We were somewhere in the desert around Barstow

when the drugs began to take hold when it finally dawned on me that we were coming near to the end of the trip. We'd already covered about 3400 miles (400 more than I initially thought we'd do) and this was the first big town in California, the last of the eleven states we'd visit.

We drove steadily west until we joined the 101 and turned north-west towards Santa Barbara, with the Pacific off to our right. Now it really hit home: we'd physically run out of America to cross. I felt a little sad at this; settled into the road trip mindset where the journey is as important as the destination, actually reaching that destination had immediately removed half of the reason for the trip.

We watched the signs roll past, and finally we turned off for Sheffield Drive. I say "turned off"; actually it was more like "careened off at high speed, utterly unprepared for the sharp corner on the exit, and jumped on the anchors to stop from rear-ending any innocents already at the junction".

We found Devon's parents' house at the end of a narrow driveway and abandoned the dusty Impala. Their house was fantastic: Spanish colonial-style buildings formed three sides of a courtyard, with gardens and patios in between and all of it basking in the much more reasonable California sun. After a fantastic meal expertly barbequed by Devon's dad Steve, Brenna gave us a lift (in their most excellent Toyota Prius, complete with geek-hypnotising power display) into Santa Barbara to check out the main drag. We were pretty much deflated after finally coming to a halt, and pent-up fatigue hit us all at once. We begged off a big night out and collapsed into our first non-motel beds for two weeks. I slept like a log, woken up, ironically, by Devon calling from the UK, trying to get a hold of her sister.

We spent the day at a snail's pace, driving into town to do some random errands and stopping off at the beach for a while. We swam in the slightly chilly Pacific, and lamented the fact that if we'd started the trip on the Atlantic coast, we could have swum off all three (some Gulf Coast dwellers call it the US' third coast) American coasts.

The rest of the day was spent lazing around by the pool, reading and catching up with emails. Our big night out in SB didn't come to pass; crossed wires and missed phone calls meant we didn't go anywhere, but instead enjoyed another massive barbeque and sat by the outdoor fire until it died down and the night turned into the first cold one since we arrived.

Edit: I forgot to mention probably the coolest thing that happened to me in SB: I was lying on a sun lounger type thing, reading a book when I heard a buzzing noise get louder and louder, until it sounded like a really big bee. I looked around, and hanging in the air maybe a couple of feet away from my head was a brown and red hummingbird, maybe two inches long! I don't think I've ever seen one before, and to suddenly find one looking at me like it wanted to check my ear for nectar was rather exciting.

Edit #2: "With the Pacific off to our right"? My sense of direction was completely screwed in the states. The Pacific was off to the left as we drove north-west along the coast. I think it was a driving thing: in order to not crash into all and sundry other cars, I had to mentally swap left and right turns in my head. UK right turns became difficult, or US left, turns. UK left turns became easy, or US right, turns. Hence the use of "left left" and "right left" pretty much in all our navigation.

"It's left."
"Left left or right left?"
"Right left. And then right."
"Right?"
"Uh, no. Left."

Hours of fun, and missed exits.

Intermission:

the RF have just moved flat, so the neverending story that is the road trip will continue soon, once I have a chance to write up California.

Vegas Two Times.

First thing the next morning (okay, 11 am) we had a blackjack lesson, supplied free of charge by the casino. The croupier was entertaining, although by the end of it I was more bemused than I was at the beginning: blackjack is entirely a game of predictable chance, and I couldn't quite grasp why anyone would want to play it. Learn the percentages and away you go; if you play long enough you'll make your money back, minus some for the casino and a tip for the croupier.

In the afternoon, we jumped in the car to see the Strip in air conditioned comfort, with the daytime temperature outside still at 39°C. Driving slowly along Las Vegas Boulevard, watching through the windscreen glass as masses of tourists filed into and out of replicas of the Parisian and New York skylines, an Egyptian pyramid and Caesar's imperial palace, felt oddly like a theme park ride. The tourists were the exhibit, and we were the real tourists. I think it might have had as much to do with a reluctance to get too involved in the whole Vegas experience just yet: the visual, aural and financial assault of the interior of a casino, the heat and the crowds meant that diving in with abandon wasn't really on the cards just yet, at least in my mind.

We headed perpendicularly away from the Strip on West Flamingo Road to check out the Palms, a self-consciously hip and more restrained (at least architecturally) casino that had been recommended to us by all of the cool young things we'd asked about Vegas. Inside it was far more what you might imagine as a traditional casino: tables for roulette, blackjack, craps and poker dominated, with the slots off to one side. Ringed around one edge were entrances to various bars and clubs (most of which looked to be beyond our dressing-up capabilities, but what the hell: you only live once, and we'd already used up our getting-thrown-out-of-bars bad karma in New Orleans) and we decided to come back later that night.

It was a dark and stormy night when we did head out, with lightning flashes every few minutes. We got a cab (no walking tonight - we'd ironed our T-shirts this time) and sauntered in through the main doors, looking as nonchalant as we could muster. We'd decided to pool $60 for gambling - about £11 each, so not exactly extravangant, but $60 sounds better, right? - and wandered among the tables, looking for somewhere less intimidating than the scrums around the craps and blackjack tables.

We chose roulette. We chose poorly.

The one other guy at the table had a stack of a few hundred dollars' worth of chips, and he placed group bets on maybe nine numbers at a time. We changed our $60 into chips, and the dealer was merciful enough to give us six $10's instead of a two-chip Swingers-style stack of $50 and $10.

We put a whopping $10 down on 'Even' and watched the ball fall into number 27.

"Evens again," I said.

Odd came up.

"Evens again," I said. The power of science was on our side.

Odds.

"Screw it," said Josh and threw down the remaining $30 on 'Even'.

Odds.

$20 per minute burn rate. We left the table. Gambling is for mugs, kids.

Humbled by roulette and anxious to spend our money on something tangible, we stumped up $10 each to get into ghostbar, a venue so trendy it didn't need capital letters. We were herded into an elevator with three numbered buttons - 1, 2 and 55 - where the bouncer pressed 55. Stepping out into the bar, it looked like we'd picked the right place:

That, supposedly, is the most powerful man-made beam of light shining from the top of the Luxor casino on the Strip.

We bought a round of Coronas and squeezed a slice of lime down the neck of each bottle then were made to immediately decant the beer, sans lime, into plastic cups as we walked onto the balcony. The view was good, and the clientele were remarkably chatty. This seemed to be a constant throughout the trip: whether Americans are genuinely friendly, or whether it was intrigue at our trip or nationality I'm not sure, but it did make for a good night, and it was a lot easier to strike up a random conversation that it seems to be in an equivalently hip place in Edinburgh.

This openness of the crowd made me suspect that the cooler than thou, imperiously stylish attitude of ghostbar was just a helpful veneer to generate interest. Just like everything else in Vegas, it's there to make as much money as possible. If that means admitting three dubiously dressed, patchily sunburnt guys without a mitigating entourage of women on a quiet Wednesday night, that's what they'd do. This seems to be in contrast to some of Edinburgh's trendier spots, where the prejudicial entry policies are always in effect. More power to Vegas in that case: I had more fun in ghostbar than I've ever had in the Opal Lounge, for example.

We got another taxi home, this being our one and only night of luxury, and crashed.

Vegas: 1st attempt.

Settled into our unprecedented two hotel rooms (no roll-away bed or flea-infested mattress for one of us tonight, no sir. Tonight we was kickin' it floral-print style), we put on our least crumpled T-shirts and ventured out into downtown Vegas. The centre of downtown was Fremont Street, covered by a canopy running its full length, and into which was built one long, continuous video display. Every now and again the display would light up playing a custom made show/advert, and the mostly retired-looking crowd would stop walking as one and gaze up at the spectacle. The cynic in me thought it'd be a good opportunity for pickpockets, and I was consciously wary of the few shady characters milling around on the periphery of the throng.

We walked up and down the street in the still baking 37°C heat, soaking up the atmosphere and recycling it into sweat. We were hungry after the drive from Flagstaff, and looked for restaurants as we went. Eventually it became apparent that pretty much all of the usual establishments you'd expect in a tourist town - restaurants, coffee shops, gift shops, hotels - were reached through an associated casino. Sometimes there are signs to them inside the casinos, and sometimes the signs are even helpful.

We ate in the first place we came across after the desperation took hold and then set off to have a look at the Strip by foot. The shuttle bus covering the two mile distance between downtown and the Strip was full, so we decided to walk.

Bad idea.

By the time we reached the Strip, having walked edgily down two miles of slightly seedy wedding chapel-lined boulevard, we were hollow-eyed with fatigue because of the heat. We ducked into the first casino we saw and found a bar at the back of it.

(The inside of the casinos that you have to navigate to find bars, restaurants or whatever are overpowering places, with slot machines blinking, muzak playing and people filling every nook and cranny. Unsurprisingly, the one notionally upmarket casino we went to - the Palms - was the least ostentatious and glittery, presumably because they make their money from 'real' games like blackjack and poker as opposed to slot machines. But more on the Palms later.)

On a stage by the bar, a Philippino band regaled an audience of aging regulars with disco covers. We ordered a round of beers for an eye-watering $17, drank them and got out. The night was still stifling, and after making it a further half mile along the Strip, we gave up and caught the bus back.

We had the next day planned out in advance. Surely this time Vegas would obligingly rock for us.

Welcome to Fabulous (Downtown) Las Vegas!

I demanded that we stop at the Hoover Dam on the way to Vegas, inspired mainly by a song on my iPod called, yes, Hoover Dam. We stepped out of the car into a vast natural hairdryer. I can't even begin to guess what the temperature was - 40°C, maybe? It's probably the hottest place I've ever been.

It was suitably impressive though. There isn't intuitively a great deal of opportunity for architectural flourishes in building a dam, but some of the outbuildings and features of the dam itself were fantastically, iconically 1930s in style - very Chinatown or The Maltese Falcon.

We arrived in Vegas about 4 pm, wound the windows down and joined the slow crawl of traffic down the Strip. It was still blisteringly hot and the A/C was working overtime in cooling the entire atmosphere down for us. Environmentally irresponsible yes, but when you've driven 3000 miles already, two more with the A/C on full bore seemed like a drop in Vegas' uber-consumer ocean.

We passed the famous sign on the way in and made our way past the Luxor, MGM Grand and the Bellagio, and then the older, relatively staid end of the strip. Turned out our hotel, the defiantly old-school (i.e. full of poor people doing their best to become poorer) Lady Luck, was in downtown Las Vegas, a couple of miles beyond the Strip, and a pale imitation of it devoted to the old and the wheelchair-bound.

[More on Vegas, and Santa Barbara, later.]

Do not feed the squirrels, sucka.

We're driving across a plain bordered by mountains to the north and south on our way from Flagstaff to Vegas, the penultimate big journey before we finally reach Santa Barbara and the Pacific coast.

We stayed in Flagstaff for two nights, using it as a base for a day trip to the Grand Canyon. The first night was mostly uneventful; we've barely stopped moving since New Orleans and there was a general lack of enthusiasm for going out again. Instead we went to see Batman Begins (hmph. 3/5. Edited to within an inch of its life, but still mostly entertaining) and had an early night.

The next day we set off, via a trusty Wal-Mart to pick up some all-American sandwich ingredients (Kraft cheese slices! Squeezy mustard! Reformed ham! Rolls with sugar in! Good times.) and as much water as we could carry, to the Grand Canyon.

The terrain just north out of Flagstaff reminded me a lot of the highlands of Scotland, except with rather more yellow in the green of the undergrowth. The drive to the canyon went by quickly enough and we loaded up with rolls and water and found the nearest path. We'd parked on the South Rim - the North Rim is ten miles away as the crow flies, but something like two hundred miles by road - and we got our first sight of the canyon almost immediately.

It's an odd feeling to see it. Initially there's a "Wow, that's big," moment, followed shortly by "Surely it's can't be that big," as you read that such-and-such a peak or valley is a good eight miles away and around a mile straight down - it's hard to appreciate such dramatic geography on this sort of scale.

As I walked back along the path to take a picture of Dave standing on a suicidal-looking promontory jutting over the rim, a guy walking next to me said: "Is this your first time here?"

"Yes," I replied.
"Somebody told me it's like looking into the stomach of God," he said in hushed awe.

Not sure if he or I got our wires crossed there.

We walked and bussed our way to the far end of the accessible South Rim area, noticing signs along the way warning us not to feed the animals. "Rodents in the Grand Canyon can carry rabies and plague," they said, "and animals used to humans can become aggressive and bite."

We stayed away from the rabid, black death-carrying squirrels. How exactly are there any squirrels left? Surely some kind of cannibalistic/bubonic plague squirrel armageddon should have wiped the disease-ridden buggers out by now.

After a bit of very light hiking, we headed back to the car. It's definitely heating up as we head further west, but at least the humidity is less oppressive. We left Flagstaff the next morning (after a repeated, Groundhog Day-style failure to get into the only interesting bar in town the night before, but that was so irritating I can't be bothered to write about it) for Las Vegas. Westward ho!

[This entry is a few days old - we've been out of internet contact since Flagstaff until now, having arrived in Santa Barbara.]

The lost time incident in Roswell

and the subsequent sprint towards Santa Fe meant we got there mid afternoon, so we found a motel (a singularly unimpressive Travelodge - 0.5 x Super 8. Mediocre 4) and walked into town.

Santa Fe didn't look promising, I have to say. It seemed to be a sleepy, desert-bound St Andrews-style tourist trap for the rich, and the only busy places were upmarket restaurants with correspondingly upmarket prices and waiting times for a table. Eventually we found a reasonable one serving standard (New) Mexican food and then moved onto the one vaguely interesting bar, with giant pool tables at the back.

We played some pool. Dave mainly defeated himself, Josh won (although not until after an embarrassingly long time against me :) and I thoroughly sucked. Trying to get some extra players, we ended up invited to a club by a group of girls called Elena, Nina and Molly (hi, guys!) and so off we trooped.

We were frisked on the way in, paid our $7 cover and had a seat in the opulent back room of the club. We blethered for a while and then went through to the main room (kicking and screaming in my case) where the crowd was rather predictably grinding away to R 'n B and hip hop.

I'm getting a little bored of R 'n B and hip hop. This, plus the fact that my stomach was acting up a bit in a Texas-rebelling-against-the Mexicans way (I suffered something of an Alamo in digestive terms) was enough to convince me to head home, so I left the guys to it and after being pointed in the right direction, wandered off. (I'm getting steadily less tolerant of music I don't like the older I get. I'm going to make an excellent grumpy old man. "What's this crap? I remember when Britpop etc., etc.")

On the way back I was asked for directions by another couple on holiday in Santa Fe and talked to them for half an hour or so, exchanging email addresses and promising to get in touch. The people so far in New Mexico, more so than any other state we've encountered, have been incredibly friendly. Possibly this is because we've been here longer than in any other state, but being approached on the street at 1.30 am in an unfamiliar city would feel threatening anywhere else, but here it was entirely fine.

Instead of staying in Santa Fe for another night, we drove to Albuquerque the next day, having had it recommended to us in both Roswell and Santa Fe. If the Falkirk* and St Andrews of New Mexico both liked it, it was good enough for us.

Our motel this time was on Route 66 (ROCK!) and gets at least a 2 x Super 8 star rating. A walk down Central Avenue, the continuation of R66 through the centre of the city, was unsurprisingly hot and we found a diner, Milton's, just down the road from the motel to cool down in.

Milton's was as near to the canonical American diner as we've seen yet. It looked like it had been built in the '60s, and was staffed by a grizzled old chef, a mustachioed manager and a young waitress doing all of the actual work. We must have been there for an hour and a half, talking to the manager and occasionally the waitress as she explained to us that the town was going to be dead that night:

"All the kids are going to a 12-kegger out near Tijeras. There's gonna be four local bands there and they have jungle juice."
"Oh, right. What kind of music?"
"Some grindcore, or maybe some death metal."
"Right."

We'd already promised to meet up with Molly, who lived in Albuquerque, later that night, so we politely declined the 12-kegger and said goodbye to Milton's. We met Molly and a couple of her friends - Heather and uh, Erin/Arran (sorry man, should have asked you how to spell it!) - and had a few jars in a pleasantly cool beer garden. It was a relief to not have to shout over the din of a club; the chat was excellent and the tequila was smooth. The bar closed a little early at 1.30 am, but still the evening rounded off New Mexico really well.

* There's a Falkirk Triangle, where most of Scotland's UFO sightings are made. Just so you know.

Lost in time.

We made such good time on the road towards Carlsbad that we pushed on to Roswell, arriving in enough time to get ourselves a room in a pretty decent independent motel called the Frontier (2 x Super 8 - big room; free, working internet; free breakfast and free roll-away bed. And cheap to boot).

We hit a bar across the road from the motel after getting some food, and it was pretty much the bar I'd been looking for to convince me that the stereotypical local bar, just off the highway, that seems to define small-town America in just about every road trip film, does exist.

We got chilled bottles of Bud, inexplicably tasting better than anywhere else so far, and sat back to soak up the atmosphere. There were bikers at the bar, talking to the aging barmaid who had clearly seen it all; there was a Hispanic DJ playing hip hop and R 'n B, except when coerced into a few country tracks by the waltzing, check-shirted locals, and a handful of under-21s that wouldn't have been served anywhere else, dancing away and doing their best to transform it into a big-city club.

Genius. I was liking Roswell already!

The next day we split up to do some laundry and get Josh a haircut. (For the record, he looks just the same as normal so presumably that's a thumbs up for Wal-Mart hairdressers.) In the laundromat ("Suds 'n Fluff") I spent a good half hour talking to some locals who had offered to do our washing for us while we were getting Josh shorn. To our discredit, we were concerned that we'd come back to empty washers and driers, our clothes half-inched by savvy locals looking to rip off the naive foreigners, so Dave dropped me off there after we filled up the tank with gas across the road.

After talking to them, I couldn't have been more wrong. They were open, honest and friendly, recommending some lakes to the east where we could go swimming, and recounting, dead-pan, how if you lived in Roswell long enough you'd see something, if you know what I mean.

We looked around the earnest UFO museum, which did more to convince me of the weather-balloon theory than it did of any sinister explanation, and got lunch. Checking out the day's route, we looked at the notes for our planned daily drives.

"What's the date?" someone asked.
"The 18th," Josh replied, looking at his watch.
"We're supposed to be in Santa Fe now. What happened?"

General consternation.

"It occurs to me that we've lost a day in Roswell."

We jumped in the car and headed north as fast as the highway allowed, the lakes forgotten. An hour later, Josh said from the back seat: "That's funny. The computer says it's only the 17th."
"So does my phone," said Dave.
"Ah. I must've had a time-zone issue."
"What, you got the time zone 25 hours wrong?"

We got to Santa Fe nice and early. I had a swim in the motel pool.

The Lonely Planet

lists 37 things that visitors to the US should do. As far as I can tell, we've done no. 37 - "Experience the highway" - to death in crossing Texas. I'm writing this in the middle of our first really, really long driving stint as we head west towards New Mexico. The scenery has changed fairly dramatically (as, frankly, you'd expect if you were to drive 1400 miles across 7 states): it started out in the Carolinas* with lots of lush, verdant greenery like Northern Europe, changed to swampy land with the trees all choked in creeping vines in the deep south and now, as we turn west in Texas, has changed abruptly to more sparse, dusty scrubland. We're not in the desert proper, I think, but it can't be long before we get there.

We left New Orleans rather later than we should have, and arrived in Houston around 7 pm where rush hour was still in full flow. The traffic was mental enough to be a bit trying, and we missed exits, took wrong turns and generally failed to find our way around for an hour or so. Eventually we found a likely looking area with some motels and fast food joints and got a room in a Super 8.

Dinner was at a Flintstones-esque drive-in diner that had all the charm of a deserted McDonald's.

Houston was, in short, not a whole lot of fun.

We got back on the road early the next day; as with Houston, we've managed to miss out on getting much of a feel for some of the other places we've stopped because we didn't arrive until later on in the evening, and San Antonio looked interesting enough to warrant a bit more time.

We arrived just after 2 and found ourselves a Travelodge (1.5 x Super 8 - cheap, good room, free breakfast but no internet) near the centre of town and wandered in for a look. San Antonio is the most European-feeling city we've seen, I think; it actually has something approximating a town centre that is walkable in size and isn't deserted after 6 pm.

We looked around the Alamo** in the brutal mid-afternoon sun, and after a few restorative beers in our room, put on our party pants and went back out for the night. We ate to the sounds of a mariachi band and wandered along the banks of the river running through the centre of town, looking for a decent bar.

Madogs, a terrible travesty of a 'British' theme pub, wasn't it. San Antonio must be a popular place for conventions, judging by the number of business men in there, top buttons undone (ROCK!) watching the bizarre pseudo-cabaret/karaoke/comedy act. We got out and went back to Club Rive, where we'd earlier been put off by a cover charge.

Turns out there are three types of guys in American bars: smoove groovin', serious-looking black guys there to grind up against the hordes of willing girls; high-fiving ex-frat types and the aforementioned businessmen twitching arhythmically to the R 'n B. We don't really fit any of those categories. (Well, maybe I'd make the last one if I tucked in my T-shirt, but for the sake of argument...) Even Josh, our putative secret weapon, with his actual ability to dance failed to make much inroads in talking to any of the locals and we left about 1.30 am, full to the brim with too-cheap rum and coke. Typically, as soon as we left the club, we got talking to a girl who worked in the area who gave us an off the cuff highland fling (and very good it was too, Heather!) and told us to email her with the addresses of our various travelogues.

That was San Antonio, and it was a welcome change from the flying visit mode we'd gotten into. Currently we're on the road to Carlsbad, just south of Roswell, New Mexico, where we intend to gawk at a patch of desert where a UFO may or may not have crashed.

* Can I call them that?
** The Alamo is/was a chapel and attached courtyard where a small Texas force were massacred to a man by the Mexicans. Not normally something to cheer for, but apparently it was the spark for the revolution that made Texas into an independent republic for 9 years. What is it with celebrating disastrous battles, exactly? Culloden? The charge of the Light Brigade? Eh?

New Orleans day 2,

in which Dave is robbed, and when we get to experience some of that famous NO hospitality by being ejected from a pub for no apparent reason.

After Sunday night's Bud, Hand Grenade ("New Orleans' most powerful drink!" - I can vouch for this) and Hurricane-fuelled inebriation, we finally left the hotel around lunchtime to have a walk around. As I was leaving, the phone rang and the housekeeping manager asked if we wanted our room cleaned today; I said yes, and thought no more about it.

An hour or so after heading out, the stifling weather, combined with the challenging NO street perfume, got to me. I left Josh and Dave to it and walked back to the hotel to crash out for a couple of hours in our newly cleaned room. All fine and well until we were getting ready to head out again that night, when Dave announced: "I've had $300 nicked from my bag."

The fuck?

Sometime in the hour or thereabouts that the room was empty, someone had taken the money from Dave's bag. Dave had to wait for New Orleans' finest to turn up to take a statement, and he told Josh and I to get something to eat and we'd meet up later.

We found a nice little restaurant that managed to be authentically local without veering towards touristy or pretentious, and were chatting to the waitress afterwards.

"What's in the gumbo that make it taste the way it does?" I asked. "Is it the okra? I think it's the okra."
"Oh, I can ask the chef for you," she said. "Shall I get him for you?"
"No, no, it's fine- ah."
"Hello," boomed the chef/man mountain.
"Hello. So, er, what's in the gumbo?"
"Okra."
"Thanks."

Josh got a phone call from Dave saying that the cops were at the hotel, and wanted to speak to us. Once we got there, one of them took us outside and got our side of the story, and only then did it occur to me that I was almost certainly their prime suspect - the only one alone in the room for quite some time before Dave discovered the money was missing.

Unfortunately for the housekeeper's cause, I think I came across as non-kleptomaniac and reasonable, despite one of the (ex-military) cops telling Dave to "trust your buddy with your life, but not your money or your wife."

Hopefully it'll be okay; both Dave's insurance company and that of the hotel have been told about it, so he should get the money back. Still pretty off, though, and it put a bit of a damper on the rest of the evening.

We went out again in the same manner as Sunday night and after a few drinks, wandered up the stairs to a bar's balcony overlooking Bourbon Street. We got talking to the enthusiastically leering guys there, and it turned out we'd accidentally crashed a private party with free booze until 4 am.

Result.

Then Dave was thrown out by the bouncers for some imagined slight or misinterpreted comment (we still don't really know why!), with one of them recording the whole throwing-out process on a mini video camera for anti-lawsuit purposes.

"What did I do? Why are you throwing me out?" asked Dave.
"You can't do that," came the reply.
"Do what?"
"You can't do that."

Surreal, annoying, and another nail in the coffin of the evening. A few drinks later and I headed home, still a little the worse for wear after the last night, and just not quite getting into the swing of things.

On the whole, NO just didn't really gel for me. The atmosphere (and I'm not talking about the sundry vile smells wafting around) was more Ibiza than laid back jazz capital of the world, and it felt less like the Big Easy than the Big Hangover. Seeing the street cleaners and café workers (almost all black) sweeping up and hosing away the detritus left by the previous night's partygoers (almost all white) made me feel like I was unwillingly playing out a part in a hundred-year-old, ingrained ritual of thinly-veiled racism. Perhaps I'm being naive about it, but it didn't endear the place to me.

Anyway, we checked out of our hotel (0 x Super 8s, because of the $5 mandatory telephone access charge, even though we didn't need the telephone. Oh, and because of the theft of three hundred dollars from our room) with a minimum of fuss, finally got out of New Orleans with a rather larger amount of fuss, and set out for Houston.

So we're in New Orleans, LA.

We spent an evening in Mobile, driving into town from our motel (a Hampton Inn - roughly equivalent to 1.5 x Super 8, my newly minted unit of motel quality. At least the internet worked, although I did have to share the fortunately massive bed with Josh) along the shady Dauphin Street. It's really starting to feel like we're in the South now; the houses were alternately ramshackle and well-kempt grand old Southern edifices. The town centre was a ghost town; a bar recommended by the Lonely Planet was closed up, and we saw maybe five or ten people in total as we cruised around for a bit. Apparently Mobile paid more heed to the storm warnings than we had, and so we ate at a restaurant within walking distance of the motel.

Mobile to New Orleans was the first stretch of 'scenic' highway that we've been on. We left Alabama and crossed into Mississippi on I10, then headed south to the Gulf Coast, passing through Biloxi and stopping at a small town called Pass Christian, when the beach became too enticing to ignore. Josh and I went for a swim in the murky but pleasantly warm water. (As a result, I'm - in fact all of us are - mostly looking like the quintessential Brit abroad, with lobster-red shoulders and faces, and pasty legs.) The whole effect was of Jaws crossed with Fletch Lives; the Southern air persisted from Mobile, and we could have been swimming off Amity Island beach. Didn't see any sharks, although there were some small silver fish that jumped out of the water around about.

Most of the cars (ha! Buses, more like) had either of both of a Christian fish sticker and a camouflage-patterned ribbon, with some slogan along the lines of "I'm supporting our troops!". Definitely Bible-belt, Republican country, and I could almost understand the resentment towards the federal government that goes with the conservative politics - it felt like we were a million miles from the liberal north-east, and the idea of a government that far away having any right to interfere this far south seemed disturbingly believable. I mean we've been driving for three days, and all we've done is come from North Carolina, which is already classed as the South, to Louisiana. This is a big place, and the original concept of a loosely confederated group of states is fairly understandable.

Phew. Deep. Deep South, in fact. Ho ho.

We left Pass Christian after eating in a little tourist town called Bay St. Louis and drove into Louisiana, to New Orleans. We've singularly failed to do anything specifically touristy, apart from trawl up and down Bourbon Street, getting progressively more mangled from a variety of obscenely potent, and obscenely expensive, cocktails. So bad was I that I slept through most of today, the baking heat, humidity and omnipresent, mingled aroma of stale beer, vomit, horseshit and urine not helping my staggering hangover in the slightest.

I must admit that I feel we've lost a bit of momentum by stopping here for two nights, even though we planned to do so from the start. I'm starting to really enjoy the driving, and the feeling of traversing the country - the whole country! - is diminished a little by staying in the one place.

Or more likely, I've just been sucked in by my own hype and feel that we're not living up to On The Road and any number of road movies that have worked their way into my subconscious :)

More on New Orleans next time.

How terribly information age of me:

I'm writing this on Josh's laptop as we roll along I85, just inside Alabama and heading towards Montgomery, where we'll grab something to eat before rejoining the interstate and charging onwards into the tropical storm. This far north of it, it's manifesting itself mainly as a noticeable but not oppressive humidity and a persistent, fine rain.

We've already played Sweet Home Alabama to death, so the radio is silent - we tried local radio and found it wanting, having listened to one middle-aged presenter wax lyrical about Mariah Carey - and the air con is also off for a while, Josh rightly pointing out that he didn't envisage the deep south as having a pleasant ambient temperature of around 19°C.

Yesterday, we picked up Josh the morning after his date (east coast girls are hip, it seems; southern girls haven't knocked us out with the way they talk yet, but we'll get back to you on that, and our desire for them all to be California girls hasn't yet been tested) and headed out of Charlotte. We stopped in Greenville (c.f. enthusiastic waitress* and admittedly cute map store girl, as Josh and Dave have no doubt already recounted) and then made good time to Atlanta, our first nightly stop. We were aiming for Decatur, a college-town suburb of Atlanta, as suggested by Cute Map Store Girl, and here was where things went a bit Pete Tong.

Road signage here is abysmal. We spent an hour and drove for forty miles trying to find the bloody place after getting to within one junction of it on the interstate. Eventually we got there and rented our first motel - a Super 8, chosen more out of desperation than judgement - and wandered into the very studenty centre of town. Josh had long since recovered from his jetlag, but Dave and I were a little sluggish still, and I think we might have made a bigger night of it otherwise. Still, we ate our first burrito (of too fucking many, I can tell you), had a few beers and hit the sack at a respectable hour.

We're seeing a lot of America exactly as the Americans see it, rolling past their car window. North Carolina was fairly brief, with Charlotte lying near the NC/SC state line, but South Carolina was at times very green and pleasant. We're sticking to the interstates to make sure we don't waste too much time in between layovers, and it becomes obvious that most of the US is built to follow the roads, perhaps the other way around from Europe, where the roads were built to connect the already established towns. Alabama is beginning to feel like the deep south, with the road elevated above wetlands, swamps and lazy rivers, and the centre of Mobile (where we now are, after our second night's layover), was deserted even at 6 pm on a Saturday because of tropical storm warnings.

(I'm completing this entry the day after I began it, and in the end the storm was only as bad as an hour or two of heavy rain along the road, dying down by the time we reached Mobile. Today is the first day that's not heavily overcast. I'm going to investigate the motel pool - I may be some time.)

So, today, after we grab some breakfast, we're going to leave for New Orleans. Wish us luck - according to the guidebooks, if we don't stick to the French quarter, we'll be mugged, stabbed/shot and our corpses mugged again. Good times!

* In fact, the waitress in Greenville was a comedy goldmine.

"We're looking for somewhere we can buy a roadmap. Can you think of anywhere around here?"
"Well, there's a mall on 383. Go along Main Street, turn right onto College Road, head along there looking for signs for the 383. When you see one, take a left again and you should see the mall."
"Cool, thanks."
"Or there's a map store round the corner."

We're here.

I've decided to chronicle the journey over in terms of the caffeine it took to get me here. Also planes, trains and automobiles were necessarily involved, but they were secondary to staying awake for 26 hours or whatever.

• cup of tea with breakfast. Still a bit groggy from dragging myself out of bed at 6.15.
  
• cup of coffee (medium latte from Costa) in the train station. Meet up with Dave and go through the wrong ticket barrier. Good start.
  
• can of coke on the plane. In other news, we're on the plane! Managed to get here without too much drama, although it appears I've chosen the worst seats (near the back, where we get the air pre-breathed for us by all the other passengers) on a venerable old 767 with no individual video screens.
  
• 2 x cups of coffee with meals on the plane. Not sure what the terminology for lunchtime is when you're in an indeterminate time zone and the clock is more or less ticking backwards.
  
• iced coffee (uh, tall mocha frappuccino from the evil empire. When in Rome...) at Chicago, where our internal flight is delayed for forty minutes.
  
• cup of coffee on said internal flight, which circles Charlotte airport for an extra hour before we're allowed to land. Once we do land, we sit on the apron for an hour because there isn't enough manpower to unload the plane. At this point I'm ready to unload it myself. Local time when we disembark is about 8.30; UK time is 1:30 am and my internal body clock is in a limbo akin to the hallucinogenic hyperspace sequence at the end of 2001.
  

Our hire car isn't a Pontiac Grand Prix, but instead a Chevy Impala. In reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it steers like a cow but without the associated benefit of moving like a fish. Good for highway crusing, though. We seem to have adapted to driving on the right without too much hassle ("Right, Dave. Right. Right!") and we're making reasonable time, with three states (NC, SC, and GA) under our belts.

Some amusing incidents so far:

• Checking into our hotel in Charlotte:
  "Which city are you from?"
  "Edinburgh."
  "Is that North or South Carolina?"
  
• We've planned to head for Mobile, AL on the way to New Orleans, arriving on Saturday. Watching CNN in the hotel room: "And tropical storm Arlene is predicted to hit Mobile Bay on Saturday". Damn the torpedoes: we're going anyway.
  
• Looking for a bar in Charlotte, it strikes me that the US is the polar opposite of Scandinavia: here, it's cool in the buildings, and the sauna is instead outside.
  
• Eating lunch in the marginally sleepy city of Greenville, blethering to the waitress.
  "Greenville's a fun place, I guess," she says.
  "Greenville is unlikely to make its way onto many itineraries," retorts the Rough Guide to the USA.
  

There's too much to write about in detail, so I'll leave it here. More later, probably once we hit New Orleans!

A spot of blatant self-promotion:

Two things:

1. Christ, is my nose really that big?
   
2. I've just signed up for Flickr so I can post 'interesting' photos from the forthcoming road trip, hence the random self-congratulatory pic from TM's Subway gig.
   
3. Have you been to tiny-monkey.net yet? Well why not? Off you go and have a browse through a Pulitzer-calibre selection of photographs documenting the Monkey's first two outings.
   

Okay, three things.

Cheese and wine parties

are like zombies. You wait ages for one to appear and as soon as you dispatch it, another pops up to take its place. So it was that I went to Louise, Ally and Antonio's flat on Wednesday for the second C&W party in a week. Louise is off to NZ for the summer to visit her family, so this little shindig was thrown to say goodbye for a while. It was curtailed a bit by having to work the next day, but good nonetheless. Note to self: drink more wine and eat more cheese.

On Thursday I went out for a drink with Kate. Again the spectre of work loomed over us and we called it a night fairly early on - perhaps I'm turning into an adult at last.

Stop laughing at the back there.

Friday night was rather larger. So large as to destroy Saturday with its overbearing presence, in fact. I went for a few quiet pints with some work guys, met up with Jen and then Jeff, Neil, Josh et al at the Outhouse, was rejoined by the same work guys (ah! The sight of Voxar types mingling with the Mafia brought a tear to my eye) and finally staggered home to purge the fridge of its few remaining beers.

On Saturday, I mainly failed to see Sin City. We got the the cinema and it was sold out so we watched Dodgeball in the flat instead. Good, but not quite as good as Old School and consequently not quite as good as Road Trip, the reigning number one in the tasteless-but-excellent teen comedy stakes.

Real-life road trip preparations are continuing apace. As we speak, I'm trying to decide: just how many pairs of ridiculously baggy surf shorts does the fashionable man-about-Texas need these days?

Road iTrip:

things are steadily coming together for next week's American lunacy. Our car (a Pontiac Grand Prix, if you're interested in that sort of thing) is hired; the FM transmitter for my iPod has arrived and my credit card is glowing a dull red.

[As an aside, the iTrip is actually illegal to use in the UK - it was shipped here from the Channel Islands. Ha! I'm sticking it to the Man. Eat my weak FM radio broadcasts of insipid Scottish indie!]