In thinking back over our brief overnight stay in Vegas, we agreed that it was such a surreal, time-turned-on-its-head experience that it’s hard to say exactly what we did and the order in which we did it... So I won’t tax myself unduly in trying to piece it together again - suffice to say we began our stay by arriving in the early hours on Sunday morning, having driven across the Mojave Desert, and celebrated by having (as you do in Vegas) Bacardi and Diet Cokes and Budweisers for breakfast, and ended our stay by strolling along the Strip at 3 a.m. and then losing what we could afford to lose at the roulette table while having an early breakfast of... Bacardi and Diet Cokes and Budweisers... However, by then we’d worked out that you only get ‘free’ drinks in Vegas when you’re spending money gambling, so at least that time they were ‘free’ (if you don’t take into account what we lost at the roulette table). Most of the croupiers seemed a tad jaded, apart from one lovely one who chatted to us about sights we needed to see in the desert - all the while quietly raking away our losing chips...

The other thing I’d like to say about Vegas is that I didn’t find walking along the Strip in searing heat the most pleasurable pastime, not only because of the heat but also because you can’t simply walk in a straight line from one end to the other. Instead, you have to go up and down escalators or stairs and across walkways over the busy thoroughfares. We zigzagged our weary way back and forth to get to Caesar’s Palace, at the other end from the Tropicana where we were staying, only to find the roulette tables way too expensive to even consider losing any money there. Night time on the Strip was much more pleasant, with fewer people and a lower temperature - definitely the way to go! Except that when you get back to your hotel in the early hours, you might well expect to stumble across a couple feverishly making out on your corridor. It’s best to do the British thing in such a situation, and hide your eyes by putting your hand across the appropriate side of your face while muttering, “Sorry! Sorry! Don’t mind us! Sorry!”

I developed a bit of a complex about being pounced on every time I ventured onto the Strip by the many and varied purveyors of skin-firming lotions and potions. Being too polite, and too heat-weary, to tell them where to go, I ended up with both eyes firmly glued open from dawn to dawn, and with a bag full of samples to keep the pesky wrinkles away. I did, however, resist shelling out hundreds of dollars for bottles of the products - so maybe I wasn’t quite as naive as they pegged me as being... Maybe.

By the time we checked out of the hotel on Monday morning, we were feeling somewhat jet lagged from such a bizarrely unreal experience (yet my eyes remained firmly pinned wide open) and not quite ready for yet another long drive through the desert to get to Lake Montezuma in Arizona... but we’re such troopers, so we did it anyway!
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We decided to visit the small Californian city of Soquel, near Santa Cruz, as part of our road trip as I’d lived there very briefly a long time ago and wanted to show Carol the delights of that area nestled on the Pacific coast between the ocean and the Santa Cruz Mountains. The drive there from San Francisco took us along the fabulous Route 1, which follows the Pacific Ocean all the way down the west coast, but when we reached Santa Cruz, it turned out to have been so long ago that I had lived there that I barely remembered anywhere we drove through, and even struggled to recall the name of the street that I’d lived on. I did, however, remember the name of one iconic café in Santa Cruz (and shall refrain from giving its name in order to preserve its iconic status), so we went there for breakfast the morning after we arrived – but ended up stomping out, with me clutching a takeaway box containing the burrito I’d ordered but that had failed to materialise when Carol’s meal arrived. It turned out that somehow my order had never been given to the cook, so by the time it finally did arrive, Carol had finished hers and I was so angry and stomach-churny that I demanded they take it off the bill, and had to be persuaded to even take the wretched boxed-up meal away with me. I would soon be glad I had done, though, as I was by then really hungry, and once we were safely away from the iconic place, I tucked into it rather ravenously.

Another institution I remembered from my few months there back in the late '80s was the Saturday flea market that runs from 6 a.m. to early afternoon. So, with me still munching the botched burrito, we headed over to the large car park on which it’s held, paid our dollar fifty each, and found ourselves sauntering around a car boot sale California-style. By the time we’d finished looking at guitars with strings missing (though not the one in the photo - that was a decent one, but it wasn't for sale!), grubby old clothes, boots that had seen better days, and other assorted potential gems, it was clear that tat is tat the world over, whether it’s sold out of an old estate car in a field in Essex or from the back of a battered pick-up truck in a parking lot on the Pacific coast.

The other thing I wanted to show Carol was the famous Santa Cruz boardwalk, allegedly the one referred to in the Drifters’ song ‘Under the Boardwalk’. But when we got there, I felt sad to see it had become so grossly over-commercialized and was now nothing more than mass of elaborate theme park rides – so we carried on down the coast and came to Seacliff State Beach, with its lovely old wooden pier replete with keen fishermen, and a wreck at the end that’s become a sanctuary for seabirds, including pelicans – as well as a lone sea lion we watched swim along the line of the shore, to the consternation (mixed with delight) of the children who happened to be swimming in the sea at the time it made its appearance. Other unusual (in the UK at least!) species we spotted in the area included a hummingbird (in the back garden of the house we stayed in) and, further inland, a vulture…

Our Las Vegas hotel reservation was for 3 p.m. the next day, so we’d originally planned to drive there overnight. But having done all we wanted to do in the Santa Cruz area by early afternoon, we decided to press on then and take our time ambling over to the Nevada gambling mecca. That decision led us to stop at Hollister, California, a small town lying an hour or two inland from Santa Cruz and at the heart of a major salad-crop-producing region of the USA. We were looking for a bar, any bar, as we were both thirsty by then and in need of liquid refreshment, but it was by pure chance that Carol decided to park where she did. It turned out to be virtually outside the Whiskey Creek Saloon – from its name alone you can tell that it was exactly what we were hoping to stumble upon – an all-American dive bar full of locals intrigued by two Englishwomen stepping in and ordering Blue Moons and telling the bartender about their west–east road trip. A lovely group conversation ensued, and we eventually left there with our heads reeling with all the different routes suggested to us as the best way to get to Vegas, and wondering (yet again) why Americans seem to be so very obsessed by the British royal family…

A very sensible and valuable suggestion, though, was that we refuel at Bakersfield, as after that we’d be hitting the Mojave Desert – at night – and we definitely didn’t want to run out of petrol (or rather, ‘gas’) there…

When, months ago, Carol and I planned this trip in celebration of my birthday, we agreed that although neither of us liked flying, we’d have to endure quite a bit of it if we were going to make it from the west coast of the USA to the east coast in a month with two week-long stopovers en route. I imagined us clinging on to each other in mutual clammy-handed panic as the planes took off, bumped and lurched through bouts of turbulence, and came in to land. In other words, as far as my overactive imagination was concerned, most of our flying time would be taken up with us clinging on to each other for dear life.

The reality turned out to be quite different. Not so much for the first, mercifully short flight from Gatwick to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris – neither of us having flown for some time, we were both as sweaty-palmed and unreasonably terror-ridden as I thought we’d be. However, having made it safely there, Carol seemed to calm right down, and for the mammoth eleven-hour flight that followed, from Orly Airport to San Francisco, she managed to sleep so soundly that even when I roughly grabbed her hand for mutual comfort during the bumpy ride 40,000 feet above Greenland, she barely came to, and limply held my hand back in an unsatisfactorily semi-automatic way while remaining blissfully out of it in the land of nod. Hmmph!! So much for aviophobic solidarity!

By the time we reached San Francisco, my head was throbbing with a migraine brought on by tension, dehydration and lack of sleep. Carol, however, was positively blooming. Until, that is, we set foot in the apartment we’d booked to stay in for the two nights we’d be there, when we were both almost knocked out by the malodorous whiff of unemptied cat litter trays. Yaaargh!!! We’d been warned ahead of time that there might be a little bit of a feline smell - but this? My headache kicked into nauseated overdrive, while Carol, ineffectively holding her nose, went from blooming to ominously silent. The smell wafted up the stairs into our bedroom, and it was only because I was thoroughly exhausted by then that I managed to fall into a heavy slumber almost immediately. Carol slept too, but the next day remained ominously silent when we awoke and encountered once again the pong of undealt-with kitty litter.

As a result, we spent that entire day, including the evening, avoiding the flat and instead exploring the streets of San Francisco, travelling from one end of the city to the other via its famous mass transit system where trains miraculously transmogrify into buses and ancient-looking street cars rattle up and down the startlingly steep gradients that are San Francisco’s hallmark.

On the number 24 bus, we made our way down Castro, proudly festooned along most of its joyous length with rainbow flags, rainbow window displays, rainbow crosswalks, rainbow everything, and then transferred onto the historic streetcar that would take us to Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, where we were amused by the blubbery antics of the highly entertaining sea lions and visited the fabulous penny arcade museum. For 50 cents, I had my fortune read by a sinister-looking yet strangely lifelike ‘grandmother’ and also, perhaps too publicly, had my feet massaged rather pleasantly by a vibrating machine… What was even more enjoyable, however, was seeing so many young people being swept up by the fun of the hall of mirrors, early space invaders machines, automated but archaic bowling alleys, and, for two dollars, the joyful sound and sight of a mechanically operated Wurlitzer organ.

From there, we decided to hop on the streetcar again and head up to the other area for which San Francisco is so well known – Haight-Ashbury, where the hippie movement and free love began in the Swinging Sixties. For several blocks, Haight is lined with vintage and retro clothing stores, ‘smoking’ shops, crystal and incense establishments … and homeless people at every corner, stoned, sad, and seemingly without hope.

As the Bay area's notorious cold mist descended and day turned into evening, we hopped on a bus and made our way to the Bazaar Café on California Street, where I’d found out an open mic would be happening later. I was too late to sign up for the main list, as it was pre-booked, but I was top of the ‘alternate’ list, and pretty much assured of being able to play one song on the house guitar (as I didn’t have my own with me). In the end, as one person cancelled, I made it onto the list proper, and got to play two of my songs on an acoustic guitar with a ‘hand of God’ painted on its soundboard that had a hole mysteriously knocked through it, but that sounded pretty good despite the hard life it had clearly had. It was a lovely evening, with a listening and appreciative audience, and the positivity continued when we got back to the whiffy flat at about 11 to find that the litter trays had been cleaned in our absence and that the smell, as a result, was, thankfully, somewhat diminished. Another sound night’s sleep ensued, and the next morning we got ready to pick up the rental car in which we would be embarking on the road trip proper…