Driving the long way home

Despite being a raging environmentalist I’ve not been able to kick the love of driving. Blame rural Australia and its lack of public transport, or our exploited labour as kids when we were driving tractors as soon as we had enough weight to depress the brakes so Dad could throw hay bales or irrigation pipes off the back. My brother thinks a V8 is a thing of worship, my sister is a member of a 4WD club, and my nephew races cars in South Carolina. So the chance to drive around California for a couple of weeks is a salve on an itch that just can’t be soothed in Britain, where motorways are carparks and getting from north to south can be done in less than a day (if you can get out of the carpark).

It is a sign of the American dependence on the car that it is the easiest and cheapest option to hire one. You don’t even need a cheerful sales assistant in front of you any more. Carl was in Tennessee, I was in San Francisco, and we just skyped on the airport terminal. Industrial strength numbers of rentals are poured into and out of the airport each day in a well-oiled display of organization and car love.

I settled on a little Chevy Spark, no muscle except in a brand name reminiscent of utes and American pop songs, and within half an hour of arriving, including last minute refreshment and comfort breaks, we were on the road. Now the first days of driving on the right are slightly taxing. I repeat the mantra ‘right tight, left loose’ at every crossing. I get flummoxed by intersections and who has right of way (still don’t get it). My Navigator must remain calm at all times even when the digital and the paper map are at odds and I’m demanding to know the next set of instructions every five minutes.

In anticipation of any tension I planned a route that would break us gently into the rhythm of a road trip, and to begin, the classic, Big Sur, Highway 1. It is the smell of the Pacific on one side and mighty red wood forests on the other, mountains and cliffs falling into an ocean that has created a ragged edge of broken sculptures and tombolos. Ridiculous sunsets fall behind lurching yachts as bells and gulls call out the mood of the sea. Among the churn of the water sea otters pop up to play, officially replacing the wombat as the cutest animal on the planet. Let's face it. Who doesn't think floating around on your back in the ocean, cracking crabs and eating mussels cleaved from the pylons of a pier, isn't a good way to spend a day.

Taking our cue from the sea otters, we spend two days pulling over to cleave treats from various outlets: tea at Big Sur River, sprawling on the lawn with a quietness falling, even over the groups of students on Spring Break sitting on wooden chairs in the river; taking a window seat at Post Ranch restaurant hanging over the cliffs for three courses of yumminess (I recommend the trout with fennel puree and tapanade, or the blue cheese, orange reduction and almond bread); an organic breakfast at Los Osos where the wild people, hippies and hipsters hang out. We gawp at the excess of wealthy architecture in places like Carmel with some schadenfreude that it will all end in tears when the next big earthquake comes along.

Occasionally the otters were confused for seals that also cruise along Big Sur’s coastline. Stopping off to see a colony of hundreds of the elephant variety, we can only conclude they are not so cute. They molt. They stink. They yawn and pick fights. They look like I feel some Sunday mornings.

The calm of Big Sur was ruptured by the ever increasing heat and volume of traffic as we approached Los Angeles. I am no fan of this monstrous conurbation so the deal with the Navigator was a two day layover in Venice Beach so he could tick ‘working out at Gold’s Gym Venice Beach’ off his bucket list and I could sit in cafés on the beach and remember Sydney. 

Former spiritual home of Arnold Schwarznegger and several Mr Olympias, Gold’s Gym is a freak show. We entered behind a minor celebrity body builder, famous for the size of his veins that stick out from arms the size of my thighs. But it’s LA and it’s all about excess. The driving done by someone else on a tour bus in Rasta colours, we cruise downtown, Rodeo Drive and other islands in a sea of conspicuous consumption. Celebrities, their houses and our guide's stories of his encounters with them, are all about excess. On a Tuesday morning in a Santa Monica street with nine coffee shops and 12 yoga studios, everyone is holding cups and/or yoga mats.

For the excess homeless, they hold onto whatever bag, trolley, dignity they can. Mostly black and hispanic men, Venice Beach allows rough sleeping and they keep it tidy. In the public toilets, some lay out their shaving kits in the morning, holding on to some hope. Clothes are packed in bags and stacked away for the day. The panhandlers are honest enough:

'Fishing for buds'

'Why lie. I need weed'.

'This is awkward for me too'.

Food is of course the thing that is most emblematic of American excess. As our dinner arrives one evening, plate by plate, it becomes an archipelago of gluttony. Even ordering half portions we still needed the ubiquitous take home box. Food now even seems to be getting its own national days. Apparently 23 April is National Cherry Cheesecake Day. Who knew? Motel breakfasts featured excess amounts of powdered or pump dispenser coffee-mate, chocolate muffins and cheerios, pre-cooked scrambled eggs, and turkey sausage/rissole/non-descript shape, served in plastic plates to save washing up. Heaven forbid anyone should sit down with real cutlery and crockery. Even when food was a lovely, fresh salad from 'Lemonade' on the uber-trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard, it was all served on paper and plastic that slides into a bin when you're done.

Having had a whinge (note ‘raging environmentalist’ above) I will miss unlimited iced tea and splenda, but not as much as half/half milk in my coffee. And motel breakfasts could become a useful tool for orientation should you happen to arrive late at night and forget where you are. If you’re in Napa you will get: almond milk, berries, fat- AND sugar-free yoghurt, healthy toppings for the oatmeal and honey instead of maple sugar on the waffles. If you are in Pahrump or anywhere other than Napa: none of the above and all of the chocolate muffins, cheerios, turkey meat shapes etcetera.

Having warmed up to driving on the right it was now time for the ultimate test of nerves: leaving L.A. Crossing lanes at 60 miles per hour, with inches to spare front and back, traffic is relentless for four hours. It's only reaching the desert that it starts to thin. Sweating at 100 degrees, the excessive Skechers factory looms out of the desert as does the Molongo reservation casino and billboards for various 'legal and naked' gentlemen's clubs.

The Spark’s tyres began making strange noises that sounded like a flat. In desperation I pulled into a nameless Spanish town on the outskirts of Riverside, forgotten except for the Blue Diamond cafe with its amazing home-made tortillas and vegan taco. It is a universal truth that a man's foot is genetically predisposed to check for flats by kicking tyres and a quick poke determined there was no deflation. Now the Spark was a lovely, sound car with all sorts of digital mod cons, but it did have little tyres and a propensity to reverberate any unevenness in the road, and surprisingly some of the highways were quite uneven. Over the two weeks we got used to its quirks and capacities, its vibrations and, spookily, occasional incursions into my iplayer podcasts via its bluetooth connection. It became our mobile restaurant, washing line, and extra cupboard space.

The open road of Californian desert let us test the Spark’s capacity for speed and the surreal wonders of cruise control (which I eventually learnt is rubbish on anything but flat and straight). It even managed a little off road excursion into the back lanes of Joshua Tree as we tried to find our accommodation for a night: earth bag adobe pods made by Lisa, an artist who also makes medicine drums. The village turns out to be a mini-Venice Beach with a hipster coffee roaster who knew what a flat white is, and a cafe that serves tofu scramble. It’s that kind of place; full of seekers of quiet, big skies with hearts called to the light, space and ethereal forests of rocky outcrops and spikey yucca. The pods are surprising comfortable, even for the 6’ 1” of the Navigator. We just about fit on the futon with half the swing door left open so we can fall asleep to the sound of nothing and the feel of a night with a piece of the day's heat still in it.

Heading for Death Valley National Park roads became even straighter. So straight I can over-take two semis and an SUV in one go and still have road to spare (despite the Navigator’s nervousness). In the search to be alone we pass hamlet after hamlet of trailers in the middle of nowhere, sharing space with big-eared black tailed jack rabbits. Dry lakes and wide valleys are interspersed with sage bush and grey clouds. Crushed and buckled geological layers mark the earthquakes of times past, as does the 'ghost town' of Calico.

In the present, we must skirt the blank spaces on the map that mark US Naval weapons’ testing grounds, and skim desolate junction towns like Baker, whose sole purpose is to refuel cars and people on the way to or from Las Vegas. The question of why some towns exist where they do becomes a conundrum to help pass the time. For example, why is Pahrump where it is, and how can it possibly survive on a diet of down-at-heel casinos and ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. It’s close enough to Area 51 that it can use aliens to advertise everything (and clearly fireworks are legal in Nevada along with casinos and prostitution). On the upside, if ever in need of a cheap feed you can't go past a casino buffet. It is subsidised by the Smoking Joes in the pit and at the slots. For all you can eat at $10.50, us and the poor of Pahrump load up for the next day on assorted braised and deep fried animal parts, a salad bar, pasta bar and sugar free peach pie and frozen custard (with sugar).

Thus fortified we entered the badlands in an apocalypse threatening one of the 18 days of rain this area has each year. Wind picked up the sand so that from a distance it looked like fog. Around the oasis of Furnace Valley is the desolation of white salt pans and baked clay streaked with red and green minerals. The wreck of the land is matched by that of deindustrialised America in the Panamint Valley. Trona, where even the trailer parks have given up, has seen much of its population move to nearby Ridgecrest, but the borax and salt processing plants remain. Belching smoke into a dark blue sky, it is unsurprising that Star Trek V and Planet of the Apes were shot in this location.

It is inevitable, perhaps desirable, that despite all the technology at our disposal, some driving days are just days of wrong turns and closed roads. Leaving Ridgecrest we attempted to cross the Sierra Nevada via Sherman Pass ... closed. Back to the main road to Kernville we tried another back route. Ignoring the 'road closed in 20 miles' sign we plough on to Johnsondale to find … the road closed. The locals seemed unsure why. Back to Kernville for lunch and another route over the mountain to flatlands and north to Three Rivers. 

In almost eight hours of driving, we pass through every conceivable geography: from high desert to rocky mountain, ravine and river, from pines, short and blackened by last year’s fires, to dense forest, to grass lands bright after good spring rains. Then foothills and ranches as we descend till the trees disappear into rolling bumps of grass that are eventually ironed out to plains of orange, olive and grape groves. Then back towards the east, upwards again, skirting dams and valleys, until Three Rivers at the entrance to Sequoia National Park.

We ask our Air BnB host about road closures ahead and she promises to check for us but not before first blaming 'the government'. This was not the first time we had heard 'the government' blamed for something ... generally a mysterious rule or inconvenience. We later spoke to the National Parks and Wildlife Service who gave us a pretty good rationale: snow, fire repairs, poor road conditions and they're sick of rescuing libertarians who ignore 'road closed' signs. It wasn’t until some days later, at Yosemite Point, that we were able to look across the Sierra Nevada and realized just how much snow was still up on the passes we had been trying to cross. The Spark would never have made it.

The excess of space in California also eventually resulted in an inevitable 'tried to do too much' day complete with a disagreement between digital and paper maps. Starting at 8am, and driving through a winding entrance into Sequoia National Park, we spent several hours walking with giants. There is no rushing time in this place. They are indeed unearthly, or perhaps too earthly, such is their size; sometimes in congress, at other times single sentinels. They warp our sense of scale and perspective and we become small, mewling creatures at their feet. Snow in places gathered in drifts and hollows to cover ancient root systems, while sonic frogs hid in bowers and woodpeckers axed into bodies with the impact of a gnat. General Sherman is 2,200 years old and has seen it all come and go several times by now. They are pretty much fire, drought and pest resistant.

Having been lost in the wood for several hours we then realized we still had miles of switchbacks to descend, through intermittent mist, sleet and rain, much of it unhelpfully stuck behind an SUV driver that, despite the power of the vehicle, didn’t seem to know how to drive it without riding the brakes. The Spark had enough and eventually overtook, only to be later passed by the same SUV on the flat freeway at 70 mph. Racing through Fresno, then a right turn north we realized I’d been driving four hours without a break (the Navigator has yet to get his licence). This required an emergency stop at a gas station for rations of something that was apparently food. At this stage another route is suggested by the paper map, duly taken, but then the digital map intervened with second thoughts. Human intervention went with the perfectly rational 'we're going forward and if the road is closed too bloody bad'. Proving yet again that Silicon Valley should not yet be allowed to let driverless cars on the road, paper won. The alternative route, from the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park, was not only faster but astonishingly beautiful.

The other area of potential conflict was who gets to recharge first. The modern road trip now apparently includes: one adapter/recharger, one laptop, one iPad, two iPhones, two electric toothbrushes, one camera battery, one runner's GPS. 24 hours in a day was barely enough to keep us both going.

Something about emerging from a tunnel into the Yosemite Valley restored perspective, with a glimpse of El Capitan on the left, waterfalls impolitely crashing down granite walls, the smell of pine permeating a cold mist, and deer wandering through the river valley, unworried, unhurried. There was no room for argument in the immensity of this space. The Spark was parked and forgotten for three days as we remembered our feet and our lungs.

From Yosemite there was just one final stop off in Napa Valley for a last night in the vineyards before heading back to San Francisco to drop our beloved Spark home. And it was on the way that, even after two weeks of driving, my nerve finally failed me. With back to back cars I couldn't bring myself to seamlessly merge from the slip lane onto the highway and had to hit the brakes to wait for a break in the traffic. Vehicles backed up behind me but there were only a few desultory honks. Even Californian drivers seem to realize there are limits to what a Spark and its driver can do.

Despite its excesses and the current political imbroglio, a road trip highlights the things we can still say the USA has contributed to civilization and that we could even think about adopting here in Britain:  

1. automated petrol dispensers (covering 1963 miles we spent just US$120 in petrol. No wonder everyone drives); 
2. enormous hotel rooms with shampoo AND conditioner; 
3. and customer service. 

Purchasing even an ice-cream entails half a dozen questions to make sure my preferences are honoured. Would I like a half scoop of each flavour and still pay for just one scoop (even if the scoops were the normal size we'd expect in the UK)? Yes please. And which flavour would I like on the bottom? The avocado and strawberry sorbet or the olive crisp and goat's cheese icecream? (actually I passed on the olive and goat ice cream and went for chocolate sorbet).

It is not possible that the culture that invented such customer service, and a Four Way intersection system based on politeness and care, could possibly vote a man for President who is all snarl and selfishness. I live in hope.