Dave's Diary : The Whole Story

Saturday August 30th:

With an early start and a trek to the airport with dulled senses the Westminster- Gatwick leg of our journey is fairly uneventful. Taxi, train, baggage drop, security check,

The next ten hours are spent road (air?) testing Virgin’s onboard media system to within an inch of its life. Virgin are to be highly commended on a choice of about 8 different films, a wide variety of television and radio programmes and a number of late 1980s style computer games including chess, Pong, Pac-man and Battleships. Most intriguing however is a computerized version of Blackjack, which gives the opportunity to practise and learn the game away from the certain hustle and bustle of the casino floor. You’re likely to feel much less stupid asking what ‘double-down’ is or why you might need ‘insurance’ when you’re dealing with a computer rather than a tuxedoed croupier who is looking at taking $100 of your money for the sake of the turn of the next card.

Fitful bursts of sleep intertwine with films and your next snack to stop you complaining and all of a sudden we’re landing at McCarran International. The rumours are that American customs and passport control are some of the most strict and scary people on the planet. The sort who will put you on the next flight home and on some sort of international travel blacklist if you so much as cough out of turn. With this in mind we all stand quietly and patiently in line to be ushered into the strip-search room. When all that happens is a polite man asks you to leave a finger print and photograph of yourself and wishes you happily on your way, you are somewhat taken aback.

One by one, the bags appear on the conveyor belt, until we are only one bag short. When all of a sudden the belt is turned off and we realise that we are the only people left in the building, confusion begins to set in. Andrew is given the necessary forms to complete in order to report his largest bag missing. The Virgin people are relatively helpful and insist that it will be shipped on the following day’s flight and in the meantime he has a guarantee of a $50 refund to go and buy himself a change of clothes until then. Frustrated, tired, but in good spirits we find the free shuttle bus to Advantage Car-Hire to collect our wheels for the trip.

We find the shiny new Dodge Caravan with ease in the dingy underground garage and set about making sure that everything is in place. We empty the ‘trash’ from the ‘trunk’ and set about trying to find the spare tyre, which isn’t in any of the places that one may normally expect to find it. A motley collection of car-hire employees come to join us to help us with our concerns, but seem more keen to shrug their shoulders and ask us which part of England we are from than to help us locate that which could save our lives in the desert heat. In the end we take their advice that “well, I suppose it could be under the driver’s seat, as we haven’t found it anywhere else” as good enough and we hit the freeway into town.

With the giant castle-style hotel, the one-third size Eiffel Tower, the giant, gold MGM lion and the millions upon millions of flashing light bulbs this is clearly the Las Vegas of the films, the magazines and the legends. We find our hotel with the aid of the perennially useful SatNav. Or rather, we find the car park entrance of our hotel, because it is blatantly obvious when looking down the Strip which one we are after: the one with the half size Statue of Liberty standing guard by the replicas of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. With the whole complex encircled by a giant rollercoaster. Not what you tend to get at your average Holiday Inn.

Neil is dispatched to collect the tickets for our evening show, and we take a trip for our first real slice of 21st Century Americana - the outlet mall. Andrew needs clothes to replace the ones that Virgin have left on the tarmac at Gatwick. A trip to Burger King and a pair of $10 Wranglers later, we’re ready to hit the town and party on down Las Vegas style. So to celebrate; Neil, Andrew and Graham decide it’s time to go to sleep. I choose to live the Vegas high-life and take in a piano bar and a few games of video blackjack. At 25c per game and 15 minutes later seeing myself up by the princely sum of $1, it is going to take me quite a long time to become a millionaire. It’s time for the others to get up so we can be dazzled by David Copperfield.

In a small auditorium more reminiscent of school plays or a ropey village pantomime we’re brought our cokes and tiny bottles of $8 “champagne” just as the lights go down. Prior to this we’ve enjoyed a rolling video of David Copperfield’s greatest reviews and achievements including ‘flying waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s’ and ‘highest paid magician in the world’. At $100 dollars per ticket that statistic probably wouldn’t surprise anybody. The man himself appears on a motorbike inside a previously empty box, and proceeds to astonish everyone with a series of illusions, sleights of hand and plain baffling ‘how on earth is that possible?’ stunts. Best of the bunch are a convoluted story about his grandfather wanting to win a lottery in order to buy a 1948 Lincoln convertible, which is followed by asking random members of the audience to come up with numbers. Not only are those the numbers that he has predicted previously (taken from a locked safe suspended above the stage prior to the show) they are also the numbers on his grandfather’s old lottery tickets. This is obviously impressive, but is end-of-the-pier stuff compared to the audience reaction when the aforementioned car somehow just appears on the stage. For his final trick, Graham is invited up on stage to be ‘disappeared’. Our long-hoped for dreams are dashed when he is merely asked to sit to the side of the stage while others are made to vanish, only to reappear from the back of the auditorium. Pre-picked stooges or real magic? Who can tell.

At the end of a stupendous show, a long day is made even longer by a tour of the Las Vegas Strip. It seems that half of Mexico is having their holidays up here and they are spending those holidays giving out adverts for prostitutes. Temptation averted, a 25 hour waking day comes to an end at 1am Pacific Time with a welcome crash into bed.

Sunday August 31st

A nice relaxing start to the day with a hearty American breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, pancakes with syrup, coffee and orange juice OR pizza OR green algae, broccoli and garlic smoothie (depending on your tastes or getting up time) followed by a swim in the pool, a frolic in the jacuzzi and blagging free mascara (well, none of us had remembered to pack our own) from girls in bikinis. And for the first time it feels like we’re actually on holiday.

Once the hotel had been left and Las Vegas’ airstrip sized roads had been navigated four or five times and we are fully stocked up with water, corn dogs, vacuum-packed sandwiches, fiery crisps, sweets, coke and other important desert provisions we have another argument about whether the Grand Canyon drive will take two hours (as suggested by various Las Vegas residents, Neil’s sister, Andrew’s mate and most other independent sources) or five hours (as suggested by Google Maps and TomTom). On closer inspection it appears that in our infinite wisdom we have booked a hotel in a place called ‘Grand Canyon Village’ which somewhat perversely isn’t anywhere near the famous natural monument called ‘The Grand Canyon’. It is in fact three and a half hours further down the road from the bit of the canyon that everyone goes to look at. At least not checking where we are booking hotels adds a touch of extra excitement to the holiday. A bit like Russian Roulette.

The original plan is hastily scrapped and the shorter drive to the Western edge of the canyon is started. 45 minutes later we have done about 11 miles. Looks like everybody else either has the same plan as us or is desperate to be Leaving Las Vegas [\popular culture reference]. Tedium at the slowness of the traffic is relieved by the spectacular scenery. High red rock outcrops, barren desert and the deep blue expanse of Lake Mead, enveloped by the Virgin Mountain range. It’s just as well that it’s very pretty, as we have a lot of this to look at for the next four days.

The source for the massive backlog of the traffic is revealed when the Hoover Dam looms into view. All the cars are slowing down as they go over the dam to get a closer look, somewhat akin to a car crash on the M4. We successfully cross the dam, across the state line into Arizona and the road opens up ahead of us.

Doland Springs is one of those small, American communities that you expect to find out in the desert. A cracking place to live if your interests are cacti, dust and inter-familial copulation. Lots of signs are posted with handy advice along the lines of ‘Please leave your gun outside the shop’ and ‘Vote for Randy P. Overbite for Sheriff, Mayor and Executioner’. We stop for petrol and get out, sharpish.

The great Grand Canyon mission suffers another setback when we find that chances are it’s closed. How exactly you close a 271 mile long hole in the ground confuses me slightly. You can’t really imagine the Alps or the Sahara Desert closing at 5.30pm each evening. Undeterred, we bounce along the mixture of dust and shingle which they laughably label ‘a road’ to see what we can find. Thirteen miles later we find that the rest of the way is tarmacced. A little bit like building an escalator to cover the last 50m of the summit of Mt. Everest.

The bright red rock of the canyon looms over the horizon. Although we can only see the plateau of the North Ridge, it is still spectacular, stretching across the horizon like a giant wall.

The American Parks Association seem to have cottoned on to the perfect method to get money out of tourists. $20 to bring the car into the park itself, followed by $30 each to get the shuttle bus around the viewpoints. This is followed by the confusing American sales tax system which adds on a few more dollars and then another $30 for the right to stand on their special glass-bottomed viewing platform (no cameras allowed, but they do invite you to purchase one of their delightful souvenir pictures for a large additional fee). Deciding that this is one attack on our wallets too far we stick with the basic admission fee and walking right up to the edge to try and see the bottom.

For the most part, this is fruitless. This is one very deep canyon. If you look to the left, you can see the canyon on the horizon. If you look to the right, you can see the canyon on the horizon. If you look straight ahead, you can see the canyon on the horizon. If you look down, all you can see is the canyon. As far as big holes in the ground go, this is certainly very impressive.

The usual photographs are all taken, the canyon from this angle; the canyon from that angle; someone dangling their legs over the edge; someone pretending to jump in, another photo of the canyon from another angle. The shuttle bus to the second viewing platform offers the best view of the lot. Stood on the edge of an outcrop you are surrounded from every side by huge, empty space. Somewhat ironically, one of the most impressive things is the fact that the whole thing was created by the murky brown trickle at the bottom that looks to be no bigger than a stream

There are a few minutes of simply glorious sunset, then the sun goes in and the whole thing just disappears. It would seem that our “decision” to arrive at 7pm is not looking like the wisest piece of thinking. This is then compounded when the large Indian party on the shuttle bus decide that now would be ideal time to treat us to their version of Bollywood’s greatest hits.

The dark drops even further and the road home is long. And very dark. And very bumpy again. We soon realise that following the car in front isn’t the best idea when he parks up at a local ranch. The pace picks up and we find ourselves in a convoy of cars, all kicking up the dust and desperate to get out of the desert and into civilisation. This is probably what it would be like if there was a rally for middle of the range estate cars.

We find ourselves back on the tarmac and a local coyote decides that he wants to help us celebrate by trying to jump under our tyres. Now all we need to do is find somewhere to stay for the night, in the dark, wet desert.

Salvation appears in the form of the Hacienda Hotel & Casino, a grand building situated on the shores of Lake Mead. We had previously been drawn to it by the promise of $29 helicopter rides and late night breakfasts of sausage and eggs for 99 cents.

We check in and following some tired bickering head down for a midnight feast (£15 to feed the four of us) before heading to bed, ready for the following morning’s return to Vegas.

Monday, September 1st

A slightly later start gives way to an old fashioned buffet breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, “biscuits” (scones) and “gravy” (mushroom and pepper sauce with the consistency of porridge). We decide to soak up some of the late morning sun in the adjacent swimming pool and hot-tub. Graham makes friends with some small American children who think that it would be great fun to see how much they could annoy him by splashing his book and using him as a climbing frame.

Swimming pool fun over, we hit the same road as the previous day with the intention of doing the Hoover Dam a bit more justice. Built between 1931 and 1935 to give greatly depressed workers something to do (and to give water to Las Vegas and electricity to the south-western United States), it’s very tall and very big. In spite of this, it is just a lump of concrete in a river and once the photos have been taken, with the feeling that we are cooking in the midday sun we head back to the car. A further diversion is found on the way, with a small colony of near tame chipmunks that are perfectly happy to run all the way up to your toes to investigate you.

A level hour long drive brings the skyscrapers and structural cabaret of Las Vegas back into view. We walk through the maze of the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino to find the hotel check-in and up to our room. The name of the hotel soon becomes clear, all the rooms are suites. So we have a couple of fridges, a ‘cosmetics’ room, a couple of tables, several chairs, a giant sofa and a glorious view of the adjacent (and very colourful and shiny) hotel building, the lagoon-like pool and the Las Vegas strip in the background.

With a few hours to pass before our evenings festivities can begin in earnest, we set our beers to chill in a sink full of ice and set off to explore in our own ways before retiring for an hours nap before hitting Las Vegas for the second time.

With Virgin Atlantic still literally taking the very shirt off Andrew’s back, various items of underwear are donated and we set about enjoying our evening beer while preparing for our evening out.

Our first port of call is the Voodoo lounge, located on the 50th floor of our hotel. With the top floor of the hotel converted into a rather chic restaurant (which we didn’t visit) and a tasteful open-air bar/club (which we did), this is clearly the place to come to get the sweeping vistas across the city by night. Although we could have comfortably enjoyed the views all evening, we had a date with the strip to meet.

We jumped in the first available taxi and discovered that our taxi driver was Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore who had clearly fallen on hard times. He was however, a veritable mine of advice and information. Our initial destination was the Bellagio, a marble-built Venetian palace, and home to the water-displays which adorn every promotional video of Las Vegas ever made. Taking place every 15 minutes, the displays are a network of several dozen water cannons which produce jets of spray, dancing in time to the music. We are around to enjoy two performances, the second of which, set to ‘All That Jazz’ from ‘Chicago’ is added to all of our mental highlights reels.

Time waits for no man and nowhere is this truer than on an evening out in Las Vegas. We jump into the first available taxi and head for Downtown, the Vegas of Elvis, Howard Hughes and the Rat Pack. Seemingly on a smaller scale than the opulence of the Strip, it is no less impressive. It feels a lot more genuine, which considering there are still flashing lights and slot machines as far as the eye can see, is no mean feat.

We have been brought here on the recommendation of our taxi driver who insisted that we should present ourselves at the restaurant at the Four Queens and get their prime rib roast for a little over £3.50. Finding that this will cost a little more unless we become members of the casino, we sign our names to get our free membership (along with a handsome pack of branded playing cards in a tin box) and wander up for our steaks. These arrive promptly and are devoured with precious little ceremony.

No trip to Las Vegas is complete without a few hands of Blackjack and while at the Four Queens we decide that we are in as good a spot as any - the table minimum being only $5, compared to the $25 or $50 dollars that are the table minimum in some of the larger casinos. At least we knew that if we lost a few hands we knew that we could still afford to eat for the rest of the holiday. Our luck at the table varied, ranging from finishing on $17 up on our original exchange of chips to $30 down.

Suitably gambled out, we decide that now would be an ideal time to call to arrange for our limo to come and collect us. Another of our friendly taxi drivers having sold us $10 tickets which allowed us free limo transport and free entry into Sapphire, the largest ‘Gentleman’s Club’ in Las Vegas. The call is made and the limo is arranged to collect us. This plan is briefly rethought when we remember that we also have free entry into the rooftop club at the Rio for the rest of the evening and while the Sapphire is open until the wee small hours, the Voodoo club closes at two. And we were now in the mood for some more spectacular views. We jump into the nearest taxi, with the plan of re-ordering our limo from our hotel.

We arrive back at the Rio in high-spirits and with high-hopes. However, we discover that the doors to our high-rise venue are closed. Highly disappointing. We order free drinks merely by sitting by some slot machines and calling the waitress over. The Sapphire is telephoned once more and the long-suffering limo driver is sent out again. With fatigue catching up with me, I shamefully retire to bed, leaving the other three to enjoy the earthly pleasures of the Sapphire Gentleman’s Club, to return at 5.30am.

What took place within their walls shall remain a closely guarded secret.

Tuesday, September 2nd

The motto of the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino is ‘Leave Your Inhibitions At Home’. We decide to respect this maxim by ignoring our inhibitions regarding checking out of hotels on time. After not enough sleep, we stumble out of bed ten minutes before the 11am check-out time, and lurch around for the next hour or so and try to pack up.

As luck would have it, the Rio have chosen this morning for all their systems to develop technical faults, and they probably wouldn’t have realised if we ended up staying for an additional night. Tempting though this is to all of us, we settle instead for relaxation by their lovely lagoon shaped pool, with the now ubiquitous hot-tubs.

Realising that we were on the verge of Leaving Las Vegas without sampling one of the world-famous all-you-can-eat buffets, we decide that this is an ideal opportunity. As our luck would have it, the buffet widely accepted as being the best in the city was 150m away from us on the casino floor of our previous night’s lodgings.

For $17 per person, we were treated to a banquet. And then another banquet. And then another. Italian, Japanese, American, Mexican, Chinese were represented in any number of spectacular and tasty ways. Once we had eaten out own weights in peeled shrimp, clam chowder, sushi, tacos, pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, samosas, Chinese dumplings, corn-on-the-cob and barbeque ribs we made a start on their enormous selection of freshly baked gooey pastries, cakes and desserts. Groaning, we head back to the pool for half an hours dozing before returning to the car.

Additionally, Andrew has by now discovered that his case having been originally forgotten by Virgin Atlantic on the 30th August has now been forgotten on 31st August, 1st September and 2nd September as well. Deciding that one pair of socks and one set of underwear is probably not enough to go out into the wildernesses of Death Valley and Yosemite National Park, another trip to the outlet mall is required. A quick in-and-out trip turns into a 90 minute free-for-all, with everyone realising just how much cheaper things are over here. Watches, shoes, belts, caps, shirts, trousers and all number of additional items are purchased and we set off north-west for Pahrump.

The brisk hop over to Pahrump takes less than an hour and a half and before long we are happily installed at the bar at Wolfie’s where we enjoy a few beers and yet more food (for those not satisfied by the earlier buffet). A few dollars were won out of the slot machines to try and offset earlier losses in Vegas, and we while away the rest of the evening on the skittles alley. Despite all but Graham being fairly dreadful (hours of practise on the Wii seemingly counting for nothing in my own case), the evening finished smoothly and we hit the sack.

Wednesday, September 3rd

Rising early, we find our free Best Western breakfast of the usual, plus a choice of cereals and a waffle maker. We eat and pack up quickly with consideration given to the 300 miles that we need to drive between Pahrump and Lee Vining. This task is made no easier by the fact that the overwhelming majority of that 300 miles is through the arid wilderness of Death Valley. As the name suggests, it’s not a place to be taken lightly. On average daily temperature it is believed to be the hottest place on earth, and today it appears to be living up to that reputation. With the car loaded up with plenty of emergency provisions and 15 gallons of water (nicely installed and covered in ice in our brand new Styrofoam cool-box) we set off into the desert.

We stop off at the visitors centre to pay the now familiar American National Parks Association $20 entry fee and collect maps and advice from the friendly attendant. We then take another detour a few miles down the road to test out nerves and bodies to the limit with a one mile walk along the Golden Canyon Trail. Whilst one mile doesn’t sound a huge amount, when you are walking along a desert path in 42 degree heat it’s wise not to stray too far from your car. A hot, dusty trail leads to the grand ‘Red Cathedral’ (a rock that’s a bit bigger than the other rocks), but a brief scramble up one of the large outcrops reveals spectacular views over the surrounding terrain. With sweat, sand, dust and water liberally dripping off us we start the journey back to the car. The whole journey was little more than a mile, but all were extremely glad to return to the car for water and shade.

The rest of the journey through Death Valley passed without any of the stories of gross dehydration, car failure, scorpion-sting, rattlesnake poisoning or Black Widow spider bite that would have given us a 30 second slot on BBC News 24, and we found ourselves returning back through the little hamlets of Stovepipe Wells, Panamint Springs and Lone Pine. Just on from Lone Pine, we took a brief detour to Keough’s Hot Springs. Avoiding the $7 official pools with their enamel and chlorine, we head instead to the small, dugout ponds that the locals have created for their own use. Virtually filling the pond that we enter are a party of touring Brits, most of whom seem very surprised and impressed that we have managed to get organised enough to do the trip without the aid of a burly Californian guide. Suitably relaxed and bathed, we leave them to their pool and with a wry chuckle at their similarly sized vehicle to our own (for five times as many people as we are transporting) we head back on the road towards Lee Vining.

At this point the surrounding scenery begins to change. Dust is replaced by grass, sand by plants and scrubland by a variety of trees. The fiery air, so stifling in Death Valley is replaced by a cooling breeze, and we begin to start the climb into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We are given a small reminder that even out of the desert we are still at risk from the nature around us, as a small whirlwind passes within 100m of us.

The approach to Lee Vining is in a similar vein, middling-sized peaks sprinkled with evergreens. Our destination is South Tufa, the best location to enjoy the perplexing topography of Mono Lake. With a salinity twice that of sea water (and a thousand times more alkaline) nothing of any note is capable of living in the water, but what it lacks in interesting wildlife it more than makes up for spectacular geology.

We arrive just as the sun is setting, which although we get some lovely photos, it means that we slightly restricted in terms of light and time. We had intended to experiment with floating in the lake to test its salinity, but this idea is quickly dashed, not only because of the dropping light and temperature but also because of the swarms of sand-flies which have made the edge of the water their home.

Instead, we make do with a wander around the spires, free-standing pillars of calcium carbonate created underwater when the spring water from various rivers mixed with the salty lake water. As the water level of the lake has fallen, the towers have become visible.

We stroll and photograph for an hour, taking particular note of the wildlife in the vicinity including a nesting Osprey and a playful rabbit until the light drops and we find ourselves in darkness.

We take the road back into Lee Vining to the El Mono Motel, a friendly, family-run place on the edge of down and immediately head back out to find some dinner. We have been recommended a local place called the Whoa Nellie Deli, which is found in the unlikely setting of the Mobil petrol station. However in a classic case of not judging a book by its cover, the food is excellent and the service is very friendly. We head back to El Mono Motel and are asleep before our heads hit the pillow.

Thursday 4th September

We rise and start the journey into Yosemite. Compared to the bleak, barren scenery of the previous day in Death Valley, the steep peaks and green trees provide a stark contrast. The standard $20 is paid and we start out trip down into the valley along twisting roads and mountainous passes. Around every corner is a new mountain to photograph and a new sight to savour.

Our plan is to leave our luggage at Curry Village where we will be spending the night and then have a light walk to prepare us for the exertions of our three day trip into the wilderness. We bring everything from the car into our small wooden hut. This is a park regulation; anything that is scented must not be left in the car overnight – if a bear smells something it likes inside the car, it will peel the roof off to get at it.

We pack light and set of in the direction of Verdon Falls, an easy 3 mile trek up a relatively steep path.

We reach the foot of Verdon Falls and decide that it is an excellent place to stop and have lunch. We find a fairly flat rock to lay our stuff on and (avoiding the attention of the local ground squirrels) set about braving the glacial waters of the waterfall. We eventually pluck up the courage to dive in and then sharply get out again. The water is VERY cold. As it is freshly melted snow and ice, this obviously shouldn’t come as much of a surprise – but the sun and heat from the walk had obviously lulled us into a false sense of security.

Chilled to the bone, we continue to walk in the sun to the top of Verdon Falls and the “no swimming allowed” Emerald Pool (due to the risk of being swept straight over the top of the falls), looking up to the higher cascade of Nevada Falls. We decide to start our descent, due to a tight schedule when we get back down to the valley.

On our return to Curry Village we find a most welcome surprise awaiting us. Andrew’s suitcase, previously thought to be missing in action is now sat behind the reception desk at the campground. This miracle is due to Virgin sending it from Las Vegas to Yosemite Valley via FedEx, meaning their driver must have had a spectacular day of driving to get it there. Probably beats delivering parcels around the Nevada desert. Andrew is understandably delighted to be reunited with his underwear.

Celebrations are then cut short as we realise that we only have an hour or so to fit in dinner before our evening excursion, a guided tour of the night-sky. We hurry to the takeaway pizza restaurant which seems to be the promptest and most suitable option and place our order. As the minutes tick by, we realise that we are cutting it very fine before getting the shuttle bus to our meeting place for our star-gazing. We decide that driving this would now be the best option, so we grab our pizzas and start shovelling them down us as we blindly drive around the backwoods of Yosemite Valley looking for a group of people who could conceivably be our tour party. By this time, another worry hits us – we had previously been warned that a bear can pick up the scent of anything it wants to. You’re not even allowed to leave a toothbrush in your car due to the aroma of mint that a bear could pick up from it. We now found ourselves filling the inside of our car with the smell of pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Not only that, but we were about to go and sit in a field for an hour with our hands and faces smelling of delicious food.

We found the tour party just as they were about to leave and hastily joined the back of the group. We sat on a collection of tarpaulins and the guide set about explaining to us the different bodies and constellations in the night sky. High in the mountains with minimal lighting, thousands of stars were visible and she explained all of them to us through various stories, explanations, charts and the help of a very powerful laser pointer.

An hour later, with bodies numbed by the hard ground and worry setting in about the bear-ravaged state of our car we headed back along the path to find that all was fine and that we were being silly. We parked (and locked) the car and headed back to our cabin to pack our bags and rest ourselves ahead of the three-day hike in the wilderness.

Friday 5th September

The day started bright and far too early. With a 90 minute drive to get back to Tuolumne Meadows to meet our guide at 8.30am, we needed to rise at 6.30am to make sure we were prompt and on-time. In the end we left Curry Village at approximately 7.20am, meaning that our lives were in Graham’s slightly sleepy hands as he took us on a white-knuckle ride up in the higher mountains to make our appointment.

We arrive only 15 minutes late, and to our relief we find that Josh (our guide for the next three days) is also late. We introduce ourselves to the other members of our party, Gaul (a software developer from Los Angeles), Stephanie, also a Los Angeleno (and a former resident of both Bath and London) and Tom (Stephanie’s apparently mute brother). Everyone seems very happy and at ease in each others company and we chat and get to know each other as the minutes tick past.

Eventually, we check with the attendant at the local sports shop with whom we had previously liaised. He has had word from the company, and apparently Josh was coming from the same location as us, but apparently his bus was delayed. If they had told us, we could obviously have brought him down with us. As it is, we continue to await his arrival on the forecourt of the petrol station. He has an estimated arrival time of between 10am and 11am. 11am comes and goes, and still there is no Josh.

Our friend from the sports shop comes out again and says that there has been a mix-up and Josh should be arriving at about 2pm. This obviously puts a big dent in our day. We take Gaul with us and set out on a mini-hike to take in some of the surrounding countryside. We take a trip up to Parsons Lodge where a kindly volunteer with excellent facial hair tells us a little about the area and the history and confirms some of our wildlife spotting. We take a short hop over the headland to Soda Springs, where naturally carbonated water flows from the earth. From here we wander back down to the river, where we pass a relaxing half hour swimming and watching the marmots sunning themselves on the opposite bank.

At approximately 1.30pm we head back to the petrol station to see if the ever-elusive Josh has turned up. He hasn’t. At approximately 2.30pm, a battered red car pulls up, and a skinny school-leaver in a park uniform emerges. He eventually comes over to our group and introduces himself as Josh. Unapologetically, he says that we can either carry on with the original plan (for which we should have departed 5 hours previously), or we can just have a refund of our money and forfeit the whole trip.

Following some discussion within the group, we opt for the refund. Josh is remarkably candid about the whole situation and says that he forgot that he was supposed to be taking us out today (in spite of phone calls we had made on the preceding day to check everything was fully organised). However, with an extra $1200 in our pockets (and all the gear that we would previously had to hire donated to us by Josh for no cost) we are ready to set out and do the expedition on our own.

We purchase lunch and a more useful map and set about sorting out a feasible route for the next couple of days. After coming up with various different options and consulting with a variety of different park officials we are told that most of our plans are dangerous, unrealistic, stupid, illegal or all of the above. The only plan that seems to be suitable is to do effectively the same route as originally planned (!) by Josh, with his stuff and his wilderness permit, but without him and with all our money back. Seemed pretty ideal. We settle down into the Tuolumne Meadows Campground where we plan to spend the night before rising at dawn to start the overnight hike and then camping at Young Lakes as per the original planned hike. We erect the tents and bear-proof everything we own (courtesy of the giant iron bear lockers) and take the short drive to the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, where we hope to be fed our last decent meal before we wander up into the mountains.

We eat very well, around a large communal table with a party of Americans with whom we exchange witty banter and feel quite happy about how our hike has turned out. We collect recommendations of where to go and what to see, as well as advice from the rest of our trip. With the offer of free lodging in San Francisco, we pay up and head back to our cold tents.

We take a brief diversion via the sadly finishing camp-fire story session going on back at the campground and after a brief chat with another pleasant American couple we settle in for an early night, ready for the early start up the mountain in the morning.

Saturday 6th September

After an entire night awake on the gravel floor with the half-centimetre thick line of packing foam offering no comfort, we rise into the cold, 9,500ft air. The plan is to take the borrowed equipment up to Young Lakes, a calm 8 mile walk and then camp there that evening before walking back. So, another cold night with a stone bed and the bears. With our groaning backs and sleep-deprived bodies complaining of another night of the same, except worse, we reconsider our options.

A quick call to the local information centre and apparently there is one single room available in the whole of Yosemite. Considering that normally every room and every campsite space is booked weeks in advance, this is quite a surprise. Considering this to be fate, we book the room on the spot and start to rethink our day.

As we don’t have the long walk with the giant packs and sub-standard tents, we are given more freedom and flexibility. We decide that we will take the short walk to Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequoias would offer us our walking fix, with some impressive views at the other end.

The walk is fairly level and easy-going (and judging by the truckloads of French and Japanese tourists, quite popular). The trees themselves are enormous (up to 3,000 years old in some cases), but unfortunately there are a lot more lying on the ground than there are standing. They are no less impressive in their prone form, and allow much closer examination and give a greater sense of scale. The trees themselves are amongst the largest living things on Earth and we are suitably impressed.

From here, we head back into Yosemite Valley to take any photos that we had previously missed of the landscape and to finish off the sunny afternoon with a quick swim in the river. The water is a good temperature and we relax, pleased that the day that was supposed to be huge amounts of walking and wilderness camping is ending in such a pleasant way.

Our day is nicely capped just as we are preparing to leave and head to our urgently-booked hotel. A “dog” that we had previously spotted slightly upstream from where we are swimming lollops slightly closer and begins to cross the river, and we realise that we had been sharing our paddling area with a medium-sized black bear. 50m or so away, he gives us a glance and pads away into the undergrowth. Another hoped-for sight ticked off, we head back to the car and start the short drive to the Yosemite View Lodge.

An old-fashioned style motel with forecourts and swimming pools, we are shown to the last empty room in the whole of Yosemite National Park and are extremely happy. It will certainly be the only room of the trip where we are likely to have a pink spiral staircase to take us up to our second bedroom. We wash the dirt from our bodies (fairly minimal dirt compared to how we would have been had our original plan been followed through) and head off for a dinner of ribs, soup and salad, washed down with the house cocktail. We feel generally content, comparing our evening to what we would be doing had we been on the gravel of Young Lakes compared to the hot food and comfortable beds of Yosemite View Lodge. Our evening ends with large bourbons and card games outside the bar area.

Sunday 7th September

A nice relaxing start to the day in big fluffy beds before heading down to a great buffet consisting of anything you could conceivably want to eat for breakfast. We are told that we’re not allowed to go and sit in the sun on the balcony with the pleasant view of the river, but as we’ve taken ourselves out there anyway they are nice and let us stay.

This is then followed by checkout and the now standard hour lying in the sun and the hot-tub. When we depart, the SatNav proves that it is not always the answer to all our questions when we stumble over the Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort 8 miles away from where TomTom says we’ll find it.

We can’t check in until 3pm, so we set out to see what other entertainments the Bug can offer. It doesn’t disappoint. We learn there is a health spa on the premises and we are offered the choice of a day pass to the spa for $10, or the option of paying $10 for the evening yoga class, which include a free day pass to the spa. Always keen to try new things, we sign ourselves up for the yoga session and set about enjoying the sizzling hot-tub, the sauna and the cold-rain shower. Feeling suitably relaxed, we decide that we need to burn off some excess energy.

On the journey up along the river, we had previously spied several pools for swimming and fun and we now made these our destination. We passed a very pleasant hour jumping into the surprisingly warm water from a series of large rocks.

On return, it was time for yoga. Despite all but Andrew being novices, we threw ourselves into it with enthusiasm. After an hour of stretching with panpipe music in the background, our chakras fully exercised and our seeds happily planted in the ground we headed back into spa for further enlightenment and relaxation. A short but very tasty hostel meal was followed by a rather later than planned check-in to our accommodation.

When we turned the key in the lock of the old barn that they had assigned us we were surprised to see that they seemed to have given us a storeroom to stay in for the evening. Broken mattresses, old furniture, an assortment of chipboard and battered furniture littered what were apparently our lodgings. A try of the other door to the barn showed that we had been slightly hasty and we settled in to our lovely alpine chalet style apartment, complete with Aga and wireless router. Being late (and with a long day of driving to follow), we all turned in.

Monday 8th September

The morning started early with nature’s alarm call meaning that we wouldn’t be able to stay in bed even if we wanted to, with a (latterly identified) Pileated Woodpecker mistaking our wooden barn for a tree and pecking the hell out of it from 6.30am onwards.

We hit the road early, with the wine country of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys our destination. The highway we take is apparently California’s version of the M1, which is presumably correct judging by the amount of traffic that we have to compete with but incorrect due to the quality of the road that we are driving along. We bounce along the bumpy concrete with gusto towards Vallejo where we begin our round tour.

The road north from Vallejo took in the town of Napa itself. All the guidebooks had told us to prepare to be disappointed by Napa, so with low expectations we headed through the town. The town clearly can’t have been anything special as it passed us by without us noticing it. The must more pleasant town of Oakville was our destination, where we planned to eat at the Oakville Grocery.

Lunch was very pleasant (if a little pricey at $80 for a picnic lunch for four), but when you’re in the heart of gastro-country it makes sense to splash out and enjoy the best that the Californian countryside has to offer. At this point our road heads south-west to Sonoma, where the Californian wine industry was first cultivated.

We settle on the Buena Vista Winery, where (with the aid of a couple of 2-for-1 vouchers) we get seven wines to taste each for the princely sum of £2.50 per head. The Buena Vista was the original Californian vineyard (founded in 1857) and we try a selection of their Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Merlot and Syrah creations.

Suitably refreshed and educated in the way of California viticulture we continue our trip south towards the San Francisco bay. The temperature drops dramatically as we approach and the hot sun and blue skies that had typified our trip thus far vanished, leaving us with cloud and fog. The fog wrapped itself around the turrets of the Golden Gate Bridge as we crossed, with the city and the bay ahead of us. Alcatraz, our destination for the evening was visible with its flashing lighthouse.

Feeling pressed for time, we abandoned the car for the evening (packing overnight bags) and made straight for Pier 33, where the ferries departed for The Rock. We had booked ourselves on the final boat of the day, to take advantage of the slightly creepier night tour.

We had been advised that the evening tour was far more leisurely than its daytime equivalent and thus it proves to be. The ferry takes us the long way around so that we are able to see all sides of the island from the water and then docks. We are assigned a guide who tells us a little of the history and points out some of the more distant buildings before escorting us to the cellblock where we are given equipment for an audio tour (presumably much cheaper than employing somebody to do it).

The audio tour itself is excellent, the stories and history within being told by former Correctional Officers and inmates of Alcatraz, lending a much-appreciated air of authenticity. We realise that this is our first time inside an actual prison before and some parts of the tour (talking you through the “Siege of Alcatraz” and some of the other breakout attempts) highlight some of the harsher realities of prison life.

Once the audio tour is finished, we watch a presentation made by Ranger José (who is giving his final tour prior to his retirement) on the subject of the unsuccessful attempts of the American Indians to claim Alcatraz Island as their own in the late 1960s. José’s own Indian heritage adds an amount of gravitas to his stories and he finished off his final ever talk on the island by singing a Navajo hymn to us all.

The final part of the tour that we had all been looking forward to was a demonstration of the door mechanisms. A large crowd had gathered to watch this, mainly so that they could hear the simultaneous clangs of scores of heavy iron doors being slammed shut (hence the term ‘The Slammer’) and imagine what it must have been like to have those doors close, locking you inside.

At this point we board the ferry home (Alcatraz Island not being a place that you want to accidentally be left behind on) and get given free hot-dogs that they would otherwise have thrown away. Andrew, being a non-meat eater gets a croissant out of the bin.

We head home in a taxi and having got our bearings, check into our hostel and decide that we should try and see a little bit of San Francisco by night (to see us in good stead for the other two nights). We see a couple of bars, a fun Sports Café where we try and learn the rules of baseball in preparation for the following evening and a fairly average Irish pub. Satisfied that there are no wild parties going on this evening that we are missing out on, we head home with a long day planned for tomorrow.


Tuesday 9th September

Up for a free hostel breakfast of juice and toast, we headed straight down to the lobby to join the free guided tour of the farmers market. Finding just the four of us and Lani, our guide we made our way out of the building to the metro station. The farmers market is disappointing (made more interesting by the huge amount of free fruit they offered us to sample), but this cannot make up for the fact that there are larger farmers markets in most average sized British towns. We lose Lani and head up to the ultra-touristy Pier 39 on Fisherman’s Wharf. What used to be a fishing dock has now been taken over by a large colony of sea lions that have now made a number of floating platforms their home. The noise and the stench are rather overpowering, so after amusing ourselves with their playfulness we head off for lunch.

Lunch is a thick, creamy clam chowder served inside a hollowed-out sourdough loaf. Very rich and very filling. After some discussions of what would be a fun way to pass the afternoon, we settle on the idea of hiring tandem bikes and seeing the city on two wheels.

We hire the aforementioned bicycles and are advised to head west, along the cycle path that leads to the Golden Gate Bridge, cross the bridge and head into the pleasant little suburb of Sausolito and then jump on the ferry which should take us back to the North Beach area of San Francisco to return our wheels. This sounds like as good a plan as any, and off we go.

We change partners and positions frequently, and despite a few mishaps, wrong turnings and angry pedestrians we soon find ourselves heading along the winding road which leads up the bridge which dominates the city skyline. Having caught our breath we shoot across at great speed, taking in the view back to the other side of the bay. The wind is strong and we are thankful to reach the other side. We freewheel down into the picturesque, snug Sausolito, a town of boutiques and restaurants based around a harbour promenade. We have a coke in a waterfront bar and pass twenty minutes while we wait for the ferry to take us back to the other side of the bay.

Our plan for the evening is to head a few metro stations south to the AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants and venue for this evenings match between the Giants and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Feeling quite hungry, we head first to a local hamburger joint, the strangely monikered Carl’s Jr. We enjoy some very tasty burgers and fries made from real, freshly chopped potato (not something that is likely to trouble you in McDonalds anytime soon). Graham’s face whitens when we examine the nutritional (sic) information hidden on a placard in a corner where they presumably hope that nobody will ever see it. Feeling every single one of those 1,700 calories heavier, we head to the metro station and towards the ballpark.

The stadium is only half-full, so we decide to ignore our ticketed seats slightly higher than the sky and set ourselves up nicely in the posh seats that nobody has bought. From our new position we have a great view of the infield, the outfield, the plate, the diamond, the bases and all sorts of other things that we don’t really understand.

We go through the typical novice routine of cheering in the wrong places, applauding the opposition and demonstrating a complete lack of comprehension to any of the ‘plays’. In spite of this, we get quite enthusiastic and by the third innings (whatever one of those is) we are in our element. Our attempts to start a Mexican wave go no further than the four of us however. With the Giants two up in the eighth (we were getting the hang of things by this point) we decided that we would beat the crush and leave, as we had reservations at a bar on the other side of town for an hour later (this later proved to be a mistake as we later discovered the Diamondbacks pulled the game back to 8-8 before the Giants won with a homerun off their final shot).

We headed to Bourbon & Branch; a stones throw from our hostel for 10.30pm, the time of our pre-booked reservation. The bar is based around the concept of a prohibition bar (hence the need for both a reservation and a pre-disclosed password to enter the premises). Once you have walked under the sign reading ‘Anti-Saloon League San Francisco Branch, est. 1920’ you are ushered through in to the bar having given your password through the intercom. The bar itself has a cast-iron ceiling with chandeliers, soft candlelight and pink velvet wallpaper. It smells like a dusty attic and would be exactly as you might imagine a 1920s bar to look (if you replaced the illicit drinker of the 20s for dozens of affluent San Franciscan scenesters).

We each try a couple of drinks, each with a history and created with the finest ingredients available. We sample their ‘Old-Fashioned’, ‘Revolver’, ‘Clermont Affair’ and ‘Blackberry Bramble’ amongst others and end up with a similar sized bill as we were presented for our two night’s accommodation in the hostel.

With Andrew and Graham feeling tiredness catching up on them, they head home for an earlyish night while Neil and I decide to check out a couple more local bars. We end up in a very lively piano bar which seems to be lots of fun until it closes only ten minutes after we arrive, walk into (and straight out of again) a very noisy, very empty underground club and end up in a small bar which is clearly one of the better ones in the neighbourhood – by virtue of still being crowded at 2am.

We pop into the all-night diner next door to the hostel for a bowl of 3am chilli (a bargain at $3) and decide that we have quite a long day tomorrow. Time to noisily wake Andrew up and head to bed.

Wednesday 10th September

We have a reasonably easy start before trying to see as much of the rest of the city that hasn’t already been covered by bicycle before our trip down Hwy 1 the following day. By general consensus the best way to do this is via the cable cars (trams to you or I) which traverse the hills and the city streets. We head up to the North Beach and Chinatown areas to find a suitable place for lunch (alright, it was a very easy start). Later in the day we need to leave our hostel in the centre of town for one on the northern coast of the city.

We wander up and down in search of a reasonably priced fish restaurant (being on the Pacific coast n’ all) and nearly walk straight past a restaurant of near-legendary status that we had all decided that we had to go to before we left San Francisco.

The Stinking Rose is a local institution, an eatery at which garlic takes centre-stage, with every wall in the place covered with signed photographs of the great and the good who claim it to be their favourite restaurant in the city. We decide that we deserve a lavish (and smelly) meal, starting with a bagna calda, oven-roasted garlic cloves in olive oil, soft enough to spread on their home-made garlic focaccia.

We move onto a wide variety of shrimp, mussels, salmon and pasta swimming in garlic, before the pièce de resistance, 3lb of Dungeness crab roasted in their special garlic sauce. We wash it all down with a bottle of Zinfandel (deciding against the special ‘Chateau du Garlique’, but in a moment of gastronomic bravery deciding to share one of the large garlic ice-cream sundaes. The interesting aftertaste is one that stays with us for a very long time.

Satisfied and less-than-fragrant, we wander back up through Chinatown with the idea of washing, scrubbing, showering and de-odorising thoroughly before our evening activity where we need to be on out best social behaviour – the weekly hostel pub crawl. Before this however, we have to check into our new hostel and get ourselves ready. We present ourselves at the lovely Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel just as the sun is lowering in the sky. The friendly lady at reception welcomes us and informs us that they have no record of our reservation. They do however have a record of us booking a stay of one night on April 27th, for which they have already charged a “no-show” charge of $100. As we were all fairly busy (and several thousand miles away) on that date and never had any intention of showing up, we are slightly confused. Particularly as our laptop demonstrates quite incontrovertibly that we had booked our stay for the very evening that we were standing there. Our charming hostess informs us that although they are very sorry, there is not much that they can do as all their beds have been filled. She can however book us in for another night in the very same hostel that we checked out of six hours previously. With time (and seemingly, beds in the city) running out fast, we take her up on her offer and head back down the winding roads towards the City Centre Hostel.

After this palaver we only have half an hour before the tour is due to leave the hostel) we begin to hurry. Graham chooses this moment to decide that he is going to head back to Union Square to visit the place that he had been looking forward to for the whole trip – The Cheesecake Factory.

In Graham’s fevered mind, this had taken on mythological status – like some sort of dairy/pastry version of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, where he could dive into a big vat of vanilla flavoured goo.

The rest of us headed down to The Mission area of town to meet up with the rest of the pub tour. By some quirk of public transport (we took the bus, they walked unnecessarily far to catch the metro) we actually arrived at Zeitgeist where the tour was starting before everybody else, in spite of them leaving the hostel 25 minutes before us.

We ordered insanely strong cocktails (Neil’s ½ vodka, ¼ Worcestershire sauce, 1/8 chilli sauce, 1/8 tomato juice Bloody Mary lives strong in the memory and sinuses) and got chatting to one of the tour organisers, who cheered us all up immensely by informing us that that The Cheesecake Factory wasn’t some sort of dessert Utopia, but a chain restaurant, somewhat similar to TGI Friday. Filled with the sort of good cheer that one can only feel when the dreams of a close friend have been ruined, we set about mingling. Graham arrived shortly afterwards to much hilarity (the tour organiser telephoned two friends, so amused was she by Graham’s misconception), although he will claim for the rest of his life that his cheesecake detour was wonderful.

Top priority for the single members of our group were a very pleasant group of Swedish girls (whose names I now forget), who proved to be our companions for the evening. We move on from Zeitgeist (which was an excellent bar, very biker-friendly with many fun people and fun drinks) to a variety of Mission-based bars, each more identical than the last. Having done plenty of mingling (with Graham and I discovering that we still speak French to a certain extent), we decide that we have a date with The Tonga Rooms.

The Tonga Rooms is a Hawaiian themed bar based in the Fairmont Hotel. For the previous ten days of the trip, it had been a particular obsession of Neil’s, having received an excellent recommendation while back in the UK. We arrived to find that we were the only customers in the place. With our party our eight, (four of us, three Swedes and a random guy who apparently decided that our taxi looked as inviting as any other), we decided that the cheapest way to buy a drink was the big sharing bucket with lots of straws. With two of the Swedish girls getting increasing irate at their pretty friend (who appeared to be building up quite a friendship with Neil), the atmosphere was fraught and to ease the tension (and speed up our exit) Neil decided to finish the bulk of the large cocktail – a decision that he would later live to regret.

Two of the Swedish girls decide that they are fed up of getting angry over their friend and jump in a taxi, leaving the rest of us to see what the centre of San Francisco can offer us on a Wednesday night. In an extraordinary evening of prescience, we end up in exactly the same bars in exactly the same order as Neil and I had visited 22 hours previously.

Not that this is in any way deliberate. After his heroic actions in the Tonga Rooms, Neil is not in a fit state to plan where we are going. Back in the piano bar (a massive amount of fun this evening), Neil decides that he is feeling a little bit queasy and demonstrates this fact in a very physical way. All over the bar.

Andrew eventually takes responsibility for the ailing Neil and we move on, firstly to the underground club and secondly to the sophisticated bar that we finished up in the previous night. Deciding that we are in no fit state to be sophisticated, we bid our final Swedish friend adieu and take ourselves back to the hostel.

The rest of the evening is spent in tired resignation and following various fun and games we finally settle down for a restless nights sleep.

Thursday 11th September

Not surprisingly after the previous nights excursion we find ourselves starting slowly. I have a strange craving for melted cheese and set out to find myself an overpriced Panini; the others make do with the hostel breakfast.

Today we start on Highway 1. This is an astonishingly scenic road, which winds all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles (a distance of 656 miles), never leaving sight of the sea a few metres to the right of the car. Over the next six days or so, we plan to follow this road all the way down the west coast.

We take a quick stop in Haight-Ashbury on the way to the highway, a small district in north-west San Francisco. During the 1960s, ‘The Haight’ was the centre of the counter-culture movement and was home to some of the best-known names of the era including Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and Jerry Garcia. We visit Amoeba Records, apparently one of the best record stores in the USA and spend a happy twenty minutes browsing (although we could have comfortably spent ten times that amount).

We hit the road again for the first time in a few days (briefly taking a walk along the beach to cure some hangover ills) before settling with a healthy salad-based lunch at Año Nuevo State Reserve.

Año Nuevo is famous for being the breeding ground in North America for the several-thousands strong colony of elephant seals that make the Pacific Ocean their home and although it is not breeding season, year-round one can expect to see a few dozen lazily basking on the shore.

Being a national park we collect our now standard national park walking permit and set out along the pleasant walk through the terrain, which changes from beach, the moorland, to scrub, to sand dune, back to beach and then finally to pathless wilderness.

We later discover that there was a reason that this wilderness was pathless.

We step over various carcasses of dead elephant seals (feeling slightly like potential victims in a nature-based remake of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre) before we approach the beach, on which we can see several lounging, noisy, smelly seals.

We are able to wander up to them, at which point one in particular becomes noisier and seemingly more ferocious. This is one furry seal that we have no intention of trying to stroke. We are calm, quiet and respectful and we spend time recording video and watching the creatures lollop around the sand and play in the surf.

After thirty minutes or so we decide that it is time to head back to the car and we start our trek back along the beach, stepping over yet more cadavers. Our journey back is interrupted by two people in red jackets, who seem a little animated.

Apparently we had wandered off the path and were not supposed to go quite so close to the animals (a quick look at our map/permit quickly confirms this). “We have been following you all the way and we have been watching you through our telescope”. I can’t think of any time in life when those words are good things to hear. We obviously protest our innocence and point out that we are naïve British people who had no idea that we were doing anything wrong (although seeing the various ropes and barriers, plus the fact that we got to the beach minus any sort of path, we must have had some idea). We are told that if they had been official rangers rather than park volunteers (the words that calmed us down somewhat) then we could each have been liable for a $200 fine, we apologise once again and, ever mindful of their walk-talkies, start to hurry back to the car before they impound it and burn it as punishment.

We arrive in Monterey an hour later and find a friendly (if slightly sterile, with its “10pm doors locked-1am final curfew”) hostel which we happily check into. We are feeling quite tired after our long walk/angry volunteer encounter and we decide that tonight would be a good night to stay in.

We purchase food from the amusingly named Nob Hill (named after the posh area of San Francisco) supermarket and head back to the hostel to cook enormous plates of Spaghetti Bolognese and have a blissfully early night, to enjoy a much needed 10 hour sleep.

Friday 12th September

After the excitement of the San Francisco pub crawl we enjoy our well-deserved lie-in. We potter up and down Cannery Row (previously the centre of Monterey’s fish-canning industry, now a long line of boutiques, bars and restaurants) for an hour before heading to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, famous for being the best aquarium in the USA.

After been sold student tickets by the friendly lady who served us (“are you students?”, “are you sure you’re not students?”, “well you look like you should be students to me, I’ll just give you student tickets”) we enter the aquarium. And as four people in a big public place are often found to do, we promptly split up. We spend the next four or five hours navigating the complicated split buildings of the aquarium, often being given a stamp on our hand if we wish to return when we have no intention of leaving in the first place. We occasionally meet up, for the feeding of the ridiculously cute sea-otters, the interesting interactive video presentation on which fish we should and should not be eating, the ocean tank feeding (where we hope that the diver will be accidentally bitten by the sharks), but we more or less keep ourselves to ourselves.

Our afternoon livens up when we see the representatives of The American Society For The Defense Of Tradition, Family And Property (TFP), who we have seen over the previous 24 hours with their amusing neckerchiefs and banners insisting that “God’s Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman”. While clearly missing the irony of ten young, unmarried men travelling around the country in close company with each other, proclaiming their disgust at homosexuality.

Andrew, Graham and Neil decide that they want to go for a drive (like we’d not spent enough flippin’ time in the car so far this holiday) and elect to do the 17-mile drive which takes them around the Monterey Peninsula to Carmel (the picturesque town of which Clint Eastwood claimed the mayorship during the mid-1980s). In the meantime, I locate a suitable place for dinner and stroll along the pier watching the sea otters frolicking in the bay and the sea lions taking over people’s boats that are moored along the pier.

When the other three return, we set ourselves up for an evening to trump our quiet night in with Spaghetti Bolognese that we enjoyed the previous evening. Following a bit of internet research, I direct us a couple of streets down to Hula’s Tiki, a Caribbean/Hawaiian restaurant with a reputation for good food, nice cocktails and a lot of fun. After a wait at the bar for a few minutes for a table (enough time to order our first round of cocktails) we are shown to our table by a friendly waitress. We share appetizers of sea-bass ceviché and excellent sweet potato fries, before tucking into our main courses of a variety of superbly cooked local fish and shellfish, all cooked with a hint of tropical flair. We also worked our way through an excellent range of cocktails, before heading to downtown Monterey for some fun.

The night out starts at the Crown & Anchor, a faux British pub with a pleasant patio area, which we have been advised to go to due to the roaring open fire that it has outside. This is great, but difficult to enjoy due to the racket of the DJ area. Not feeling quite in the mood yet for music as loud as that, we take recommendations from the attractive group of ladies queuing to enter the garden area that we have just left. They suggest the Britannia Arms Pub (locally known as the Brit – a theme develops for Monterey’s pubs and bars). We head over there and find it much more to our tastes.

The bar is packed, with a band doing turn of the century cover songs and a hugely fun crowd. It doesn’t take us long before we find ourselves chatting to a pleasant group of girls at the bar. The evening gets even better when we find that the group who recommended the bar to us have decided to join us here. We pass the evening flitting from group to group and make plenty of fun new friends.

Our evening takes a turn for the worse when we remember that our hostel has a curfew of 1am. We are a 10 minute taxi ride away and we will be locked out and have to sleep on the street if we are not back in 25 minutes. Andrew dashes out to hail a taxi and jump in it, while we say our goodbyes.

Our plans change when we (as all good friends do) decide to forget about Andrew, and think that he can just open the front door whenever we decide to roll up. And get back to socialising with our new friends. Graham takes advantage of this and meets a young lady - and we see little of him for the rest of the evening. In the meantime, Neil and I meet two pleasant girls at the bar named Alexandria and Imsorryiveforgottenyourname and we perfect our charming Englishmen routine, much to their delight.

When it is time to leave, we end up loitering on the street for a few minutes and we are joined by a group of guys who are in Monterey, having driven 691 miles from Phoenix, Arizona to support their friend who won yesterdays Ultimate Fighting Competition. Only in America. We pass the next half hour teaching them English football songs and English swear-words (as drunken English people are wont to do) before Graham and his new friend reappear. Graham is quite disorientated and seems surprised to find Neil and I still on the street an hour after all the bars have closed. In a confused daze, he heads off in the opposite direction.

The guys that we have now become firm friends with inform us that they are staying in the reasonably posh Hotel Monterey, which as luck would have it is right across the street. Had my hotel been right across the street then I would have been asleep an hour earlier, but then that is maybe because my weedy English body can’t cope with this much fun.

The four American guys, Alexia and her friend, Neil and I settle into their hotel room. We politely decline the various drugs that they offer us (while beginning to wonder whether or not this plan might turn out to be a terrible mistake), we accept a beer each from the impressive drinks cabinet that they have created out of one of their suitcases, filled with a dozen bags of un-melted supermarket ice. We start to chat the night away, interrupted only by the frequent calls from reception to keep the noise down.

Eventually one of these phone calls turns to threats, as they say that the police are on their way. Not intending to have a night in the Monterey cells as part of our holiday itinerary, Neil and I scarper. We are halfway down the road when we realise how silly we have been. Having introduced two pretty young girls to a group of drunken men, we have managed to abandon them in their hotel room. We realise that we have to do something. We stride back into the hotel and adapting our best Hugh Grant accents, offer a smiling ‘good evening’ to the receptionist. We crouch down and creep along the corridor to avoid the peep holes on every door. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Like all good-ideas-that-seem-good-at-the-time, we realise that it was a bad idea, when the burliest of the American guys opens their front door to find Neil and I prostrate, with our ears pressed against the previously-there wooden surface.

We make up an excuse that sounds credible. Or at least, sounded credible to us at that moment in time. Whatever we said, it gave us time to get out. The cheery hello that we gave to the two police officers who were entering at the moment that we were leaving the building is the one reason that we feel that Alexia and her friend followed us out shortly afterwards. We jump in a taxi and give the hostel address.

Our taxi drops us outside the hostel and for the first time in several hours we worry about how we are going to gain access. Fortunately, we see salvation in the shape of Andrew standing very angrily by the window. He lets us in and we settle down to sleep. He later tells us that it was pure chance that he had woken up to see if we were back yet, and had we not arrived at that moment then we may well have been cuddling up to the sea lions down by the bay for comfort.

Saturday 13th September

We are woken by Graham letting himself back in at 9am. We are all feeling a tad tired and delicate after our previous night’s fun and games and we make the most of our snug hostel beds. We make ourselves the complimentary pancakes and are comfortably the last people to check out of the hostel.

We have a decent-ish drive to do before we arrive at the sleepy inland hamlet of Cambria, where some insane person has decided we should spend our final Saturday night of the trip. But then again, maybe they predicted the excesses of the previous night in advance.

Deciding that Cambria probably doesn’t have too much to hold our attention we plan a couple of stops along the way. First up is a small walk through Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park which leads to a cliff-top path with a view over an astonishingly lovely beach.

Golden sand encircles an emerald-green sea with the 50ft McWay Falls hitting the ground a few metres away from the surf. There are steep hills all around, each other them covered with conifers. It looks as though a child had attempted to draw an idealised beach and placed it in the middle of the Big Sur coast.

To our regret there is no way down to the water-level itself (in the midday heat we consider this a big shame). This is understandable - if the beach were crowded with the sort of people who were sharing the path with us, then it would only be a fraction as beautiful. We do our usual thing of getting lost a couple of times, then losing each other, then losing Neil’s sunglasses, then hitting the road 90 minutes after we wanted to.

After the disappointment of not being allowed down the postcard beach, we decide that we will settle for any beach and set about finding one. As the Big Sur coast is effectively 90 miles of rocky cliffs, this may prove to be harder than we expect. We console ourselves with spectacular views to rival the previous day, every bend and turn in the road leading to another vertical drop with blue waves crashing into a nest of seals and pelicans.

Eventually we get lucky and we find a long, sandy beach which is clearly the best place in the area – due to the sea teeming with surfers, even in spite of the late hour. We figure that we probably have about an hour until we lose the heat of the sun altogether, so we set about damn well enjoying it. Graham has his usual sleep and we take a walk along the beach to explore the caves, taking special care to avoid the dozens of jellyfish that have been washed up on the beach (varying from the size of a tomato up the size of a car tyre.

The sun begins to fade and we head back up the steps to the top of the cliff (surprisingly passing more surfers on the way down – maybe it gets REALLY good just as it gets REALLY cold) and make our way to our motel in Cambria.

Cambria is a very small, very sleepy little hamlet and we soon set about checking out the local facilities. Once we have finished this a few minutes later, we enjoyed a fairly average meal at a locally recommended Mexican restaurant where we embarrass ourselves by asking how spicy everything on the menu is, and the waiting staff embarrass themselves by getting all of their answers wrong.

With some of us happily satiated and others of us less happy with their hugely spicy burritos left to waste, we head over to Mozzi’s Saloon where we have been told that “if anything is going to happen, it will be there”.

The place seems to be a fairly typical bar (animal skulls and murals of semi-clothed cowgirls on the walls, regular clientele of locals scarred by farming equipment and an irregular breeding history, pool table, Irish barman), which tonight has a fairly decent covers band playing. With the four of us being comfortably the youngest people in the bar by a good ten years, Graham and Andrew decide that an early night is probably the best option for the evening, while Neil and I decide to make the best out of a dull situation.

We don’t have long to wait, when an overweight, middle-aged lady with friends in Liverpool decides to try and make Neil her objet d’amour for the evening. When Neil decides that he doesn’t really fancy this plan, she proceeds to introduce him to ‘some proper, nice American girls’. The fact that she has never met any of these ‘proper, nice American girls’ before in her life doesn’t seem to deter her. Neil spends a diverting half hour being introduced around various girls (and their boyfriends) by what must seem to everyone to be his slightly mad aunt.

The reason for this crusade of hers is that the bar has become rather livelier. A ten-strong group of San Franciscan housewives on a winery tour has just arrived for their annual visit (a fact that Neil’s chaperone strongly disapproves of). I am assured by Monique, one of the slightly less extreme members of the group that it is certain to end with them dancing on the bar and removing their clothing.

Deciding that we don’t need to see the understudy cast for Desperate Housewives de-robe, we take a recommendation from one of the boyfriends that Neil has been introduced to (it may have been a recommendation, it may have been a threat) to “check out the karaoke bar up the hill”, which apparently can get very lively on a Saturday night.

We take the 15 minute trek up the hill in question and find what appears to be the tail end of a dull wedding party. We start to believe that this night is not going to top our previous one, and we start the trudge back home to bed.

Sunday 14th September

The Creekside Inn in Cambria provides us with a very pleasant free breakfast of locally baked pastries, which we eat in the sunshine while watching the hummingbirds and the vultures float around.

Today’s big excursion is to Hearst Castle, the palatial estate designed and built by William Randolph Hearst, an early 20th Century newspaper and media mogul. It is located on a hill looking over the bay of San Simeon five miles (eight kilometres) away and is on an estate of 90,000 square feet (274.3 square hectometres).

After listening to an audio tour during the short bus tour up to the hill (a veritable mine of historical anecdotes and baffling measurement conversions), we arrive in a large group at the glorious ‘back gate’ (larger than most houses) and proceed on an over-rehearsed guided tour.

The estate itself is an intriguing combination of spectacular wealth, confusing cultural clashes and anodyne Americanism. In its heyday ‘the ranch’ (as Hearst named it in a rare moment of understatement) with its various palaces and outbuildings offered 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, tennis courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools (made of gold, obviously), a cinema and a zoo. Descendants of the original zoo animals (including zebras and llamas) still roam the grounds today.

On the way out we watch a hilariously cheesy ‘dramatisation’ of the life of Hearst and the story behind the building of the castle produced by the National Geographic. We leave the premises, semi-impressed by the unrivalled opulence and luxury and semi-disappointed that we weren’t seeing the place as Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant and Winston Churchill saw it, moreover seeing it all from behind a proverbial velvet rope.

Hungry, we take a trip back up the coast to San Simeon and purchase lunch at Sebastian’s Store, a local grocery shop that has apparently been run by the same family since 1852. We buy very cheap and very tasty hot sandwiches (each the size of a man’s forearm) and plan to eat them on the beach, before having a relaxing afternoon lounging.

We entertain ourselves in our own way on the beach, Graham typically falls asleep straight away and remains that way until it is time to leave three hours later, while Andrew, Neil and I explore up and down the beach to see the caves at the far end and the pier.

The pier (the same one used by William Randolph Hearst to unload the materials to build Hearst Castle) in particular offers excellent views of the normally ungainly pelicans, which when hungry dart like arrows into the water in search of fish.

We pass a pleasant couple of hours topping up our suntans before leaving to make the short hop inland to San Luis Obispo. En route, we head to Morro Bay to check out the volcanic splendour of Morro Rock. A former Volcano, now semi-submerged by the Pacific Ocean, it juts out of the ocean like an black, aquatic Uluru. We stop, take a picture and then drive off. It’s been a long day.

Despite the fact that it is Sunday night, SLO (as it is known to the locals) is a large college town and we are hopeful that following our disappointingly calm Saturday night in Cambria that the town might provide some life for us to enjoy.

We eat at a typical college eatery (order at the counter, get given a number and receive a giant burger a few minutes later) and feeling suitably calorific ask around for recommendations of where to spend our evening.

We settle for a reasonably crowded bar (quite a feat in the circumstances) with a pleasant patio garden and the evening livens up when two students at the local college Jasmine and Marina take notice of our delightful English accents and ask if they can ‘hang out’ with us.

‘Hang out’ with them we do and after a couple of drinks in the garden we depart on the recommendation of Marina to a local bar where they do karaoke. As a group we do ourselves proud (Jasmine included) and the only noticeable sign of pain on the faces of the locals is when Marina decides that she wishes to join in, her caterwauling something that not even the four of us can match with our foghorn voices.

The night wears on, the bar begins to empty and the karaoke begins to cease. We charmingly bid farewell to our companions and confusingly navigate the identical SLO streets to find our hostel at a variety of times between 2am and 3.30am.

Monday 15th September

Lacking sleep I rise early to convince HSBC that they want to unblock my debit card and allow me to access my money so that I won’t be stranded in California and spend the rest of my days riding the rails. Once this is done, Andrew and Neil’s lie-in is rudely interrupted when we are told that we should have checked out ten minutes previously and they are locking up immediately.

We throw our belongings in the back of the car (the inside of which now resembles a bomb-site). We have an empty day to fill. Our eventual destination is Santa Barbara, 105 miles to the south, but there are lots of interesting bits and pieces en route to live up the journey.

We head towards the coast to the strip of bars and surf-shops that form Pismo Beach and get very decent grilled pastrami and egg sandwiches for breakfast. Over breakfast we decide that we should fill the late morning and early part of the afternoon in sea kayaks (which are cheap and easy to hire) and paddle along the coast taking in the scenery and wildlife. We are introduced to a local from whom we are able to hire boats and wetsuits.

Our chap is rather disorganised, so following a lot of waiting around we finally load up the boats into his trailer and (despite losing him a couple of times en route) follow him down the coast to Dinosaur Caves Park (not as exciting as the name suggests, just lots of rocks, arches and caves sticking out the sea to kayak around). We sort ourselves out and enter the water.

The first few hundred metres are the most threatening we see for a long time, the semi-submerged rocks, breaking waves and thick kelp forests make paddling to the calmer water out to sea quite tricky. Once we are there however, it is like kayaking in a swimming pool. In this swimming pool however, we are surrounded by all manner of marine life, and we frequently find ourselves surrounded by inquisitive sea lions, shy harbour seals and the by-now ubiquitous pelicans.

As we journey through the kelp forests, we are always on the look out for sea otters that tend to relax on the natural mattress that the plant provides. We don’t have long to wait, and we see a couple playing a hundred metres of so away. Still buoyed by this sighting, we paddle softly between two craggy stacks to see an otter resting on its back just around the corner of the rock. We let the natural current take us towards him and as we appear to pose no threat, the creature continues to lie there as we float a metre or two away. After a few minutes in his company, we softly paddle on leaving the otter to roll onto his front and lazily swim away.

Realising that the two hours that we have budgeted to return to Pismo Beach still has a long way to run (and the pier at which we are to disembark is well within view) we decide to practise our exit from the water while there are no beach users in the vicinity. The tactic that we have been advised to use is not too dissimilar to surfing, we are told that we should paddle straight to the shore, collecting a decent sized wave and allowing it to gently carry us in. Our attempts range from the completely successful to the spectacularly chaotic and sodden and we find that 20 minutes elapse (through several attempts) before we are once again fully in our boats and out to sea.

Now that we are out of the sheltered cove that we have been paddling through for a couple of miles the seas become choppier and the currents stronger so we pick up the pace as we head for the pier.

We start our trip to the beach, grateful for our earlier practise run only to find our fortunes reversed. Those of us whose waves treacherously dumped us in the sea previously (Graham and Neil) find themselves gracefully gliding back to dry land on the crest of a wave (if you will pardon the expression) while those of us that got lucky on the dummy run (myself) end up neck deep in the Pacific with an upturned boat and no spectacles. Realising that I may have made a mistake in not securing these in provided bag prior to the final approach I find myself in a state of semi-blindness. And not having any spares, I will have to remain so for the rest of the trip. Good thing it didn’t happen in the first week.

By this stage, time is getting on and we still have 100 miles to cover before we reach the former hometown of Ronald Reagan, Santa Barbara. We had also hoped to fit in a couple more excursions on our journey down, so we dump the kayaks back at the hire shop with little ceremony and head back onto Highway 101, less scenic than Highway 1 but much quicker.

We are planning on washing the salt off our bodies underneath a pleasant waterfall in the Gaviota State Park, an easy ten minute walk from where we parked the car. On our guard due to the various notices telling us to beware of mountain lions we head into the forest to find the waterfall.

When we reach it, we find that it is a slow, muddy trickle landing in a small puddle. With no real possibility of a swim or a shower we trudge back to the car and aim for our next option, the tantalising sounding Las Cruces Hot Springs, ‘a pool of 100F mineral water set in a peaceful shady ravine’ (according to Rough Guides). How they found the place we’ll never know. We tried various different places, various different trails and routes but eventually had to give up and head, tired, salty and dirty into Santa Barbara.

We found the Santa Barbara Tourist Hostel fairly easily (being just a couple of streets from the beach) and are immediately put in our place by the very rude and surly attendant. After a wait at reception he finally finishes his conversation and grumpily checks us in. We take our room key (apparently we’re not allowed more than one) and head around the building to the private room that we have thankfully hired. We quickly learn that this is comfortably going to be the worst hostel of the trip. The bright, humming strip lights illuminate a stiflingly hot room with the sort of beds that we didn’t think we’d see again on the trip once we had left Alcatraz.

Knowing that we have two nights in this mini-prison we are quite keen the get the hell out of there and we set about seeing what Santa Barbara can offer us by night. We have a decent enough meal at an Italian restaurant on State Street before seeing if there is any life in the town on a Monday night. Having enjoyed a couple of excellent nights out recently we have reasonably high spirits but the town unfortunately does not match them. We try a couple of bars but a combination of fatigue, less than friendly locals and in my case semi-blindness cause us to give up and head back to our lumpy beds and their plastic sheets.

Tuesday 16th September

Personally feeling quite visually-challenged, we head into Santa Barbara to see (albeit in a blurry way) the largest number of homeless people since we left San Francisco and find an affable town with plenty of nice bars, nice shops, nice sunshine and people who are clearly trying too hard to fit in with a number of 'scenes'. Following our lack of sleep the previous night, none of us are in a sparkling mood and we try our best to make the most of a day in which everybody wants of pick a fight with everybody else.

After a pleasant (if pricey) lunch in a sunny square by a fountain filled with terrapins, we sensibly decide that we could do with a few hours apart from each other. We head off in separate directions (haircut/afternoon nap/walk on the beach/blindly fumbling around) and reconvene in the early evening with big plans. Having been disappointed by our previous dull night out we decide that we're not going to have the same issues this time around. Our evening starts with Happy Hour drinks and bar snacks at a seafood place in the vicinity of our hostel. Very full and feeling well lubricated, three of us head to Blue Agave for the promise of "fiery mojitos and margaritas" leaving Neil to reserve tables for us at Sharkee's, our next destination. While enjoying some very pleasant (if pricey) cocktails we chat to a local and pick up the tip of a dive pool club which apparently turns into a massively popular 1980s club night later that evening. Storing the information in the dark recesses of our minds, we head over to join Neil at Sharkee's.

Neil, to his great credit has got chatting to a local promotions girl who is desperate to sign us up on her mailing list. What's in it for us? Free drinks all night if we are willing to say that we live and work in Santa Barbara. Deciding that this is the sort of little white lie that we are comfortable to have on our conscience; we happily sign our names, receive our wristbands and hit the bar. Many Jack n' Cokes (each worth every penny) later we head over the road to the previously dead pool lounge to find it heaving with bodies. After a few frames of pool, some peculiar 80s 'moves' and some unsuccessful attempts by the single members of our party to get to know some Santa Barbara girls a little bit better it's back to our plastic sheets, bedbugs, loud noises and stifling heat. We all sleep like logs. Seems like we have a lot to thank some random promotions girl back in town for.

Wednesday 17th September

Ow. Just ow. Well done Graham for managing to drive the short distance from Santa Barbara to Oxnard. I imagine if any Highway Patrol officers had decided to do a random breath test then Graham would still be enjoying his American trip with free board and lodging. Although it probably wouldn't be any worse than the Santa Barbara Tourist Hostel.

We find the harbour at the fifth time of asking and order the biggest, yet slowest cooked breakfast imaginable from a local café. With an hour before our boat leaves, this causes some worry. More so when we realise that we still have to buy lunch (Anacapa has no running water, let alone any gift shop/fast food facilities). We dash off to a local supermarket, rush around and buy our usual big sandwich and grapes and make it back to the harbour moments before the boat pulls out the harbour.

The 14 mile crossing is far more fun than we expect (apart from Andrew, who sleeps through it). We bob along the Pacific at a fair rate of knots, pausing to dodge to the ocean spray and spot the occasional sea lion or minke whale off the bow. We find ourselves at the natural harbour of East Anacapa Island an hour after departing and set about climbing the many steps to reach the headland. Graham sets about abusing the good nature of the local dive school while the rest of us take a tour of the spectacular views of the island range and learn about the unique flora and fauna of this unusual archipelago.

Once we have enjoyed these views, we get back to the order of the day (we have been told on many an occasion that the snorkelling in this area is unrivalled) and hit the water to play in the kelp forests and try out the Snorbeling (a cross between scuba diving and snorkelling, kindly laid on by a dive company who happen to be making the same trip). By the time we finish, Graham and his very wrinkly skin have now been in ice-cold seawater for approximately six hours. His rented wetsuit being the only thing that means that he hasn't frozen to death. Twice.

Everyone exits the water and we embark on the boat to take us home. Lovely though Anacapa is, this is not a place that we wish to be stranded on for an evening. The journey back to the mainland is bouncy but otherwise uneventful.





We pull up to the hostel and park in the garage opposite. A sign catches our eye. Pub crawl. Tonight. 8.30pm. $25. Including dinner and as much wine as we can drink. Interesting. Check of the watch. 7.55pm. Bugger. This is going to be a hurry. Check-in, shower, change, time to move.

This is a unique pub crawl. Presumably the 'crawl' part comes from what you are doing by the time you finally reach the first venue of the trip, 30 minutes walk after leaving your hostel. We find ourselves in potentially the worst 'diner' in LA, eating cheap food and drinking bottles of "three buck Chuck" (the price related nickname of the very bad local wine), which for what it lacks in quality it makes up for in quantity.

We make friends with a huge number of tedious people, learn some Norwegian, go to a few tedious bars where we given the same grapefruit liqueur and don't buy any drinks on account of the breathtaking amount that they cost (that's LA for you). We make the best of a bad situation, chat to the dull people that we have chosen to spend our night with and eventually end up waking up the six Chinese guys/two hot French girls (depending on the luck of the draw of your dormitory) and settle in for what the Los Angeles heat permits as a 'nights sleep'.

$25 very badly spent.

Thursday 18th September

After a restless and hot night in our dormitories, we rise at a fairly appropriate time and head out to see what Los Angeles by day has to offer us. We realise that with our trip to Universal Studios theme park tomorrow we have only today to see the whole of the rest of LA. Considering the city seems to be about 200 square miles, we have probably overshot ourselves slightly. We start in our local neighbourhood of Santa Monica, and take a trip down to the pier. It seems to be fairly closed at this time in the morning, but the antique (by American standards) rollercoaster and Ferris wheel seem to be a lovely addition to the promenade. We retrieve the car and head south towards Venice and its celebrated beach and canals (although not as celebrated as some other place, coincidentally also called Venice – who would have thought it?). Venice seems to be the epitome of an affluent suburb of a large city. The winding canals and picturesque bridges network a selection of beautiful upper-class homes. We may not live in them, but at least we can be happy knowing that they'll probably be ripped down by an earthquake before too long anyway.

Back into the now baking hot shell that is our car, we head north for 14 miles (1 and a bit hours) to the Hollywood Hills. After a couple of winding detours which see us getting a tiny bit lost around various houses inhabited by film stars (and ending up halfway down a couple of driveways and ultimately at a padlocked chain-link gate) we stumble across Griffith Observatory. The views of the LA smog are fantastic (as far as a view of smog can be) and Neil's James Dean fixation is released for a glorious hour (due to the location featuring prominently in his most famous film, Rebel Without A Cause). The hilltop also offers one of the better views of the famous Hollywood sign (originally erected to advertise the name of the building site for the suburb down below, but now apparently quite famous and popular with tourists). We take the usual photographs and roasting in the early afternoon sun, we jump back into the car.

Our latest destination is the result of that building site, Hollywood Boulevard. We park at the famous crossroads at Hollywood & Vine and set off on a stroll down to Graumann's Chinese Theatre, site of all those handprints in the concrete. Dodging the costumed weirdoes, we set about "star-spotting". Not human "stars" obviously, but the stars placed in the paving slabs along the "Walk Of Fame". Glossing over hundreds who nobody has ever heard of, the amount of proper famous people seems to be concentrated down at the far end where you can step on Steven Spielberg, Bruce Willis, Martin Scorsese and Kermit The Frog all within a few steps.

Realising that time is pressing, we quickly compare our hand and foot size to various celebrities (Graham's feet being the same size as Arnold Schwarzenegger's and my hands being the size of Gene Kelly's) and dash back to the car, past the Kodak Theatre (venue for the annual Academy Awards) to do a driving tour of 'the rest of LA'. Settling for the usual dodge through traffic jams and taking in the Sunset Strip and Beverly Hills back to the hostel in time for a final meal out. Graham and Neil choose to take in some sunset paddling on Santa Monica's enormous stretch of beach whilst Andrew and I spend some time online trying to locate suitable accommodation for our final night in LA (still unbooked in a rare moment of wanton recklessness).

Finally reconvening, we have a brief tour of the 3rd St Promenade where we have been assured we will find dinner. We settle on the worryingly named 'Barney's Beanery', and Barney does not disappoint. Boasting 132 different draught and bottled beers, we enjoy the delights of Arrogant Bastard Ale, Hollywood Blonde and the house 'Barney's Brew' while taking several minutes digesting the enormous food menu (printed in the style of a newspaper and containing a similar amount of print to describe the literally hundreds of different choices of burgers, fish, pizza, sandwiches, omelettes, steaks, pastas, chilis, salads and various other specialities.

We settle on a variety of options giving us more food that we can fit on the table and settle back, full and content. We become even more content when the pretty and chatty young waitress decides that she likes us enough to use her staff discount on our bill giving us 25% off the huge amounts of food and beer that we had ordered up to this point. Tipping her extremely well we retire to the upstairs balcony where we crash the Guitar Hero competition that is going on and I discover a newfound talent. Even if I do say so myself.

Keeping in mind the fact that we have been looking forward to the Universal Studios theme park for a long time, we don't overdo things (for once) and end head back for our dormitory bunks and rest, ready to start our penultimate day seven hours later.

Friday 19th September

For what seems like the hundredth time so far this holiday, we are woken by our alarm clocks far earlier than our bodies think possible (about 7.30am in literal terms). We shower and breakfast and head out to the car. The journey north to Universal Studios is the typical LA driving experience (huge trucks, bizarre games in which drivers try to weave through the traffic at breakneck speeds and what seem to be 24 lane freeways). We arrive in the Jurassic Parking section of Universal Studios.

Having timed our arrival superbly, we enter the park just as the gates are opening. We dash straight for the most popular section, the forty minute tour of the studio. Combining a genuine tour of famous film sets (Psycho, Spartacus, War Of The Worlds, King Kong) and cheesy theme park reconstructions (Amityville, where a plastic shark jumps out the water at your carriage, "The Mummy" where thing go a bit dark and they say that beetles are trying to attack the train while it shakes a bit and you roll your eyes at how contrived the whole get-up is) we finish it with mixed feelings.

We get down to business and set about the rides. Most of these are live-action simulators based around various Universal Studios releases (Terminator 2, The Simpsons Movie, Shrek, et cetera) with a few genuinely thrilling rollercoasters (The Mummy), standard theme-park fare (the Jurassic Park log-flume, where plastic dinosaurs spit water at your and you descend an Alton Towers-esque plunge) and a couple of live demonstrations on the special effects used in "some of your favourite Universal Studios productions". The surprising anomaly is the Waterworld display. An absolutely dreadful film, but a superb live spectacle. Actors from the likes of Heroes, CSI and Desperate Housewives (clearly slumming it) act out a 15 minute synopsis of the film, complete with gunfire, explosions, jet skis and a lot of soaking the crowd.

Having clearly picked a perfect day (walking straight past all the signs telling us that it will be a two hour wait from this point and jumping straight on the ride of our choice we do every ride in the park and finish off by doing the Simpsons ride for a second time before the sight of the setting sun makes us think that it is probably time to leave.

We have a tasty tapas meal with a pitcher of beer and head down south to Manhattan Beach. The morning drive is accentuated, as it appears all of the Hollywood stunt drivers that we have shared the Universal Studios lots with are all trying to drive home in as crazy a way as possible. We make it by the skin of our teeth (although the poor car is still seeing a psychiatrist) and we manage to find our suite room. Unfortunately there is a small problem, and the suite that myself and Andrew booked the previous night for four people appears to only have one bed in it. Deciding that (although we have become close on this trip) this is not the final night's sleep that any of us had envisioned, we set about arguing with the receptionist about how we need a bigger room. Half an hour later, presumably due to the fact that she didn't really speak any English, she finally gives in and puts us in a room with twice as many beds and we get ready for a big party night out quicker than you can blink.

Not the best way to start a big evening out, but it all gets better. It appears that LA's bright and beautiful have convened upon the same charming bar as us, and we set about our (now well-practised) mingling. Keeping with tradition we forget our cameras, meaning we ultimately take home approximately 4 photographs as evidence of 12 nights out. We take in four different bars, finding a different crowd in each and end our evening chatting to a grumpy 7ft bouncer from Australia and two girls from Northampton. It would appear that the glamour of our trip is slowly fading. They do say that Los Angeles is a cruel mistress. Or if they don't, then they should.

Our evening ends in a surreal way. Deciding that he needs food (a recurring theme throughout the trip), Neil leads us to a late night drive-through restaurant. Not having a car, we are subjected to waiting in a line of traffic as three bodies made of flesh and blood. I pose as the theoretical "driver" to make us look less (or quite possibly more) ridiculous and Neil and Graham enjoy their 89 cent burgers before we decide that our evening would be made complete if we get lost.

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We get home. And sleep.

Saturday 20th September

Phew. Last day. Lots of melancholy as we sort ourselves out and pack up for the last time. At least, the last time until we go out and buy a load of cheap clothes and have to repack. And then get to the airport and find out that our bags are too heavy and need to be repacked yet again.

We rise, check out of the Manhattan Beach hotel and with the aid of Google and TomTom (how anybody is able to navigate around LA without them is anybody's guess) track down the glamorous South Bay Galleria to buy enormous amounts of nice clothes at low, low prices. With a strictly limited one hour to buy everything we need (and about 150 shops at our disposal) we all set off in the knowledge that nobody is going to stick to the time limits and grab armfuls of stuff - possibly leaving the Abercrombie & Fitch store devoid of stock.

Having got the car valeted to within an inch of its arduous and dusty life and filling in the car attendant on today's football scores we start on the next leg of our marathon shopping trip - the big supermarket. Having been assured by various sources that the ubiquitous Walmart is slightly inferior to the slightly less ubiquitous K-Mart we find one a couple of miles down the massive Hawthorne Boulevard (seemingly a similar length to the M4) and give ourselves a strict limit of 30 minutes (which may turn into 40 minutes, which may turn into 50 minutes) with which to buy foodstuffs which could be fun to take home (A1 Steak Sauce, Baby Ruth bars, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Spicy Cheetos being just some of the armfuls of comestibles eventually collected) and lunch. Buying lunch proves slightly impractical; it seems that it is impossible to buy lunch items in this enormous supermarket. All the food is relegated to 3 small isles leaving approximately 12 acres of shop space to fill with wallpaper, canoes, lawn-mowers, fancy-dress costumes, garden sheds and motorbikes. A supermarket in which it is easier to buy a bread-maker than a loaf of bread.

We head off towards Manhattan Beach, where we have been informed that the annual AVP (Association of Volleyball Professionals) tournament is taking place and we feel that this would be an ideal location to soak up our last few hours of Americana before the tedium of a long flight followed by rain and work. Graham and Neil are soon disappointed to discover that the volleyball matches in question seem to be the domain of rippling, toned men rather than the skimpy bikinis and jiggling breasts that they had hoped for. However, no city on Earth attracts skimpy bikinis and jiggling breasts to its beaches like Los Angeles does and they spend a very pleasant hour taking in the 'scenery'. Andrew and I retire to a friendly, local bar to enjoy the last beer of the trip in the company of scores of volleyball fans.

Finally finished, we rock up to the airport (with a quick detour to drop off our trusty wheels - or what is left of them) and following check-in we find the smallest departure lounge with the fewest amenities this side of Coventry International (sic) Airport. The five shops available at an airport that claims to be the World's busiest airport since 2001 take us about 15 minutes to finish (the majority of this time being to decide which whiskey Andrew should buy, settled by the decision of both), so we settle in for the typical airport waiting.

The flight passes without incident (unless having the biggest man in California sitting in the seat next to you counts as incident) and everybody settles in for a nice six hour sleep to help with the following day's jet-lag. Unless you're Andrew obviously, and couldn't sleep on a plane even if you had gone without sleep for the previous week. We land in grey Heathrow and following Andrew's usual airport "issues" (deciding that he doesn't want to take home his rucksack, preferring to leave it with those of us who are London-bound) we eventually go our separate ways. That way lies jet-lag, unpacking, unsympathetic housemates and the world of work.