's tourist traffic is missing, why open the gas station? Get rich off the summer profits instead and spend winter in Aruba. That's what I'd do. So we drive on. There is a gas station marked about 25 miles on, and there should be enough gas to make that. No problem.

When you leave the Kaibab National Forest on US-89 you are presented with the Vermilion Cliffs. I am not quite sure why these cliffs are vermilion, since last time I looked that was a kind of green. These cliffs are a striking terracotta red. And huge. And beautiful. And huge. So huge that it's hard to describe them in words. We're used to cliffs. They're things that you find at the sea-side. They look good for about 2 miles or so. Here they are 30 miles or more, a single rock formation. Early in our trip along the cliffs a twin engined plane seems to attempt a lunatic manoeuvre. It dives for the foot of the cliffs and then pulls up to rise sharply in front of them. It looks insanely dangerous from a distance, and should have been pretty good from inside the plane. We later pass Marble Canyon airfield, it probably came from there.

About five miles on, we pass a more lunatic sight yet. A man is running along the road. This is the desert. The middle of no-where. Twist your ankle here buddy and you could be in deep do-do. He doesn't seem to have any water or food with him, yet seems to know what he's doing, running at the sort of steady even pace that can cover a lot of ground in a surprisingly short time. And if I was going to run across Arizona, I'd rather be doing it at this time of year, not in the scorching summer sun.

The next gas station has a sign up claiming that it's closed for winter and will be open again in mid February. Helpfully it points out that gas is available 10 miles in the way we're going and 25 miles back. Praying that they've got a better idea of what's available ahead than they have behind we press on. I am pleased to say that they had. At Marble Canyon a round Navajo fills the tank. Thank you Lord.

There are two bridges across the Colorado River in Arizona. One of these is at the California border. The other is at Marble Canyon. There's not a bad view to the river from across the bridge, but I miss the turn off to the car park from which you can look at it properly. Anyway, it's the actual capital G, capital C Grand Canyon we're here for, not the river that formed it. South of the Colorado is the Navajo Reservation, a dry empty space full of scrub and dotted with roadside stalls selling Indian Rugs and jewellery. Actually mainly filled with empty stalls that might be selling jewellery at different times of the year. There are school bus stops out here in the middle of no-where. What ghastly hour of the morning to kids have to get up in the morning to meet the bus?

Kevin, eyes focussed on his map of Arizona, claims that there's a road coming off that will lead to dinosaur tracks. We're conscious of the fact that we've not got much leeway in our 1500 miles (ball park calculations hadn't included the Bryce Canyon side-show) but we agree that your actual dinosaur tracks are worth 30 cents a mile. Well his map might have shown it, but we never saw anything that might have actually been that road. What we do see is a hawk. It's grey on top with a paler belly, slightly stripy, hovering above the side of the road. I think it must have been a Peregrine Falcon, something I've never seen in the wild in the UK.

Eventually we find an Indian Store that's open. Kevin spots a nice little rug that will fit on his boat and it a little horrified to find that it's not $9.00 but $900. He picks a cheaper one. There's quite a lot of nice silver jewellery, inset with local stone. And some very ugly belt buckles. Not to mention the scorpions set in resin. Nice if you like that sort of thing and I for one don't.

Soon after the Indian Store we come to the turn off to the Grand Canyon. You can tell that you must be approaching a major tourist event because we see our first car in 400 miles. Sure there have been pickups and the like, but no cars until now.

Oh God, I'm probably going to have to use the S word again. I can't get around it. You come up towards the Grand Canyon catching glimpses of the Little Colorado Canyon. Which, placed in Britain (can we trade them Slough?) would be an astounding landmark. Here it's good, but it's only a taster for what's to come. The Grand Canyon. You've all seen pictures. They don't do it justice. They couldn't do it justice. Nothing could. It's too big. Shortly after entering the National Park there's the first of the giftshops, here built into a 1932 replica of a c.1200 Indian watchtower that might have been built by the now extinct Indians that used to live in these parts.

It's astounding to think that this could have been built by Indians, people I can't help but think of in wigwams, people without the technology to work metal. Now I grant you that the Indians in this bit of America weren't the wigwam types, preferring to live in devastatingly fashionable square blocky houses half way up hillsides. But I don't know if they ever developed metalworking technology. I also know, of course, that it's terribly wrong to call these people Indians, and you should call them Native Americans or some such, but I'm sorry. I started thinking of them as Indians in my youth, and that's what went in. If I called them Anazazi, which would be the correct term, though probably spelt wrong, would you have the faintest idea what I was talking about?

Still, back to the building: It's built out of bricks of local stone, circular, three stories high. Inside there are balconies with an open space in the middle of each floor. There are stairs running from one floor to another, but I suspect ladders would be more authentic. It's a damned impressive structure. Easily as impressive a bit of engineering as any of the castles scattering Britain. And the view from the top is at least as impressive.

We spend the afternoon ranging the top of the Canyon. There are ways down, there are even maniacs who can travel from the Rim to the River and back in 4 hours. But they won't do it in winter. Of the three trails we find signposted, two are under snow, so we can't see where to start. The final one, the famous Bright Angel Trail, ridden daily by mule riders, is clearly defined, but instead of snow it has ice. Taking serious care, and treading where possible in then places where warm mule shit has melted the ice I make my way a little down the trail, but Kevin's boots are pretty awful and he can't get any grip. Climbing down an icy path on a cliff face solo, even in decent boots, even with mule shit making it a little easier is a really good way to die horribly, and it would be a shame to do that. Especially since I'm the only one that can drive the car and if I did twist my ankle or something like that then we'd be in a bit of mess.

Among the many things that make the Grand Canyon astounding is the fact that it's never the same. It goes on for tens of miles, and each time you stop and look at it there are different things to seem. It's no 'more' than 4.5 million years old, which is incredible given the size of the thing. The Colorado isn't big river, not when you look at the scar it's cut on the landscape. One day I'll return. March would be the best time. Trek a tent into the Canyon and camp by the river. Before it gets too hot. Really enjoy the scenery and its splendid isolation.

We wait for sunset. It you are ever in the Canyon do not leave before dark. Slowly the shadows creep across the rocks and they change colour in the dying of the day. Nothing man made could be this beautiful.

When it is fully dark we drive away. Easier to do in the snow, without it there would be an awful temptation to stay for just another day. Kip in the car, shower at the campsight. Just a little more basking the glories of nature. But the trail will just be a terrible temptation tomorrow so we might as well get going and deliver Kevin back to his work.

Fifty miles south of the Grand Canyon is the one and a half horse town or Williams. The first motel there is clean and cheap and even has a TV that shows new episodes of the Simpsons. The Mexican restaurant is good, if pricey - the food's not, but the beer apparently doubles in price if you're sat at a table. I know the bar prices were less. Tonight's 'hot tea with milk' comes as a full mug of milk and a full mug of just boiled water to steep a bag in.

Tomorrow's the long drive home. 500 miles still to go.

Soundtrack: For some reason, none.

Day 4 - Monday 19 January 1998

Before setting off from Williams we mooch back up towards the Mexican to have a look at the trains in the railway station. Williams used to be a stop on the Santa Fe Railway, running from Chicago to Los Angeles. Now there is a daily trip to the Grand Canyon. Normal trains don't stop here, so if you want to go to the Canyon by train you have to get a taxi from Flagstaff. Bit of a share really. There's one of those huge American steam trains that you see in the movies here, with a cow catcher and a funnel like a cone with a lid on it. The steam train apparently does run now and again, but most trips are diesel. There's a small museum as well, relics of the original Grand Canyon Railroad, closed in 1905, and the revived, opening in 1989. Amid the American ephemera is a painting of a strangely familiar British train. Familiar in that it's clearly British and in Great Western colours. It's name plate proclaims it 'The Scarborough Flyer' which sets a strange note. Why would the GWR have a 'Scarborough Flyer.' It's not the part of the country I associate with the Great Western.

The motel provides free coffee and donuts, with quite the tiniest donuts you ever did see. There are only three left, and three would make a mouthful, but I just have the one. The coffee is hot and reviving. The route home is Interstate 40, scattered here and there wqith signs saying 'Historic Route 66'. They've got rid of Route 66! How could they? While I-40 is doubtless a massively better road, where is the poetry? The culture? You can't see anyone singing songs about it can you? 'Be a bit naughty/on Interstate 40?' It doesn't work.

Aside from this aesthetic complaint, the other peculiarity comes from the fact that Americans are rather keen on giving names to their roads. I know a few people who insist on calling the A1 the Great North Road. At least I think it's the A1, but either way they're just about extinct. It adds a little poetry into our sterile lives, so I shouldn't complain. I-8 apparently is 'The Blue Star Highway' which has something to do with veterans. We conclude that I-40 must be the 'Business Highway' since this is the only sensible explanation for road signs telling us that we are continually 40 miles from a town called Business, no matter how far we drive. And America does have towns with some pretty strange names: Intercourse, Pennsylvania strings to mind. Alas, there are poetic names for roads, and there's the 'Business Highway.'

West of Williams the Arizona countryside does change. Finally we leave the Kaibab National Forest and find that the flat topped mesas are behind us. Here the land is still pretty much flat, but they have 'real' mountains springing from it, with little in the way of foothills. Kevin entertains himself trying to work out which range of mountain is which. Some of these mountains are pretty high, getting up to about 12,000 feet, which isn't that much higher than Bryce. The ones we're snaking through are a little lower. The sun is out, and bright, it's desert around us and the snow on those mountain peaks seems out of place.

Eventually, winding through several towns, most of which couldn't muster a second horse in an emergency, we make our way back to our old friend the Colorado River. Ahead we see an impressive looking white tubular bridge, but it turns out that it's just carrying a gas pipeline over the river and our multilane flat bridge is completely dull. The Colorado seems to have lost a fair bit of it's former grandeur. And we are in California.

You can always tell that your crossing a state border, Nevada is protected by a ring of Casinos, Utah is bordered by sources of strong drink. If nothing else distinguishes a state (i.e. Arizona) you at least get a Welcome Center and a weigh station for trucks. California is the only one that actually has border checkpoints and customs officials. At least the only one we visited. The border control point is actually about 5 miles inside California, and is staffed by exceptionally bored looking crossing guards. I read something about them looking for agricultural produce since they're worried about Arizonan pests getting into the orange groves. And lets be fair, anything that could survive Arizona could probably devastate somewhere fertile.

The crossing guard asks me were we've come from. I say Arizona. He wishes us a good day and we're through. I drive off thinking that I must have answered his question wrong. Of course we've come from Arizona! It's such a fatuous answer that there was no point asking it. 'England' or 'Well we started in California, but we've been through Nevada, Utah and Arizona' would also have been true, and possibly more useful.

Now there's one more National Park directly in between us and San Diego. The Joshua Tree National Park, famous for U2 having named an album after it. I would like to visit it, since 4 National Parks in four days would be a pretty good achievement, especially cos they were all big ones, not like the piddly little 0.05 acre National Park in the heart of Philadelphia. I think it was somewhere George Washington once camped, or cut down a cherry tree or something like that. The Joshua Tree though is big, and it's roads don't really help us. We could go in there, but it would add an extra fifty miles to the journey and we're quite hard against that mileage as it is. So I resign myself to not actually seeing the National Park and accept driving by it. Interstate 40 runs straight on to Los Angeles, while the remnant of Route 66 pulls away to the south and skirts the Park. And this is how we meet Laura.

About five miles away from I-40, in the middle of high scrub desert, with just a few battered trailers for company, a woman in a dazzling white outfit is hitch-hiking. I used to hitch. It seems to me that having hitched then to leave a hitcher behind, especially in lousy conditions, is such bad karma that you might as well have stayed in bed that morning. It takes me a moment to realise that she really was a hitcher. It is such a blasted heath that you just wouldn't. I stop. While Kevin and I clear some of the junk that's accumulated on the back seat she walks up. 'Did you stop for me,' she asks? She is quite old.

Apparently she's had times before that people have stopped, seemingly for her, but when she gets to the car it turns out that they weren't actually stopping for her, just stopping. In the middle of no-where. She assumes that they saw that it was a single female hitcher, but weren't interested when they realised that she wasn't a babe. We let her in the car and introduce ourselves. She is Laura, she is a retired cartoonist and she is 62. 63 Tomorrow. She's been living here since 1980. She is trying to get from Cadiz to 29 Palms. To shop for groceries. And drinking water. She is 62 and lives in the middle of the Mojave Desert in a house without running drinking water! I don't know if she had water for washing, but her clothes were dazzling white, so probably. How can anyone live like that?

Her source of drinking water is 93 miles away. It is exactly the route we were taking, probably because there is no other route, no other place to go, so it's no problem. Not for us. We pass dry lakes and the haunts of bighorn sheep and Laura tells us a little of how things are out there. Apparently you could have 20 acres of land in this desert just by building a shack on it. You didn't have to live in it or anything, just build the shack. But why would you want to have 20 acres of this nothingness? She advises that if I visit Mexico not to have sex with Mexican whores because they all have AIDS and have sex with animals on stage. Communism is an extreme form of right wing government. Everyone in northern Europe will soon be developing cancer because of Chernobyl, and everyone in America dies of heart disease because of the chemicals in the food. My suggestion that there's an awful lot of red meat in the American diet is chewed around like it's a brand new idea that no-one ever had before, but she can't disprove it. When we first got going she tries to guess where we're from. Germany? Austria? When we tell her that we're British she is horrified, as though she's accidentally accused us of being pederasts. We're just amused.

Eventually 29 Palms appears, something that could pass for a thriving metropolis. Which is to say that it rates a horse. Maybe even two. It's kept alive because of a Marine Corps base right next door. We deliver Laura to her mall and pull away, hoping that she'll have no trouble getting home again. You can buy water in gallon bottles, but God only knows what it can be like in summer.

If you had a lot of money than 29 Palms might be an interesting place to live. Assuming that you could afford an airy pueblo style house, with air-con and an enclosed swimming pool. But most of the houses there aren't like that. They look as though they'll turn into ovens under the summer sun. Strangely the roads within five miles of 29 Palms are as good as any we've driven on. Beyond the town limits they're a bit bumpy, but no worse than any in more civilised part of the country.

Beyond 29 Palms there is Joshua Tree, the town at the mouth of the National Park, we get some more petrol and then head on. Joshua trees are funny looking fellers, apparently monstrous yucca, half tree and half cactus. We decide that we should take some photos of one, but the road almost immediately starts to fall dramatically and we deduce that Joshua trees must be a high altitude species, because one minute they're there, and the next they just have palm trees and stuff like that.

At San Bernardino there is a wind farm. In the UK we have wind farms as well, high up places where two dozen turbines twist away, generating a handful of kilowatts which will be lost in the National Grid. They also attract people complaining about them, going on about how terrible it is that someone should put turbines onto some hill that can be seen from their back garden, the back garden that they've had since childhood, and wouldn't it be better to put a nuclear power plant in some area inhabited only by poor people. If one could tap into all that hot air then you could light London for free.

San Bernardino's wind farm is different, if only in scale. It forms a natural funnel, channelling winds that have had most of the Pacific to gain in strength, and so is one of those good places to plant a wind farm. It's impossible to count the turbines. Hundreds certainly, thousands quite probably. A sign in a rest area on I-8 claims that they generate enough electricity to power 500 homes. It wasn't the newest or shiniest sign I've ever seen and I think they must have erected more turbines since the sign went up.

After that there's not really a lot to report. The roads get better for a while, at least until we enter San Diego Country, where they get horrible again. As we get lower down and closer to the sea, the hills seem to get greener, at one point strikingly so. Traffic increases, and with it the pickups fade away and 'regular' cars take their place. Are pickups another high altitude species, like the Joshua tree?

San Diego heaves into view. 1450 miles. That's a long way.

Soundtrack: 29 Palms, Robert Plant. What else?