The plan from Mexico sounds simple enough: leave Oaxaca, and take the inter-American highway to Costa Rica, then return to the United States. This encompasses seven countries including the USA, though, and ten border crossings.

Driving in Mexico was becoming second-nature to us. There are a few things to beware of, of course. People drive faster and the cars, on average, are in worse condition than in the United States. This means balder tyres, worse brakes, and, frequently, broken tail lights or unused indicators. The roads are variable as well. The best highways are nicer than anything the US has to offer, but the secondary roads look and feel like they were recently subject to mortar attack.

And that’s before you consider the topes. A tope is a speed bump, but while in the UK this means a sloping, gentle ramp perhaps four inches off the ground, in Mexico it can mean very nearly anything. A tope can be anything from a gentle one-incher that you can take in fifth gear, to a bone –shaking, eight-inch high monster with vertical sides. Some topes are painted yellow and black. Some aren’t, and look like innocent shadows across the road – from a tall tree, perhaps – until you hit them at thirty miles per hour, causing everything in the car to shoot towards the ceiling and the suspension to make a solid thud as the front wheels land again. Most topes in Mexico, at anything other than dead slow – i.e. walking pace – are ruinous for a car, particularly for one with little ground clearance like our Cavalier. We took, eventually, to following Mexican drivers through towns: there seemed to be a kind of sixth sense when it came to topes, and often other drivers would spot them when we didn’t. It also helped, we found out (somewhat belatedly) that it helps to drive diagonally across large speedbumps, putting one wheel over at a time. This frequently saved the horrible metallic grinding noise that accompanies you dragging a valuable car over rough concrete.

We made it to Puerto Escondido in five hours, and stayed there for two nights before moving on. Our next stop was Zipolite, an even-further removed mile-long stretch of beach. There were fewer people but, it has to be said, they were more interesting. We stayed in a hotel with paper-thin, wooden walls: we could smell the cologne of our neighbours through them. So when our neighbours-but-one had a foulmouthed, stand-up row it was hard not to listen.

It was sensational: the kind of thing that would have Jerry Springer’s bodyguards leaping onto the stage and restraining both parties.

“F*** you, you ****ing ****!” He would roar, as a bottle hit the wall.

“F*** you, you redneck son of a bitch!” She would cry. Then there would come the sound of something else hitting the wall, a door slamming, and confused, angry footsteps stumbling back towards the bar.

They were both, it almost goes without saying, extraordinarily drunk.

Zipolite gave way to Puerto Arrista, which of all the beach towns we visited in Mexico, was the smallest. It was twelve kilometres off the highway, and the last few hundred metres were along a sand-strewn, cobbled street. Arrista is a town of nothing but hotels, but those that were there looked perilously empty. Bored-looking men sat in front of deserted parking lots and sprang into life when we approached, eager to guide us to a parking space and help us find a hotel. In the end we stayed on a campsite of sorts which offered double-bed cabins, under the watchful eye of a spectacularly-bearded Canadian called Jose.

We spent the night in Puerto Arrista and headed the next day for the border.

The thing about Central America is that you need a lot of car insurance. Lots can happen to a car once you get out of the USA: road accidents, vandalism, theft and breakdowns are all part of an unpretty picture. So it was that we had Mexican car insurance that covered us for everything from total loss of the car to running out of petrol.

Mexican insurance doesn’t cover you in Central America, of course. Luckily we had Sanborn’s on our side. We had visited Sanborn’s in Arizona for our Mexican insurance, and although the company doesn’t offer Central American insurance itself, it was happy to arrange it. For a US$35 processing fee and US$386, we had a month’s coverage in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica.

(Sanborn’s, incidentally, was fabulous. We had responses to our emails within hours of sending them, and ten days after our application was sent we had coverage. It was a genuinely great company to work with, whose employees genuinely seemed to have our best interests at heart. Weird for an insurance company, but there you go.

It’s also worth stressing, if you’re thinking of going, that car insurance in Central America is a minefield. It’s not obligatory in many places - the police won’t ask to see proof of it, for instance. But in Mexico, if you get into a traffic accident without any insurance, you’re going to prison - Mexican prison, obviously - until things are straightened out. And that’s before you consider the financial problems posed by potentially writing off your own car and someone else’s. The prospect of actually hurting someone else in a car accident without insurance is too hairy to even think of. The two exceptions to this are Nicaragua and Costa Rica; two countries where you must have government-minimum insurance, even if you already have third-party insurance.)

We still had to spend three days in Tapachula while we waited, though.

Tapachula is a town 20km from the Mexico-Guatemala border, which makes it the obvious place to hole up if you’re waiting to cross. It’s dusty and not a little dull, with an admittedly-fetching central park which sports, of all things, free municipal wi-fi. We bided our time in the Diamante Hotel, whose various charms included a view of the bus station yard, non-opening windows and, importantly, cable TV.

Tapachula isn’t particularly tourist-friendly. Our first inkling came when we left an internet café one day and walked into a scene from NYPD Blue. A man in plain clothes was crouching behind a pillar across the road holding a handgun, while two more men, this time with assault rifles, were looking nervous a few metres beyond him. At the end of the road was a black sedan, blocking off the street. It appeared that people were waiting for something or someone, although we didn’t hang around to find out what.

The night after that we heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire from a few blocks away.

Happy days, we thought. Finally, our insurance arrived. Next: Guatemala.

Dave can only apologise for the lack of pictures here. Tapachula just didn’t lend itself to photography, and taking a picture of a plain-clothes man with a handgun seemed like it would be pushing the limits of tourist photography. For pictures of Mexico - a hundred and sixty nine, to be precise, you should really visit the Mexico Flickr set.

If you think at this point that you’re lost and reading the Mexico City post again, you’re not. We did it twice. The first half of our journey to Oaxaca – in terms of time, at least – was a breeze. The highway was so new it wasn’t on our map. It was all but deserted and we could have driven much faster than the posted maximums.

The first sign that things were going to go wrong should have been in the Lonely Planet. We were aiming to stay at an out-of-the-way place called La Villada, which was vaguely pointed to north of the city, off the map. “La Villada”, it said, a lonely arrow pointing uselessly off the top of the page.

The problem with Oaxaca is that there’s quite a lot to the north. Small villages, mountain ranges, hills and a maze of small single-lane back streets which run into each other like the cracks in crazy paving. You could get very, very lost there.

And we did. We spent fruitless hours searching for La Villada. We pointlessly asked people as they walked down the street if they knew where it was, then nodded as they explained in precise, detailed, useless Spanish exactly where we needed to go. We picked up, at one point, the word “church”, in Spanish, in the midst of a two-minute description of our geographical shortcomings. Another woman generously drew us a map and gave us another detailed description of what was next. Also we were saying it wrong: as we would later learn, a double ‘l’ in Spanish is pronounced at least as a “yuh”, if not as a full-throated “zh”

We drove for three hours in the afternoon heat, our car groaning its way up hills and over speed bumps as the oil temperature needle gradually nudged higher and higher and the petrol level steadily dipped.

We were, eventually (and not, I have to say, without due regard for our perseverance), ready to concede defeat, and drive into the town centre to stay at a hotel. Then, at the last second, we saw a sign. “LA VILLADA”, it said.

We tore up the hill and took the only empty room at Oaxaca’s most beautiful hotel. La Villada looks out over the hills of Oaxaca state, and as the sun turned the opposing mountains a deep shade of red, we had to reflect that it had been worth the drive. Almost.

Oaxaca has a lot to offer tourists: colonial architecture, artesian markets selling everything from rugs to leather bags to fried grasshoppers. (No, I didn’t, since you ask.) But for us, it offered the opportunity to learn Spanish. At Amigos del Sol in Oaxaca you can, for a paltry US$7 an hour, learn Spanish from professional teachers. We signed up, keen to be out of a world we could barely understand.

In the preceding week we had been pulled over at a police checkpoint. Not for anything in particular, you understand, but simply to have a look around, in case we were toting around a ton of cocaine or something. We stopped and I handed my license out of the window. The police chief said something.

I grinned and nodded like an idiot.

He said something else.

At this point things become uncomfortable. What if he decided – as we certainly appeared – that we were being obstructive or wilfully obtuse? What if he took this to mean that we were certainly carrying enough cocaine to kill a camel and wrenched us out of the car before taking it to pieces?

In the end the one policeman on duty who did speak English came and explained. We needed to get out of the car, he said, and pop open the boot while we were at it.

Ah-ha.

Since then we’d been acutely aware of the need to speak much, much better Spanish, if only to be able to appease roadside policemen and get more reliable vegetarian food in restaurants.

The language school in Oaxaca was perfect. Our teachers were pros and the classes tiny: for the first week we were the only two students in every class. The second week we were joined by one more. We picked up vocabulary and learned the dispiriting fact, as we came to the end of our second week, that there are nineteen tenses in Spanish, of which we had barely mastered two. Each tense comes with different verb conjugations and these – this is the really depressing news – vary within the tense depending on the verb. “To go,” for instance, is irregular, which means it really behaves how it wants depending on the tense. Regular verbs, of which there aren’t many, or certainly not enough, are more reliable but still change depending on whether you’re talking about something you were doing but aren’t any more, or were doing but continued for a bit, or were doing and then stopped but might start again and so on. We were, at the very least, understanding more when people spoke to us, as long as they spoke very, very slowly and, ideally, used expansive hand gestures.

La Villada turned into a kind of temporary home for us. We stayed there for three entire weeks, as long as we’d stayed in a single hotel anywhere on the trip. We became friends with the family that owned it, ate pancakes every morning, and learned the striking fact that the entire hotel complex had been scrubland when they’d bought it, and that, furthermore, they’d even made the bricks themselves, using compacted dirt and a powerful-looking machine.

***

“Is that a real spider?”

This is not a question you ever want to hear. It means several things. Firstly, it means there is something that looks sufficiently like a real spider to beg the question. Secondly, it means the spider, real or fake, is sufficiently large, or otherwise arresting, to warrant mentioning. Thirdly, it either means there is a giant spider in the room, or that someone you know thinks it would be funny to get you to think there was.

The answer to Mendy’s question was yes. Actually, it was an emphatic, emphasised-with-swearing yes. Crouched malevolently in the corner of the room was a very large spider. Its size increased with successive tellings, but in reality it was, edge to edge of its furry, fat legs, about four inches wide.

We dumped one of our medical kits on the bed and attempted to catch it in the plastic box.

I don’t much like how spiders move, to tell you the truth. But when you can virtually hear their legs scratching along the ground as they try, crab-like, to avoid being caught; when they move each of their eight legs independently like a tiny corpse-like hand drumming its fingers on a table, they really do freak me out.

Our squeaks of consternation attracted the attention of the hotel owner, a cheerful soul in his sixties who took, by the end of our trip, to singing us Mexican lovesongs and transcribing them. He seized the box from us and promptly nabbed the spider.

“Tarantula,” he said. Urgh, we thought.

The next sentence was along the lines of, “Cuando es freo, buscanden por lugares tepia,”. Or, “when it’s cold, they look for warm places.”

It was quite cold that night. Our room was quite warm. He left with his trophy furiously trying to get out of its plastic jail, as we feverishly shook out each of our sheets, towels and hiking boots, in the – ultimately, thankfully – groundless fear that there might be more tarantulas waiting inside.

The next morning the owner was beaming. “Tengo un pequeño regallo,”.

A little gift?

The tarantula, alas, had not made it through the night. He handed us a jar that used to hold baby food. The label had been peeled off and it was full of alcohol of the sort used to sterilise hospital equipment.

Oh, and the tarantula was inside.

It was a little smaller, now that its legs had been bent slightly so the jar could accommodate it, but there was no doubting its furriness or the stubby fatness of its thorax. It was the first souvenir we had received since we arrived in Mexico.

Dave can only apologise for not having pictures of the ex-spider. It’s in the jar in the back of our car. And, I apologise for potentially putting very bad Spanish in the mouth of a bilingual Mexican.

Well, I’m not sure we’d ever endured a worse three hours in the car. Having made light work of four hundred kilometres, we made exceedingly heavy work of the final hundred.

Mexico, generally, is on board with the concept of street and motorway signs. There are frequently signs beside the road giving you useful information, such as the distance to the next few major towns, impending restaurants and petrol stations, and where the next junction will take you. It’s good stuff.

But, without warning, the signs end abruptly in Mexico City. Sometimes you’ll go past multiple exits without a hint as to where they go: they swish pass like enigmatic possibilities while you scratch your head and go, “Now, I wonder if that was the road to Teotihuacan?”. When there are signs they’re often vandalised, or covered by trees that have grown since the sign was erected, or simply obscured by traffic, of which there is a satirical amount.

Whatever the reason, once you get past the southernmost edges of the Periferico, Mexico City’s gigantic ring road, navigation becomes rather tricky.

It becomes rather more tricky, by the way, if the only maps you have are large-scale country maps and the city centre map in the Lonely Planet, which is designed for pedestrians with the luxury of time, not for lost tourists moving at the speed of traffic and haphazardly flailing for the right road. In the end we determined the location of the airport and navigated for a while by the flightpaths of incoming aircraft. Then, when we did identify our location, and the steps necessary to get on the road to Teotihuacan, the only two exits we could have taken were undergoing simultaneous repairs.

After three hours we abruptly found ourselves beyond the northern reaches of the periferico. We were delighted to be out of the city, but were nonetheless on quite the wrong road: Teotihuacan, we noted unhappily, was thirty kilometres to the east.

With the sun heating the horizon, we turned off the highway and spent forty-five minutes bumping down secondary roads towards Teotihuacan. At one point the road vanished entirely, and we bumped down a dirt track after a weighed-down Volkswagon bus. Finally, seven hours after we left, we arrived in Teotihuacan. We had intended to camp; but some things simply aren’t within the realms of possibility when you’re tired and there are more immediate alternatives. We checked into the first hotel we came to (actually, the second. The first, predictably, was full), and ate a ludicrously expensive meal at a nearby hotel. Then, we settled gratefully into a real bed and fell asleep to moronic cable TV shows.

The next day we went to Teotihuacan. It’s famous, you see, for being some of Mexico’s oldest and most complete pre-Hispanic pyramids and, had it not been pushing forty degrees and approximately seventy million people, it would have been quite something, I’m sure. As it was we were still tired from the previous day’s drive, and the mid-Christmas/New Year’s rush wasn’t what we needed to relax.

That afternoon, incidentally, we found a beautiful, clean campsite just west of the center of Teotihuacan, with a friendly, relaxed owner and well within walking distance of the bus station.

We found our way into Mexico City eventually. The next morning we bought a pair of bus tickets for US$2 each, and after an hour of being serenaded by a pair of buskers with a guitar, we were spat out into Mexico’s Terminale de Norte.

Quite apart from anything else we were entirely underdressed. Mexico City gets cold in January, and if that comes as a surprise to you imagine how we felt, dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flipflops, shivering in the morning fumes.

We spent much of the day trying to be inside. We rode the Metro, Mexico City’s surprisingly-usable subway system, which costs just 20USc for a journey of any length. In rush hour the front carriages are reserved for women and children. At other times of the day, CD salespeople wander up and down the carriages, fifties American classics and Mexico pop tunes buzzing out from speakers hidden in their shoulder bags.

We attempted to find Frieda Kahlo’s house, now a museum south of central Mexico City, and with wearying predictability, found it closed. We comforted ourselves with cups of coffee and chocolate donuts at a nearby café, and reflected that the reality of Mexico City was nothing like we had imagined. Movies like Man on Fire had primed me for a kind of Hispanic war zone, all carjackings, automatic weapons and wealthy-looking women being lifted off the street for later ransoming. Instead the traffic was, more or less, ordered, and no-one looked morbidly afraid for their lives. People drove Mercedes and Hummers down the street without so much as the pop of semi-automatic gunfire.

Still, I reminded myself, there’s always the Lonely Planet, which contains the rather off-putting statistic that there were “four kidnappings, 70 car thefts and 55 muggings a day in 2006″. And that’s just an average day.

We went back the next day, and quite apart from simply being open to the public, the Frieda Kahlo museum was a sight. Whatever you think of her art, the house itself is stunning, all open courtyards and bold shades of blue on the outside walls. It also has a beautiful but photography-is-forbidden kitchen. When I buy myself a house with the money I’ve made on this blog, I thought, this is what it’ll look like.

We got back to the campsite after dark, and the next morning the woman in charge bade us a tearful farewell. After two days of early starts and late returns she had assumed the worst, and was preparing, the next morning, to call our respective embassies.

After two days of the biggest city in the world we were ready to move on. Next up was Oaxaca. It couldn’t be worse finding our way there than it was to Mexico City, could it?

Dave isn’t sure I’d go back to Mexico City, but as staggering metropolises go, well. Much, much more photography in the related Flickr set, by the way.

The American side of things was easy: who are the Americans to care who’s leaving, anyway? It was so easy it was suspicious, actually, so we stopped to see if the American border guards would cancel my tourist visa and remove it from my passport. This was, I was rather flatly told, not something the border guards did. I accepted this rather reluctantly, in the manner of someone who knows a minor convenience now will amount to an enormous problem later on.

The Mexican side of things is more complicated. To take a car further than the official “No Hassle Zone”, which extends about 100km into Mexico, you need to prove you own it, plus proof you can drive, plus registration and ideally, your title. You also need copies of everything you use. In the end, for those taking notes, we used our car registration, our passports and drivers licences. The cost of importing a car into Mexico, at least in December 2008, was US$27, and then US$17 each for our tourist cards.

(The amounts in Pesos are P$399.76 and P$237 respectively. You can pay with a Visa card, although our UK chip-and-pin cards didn’t work. We used an American card. Also, if you pay with a card for your car permit, the card has to be in the exact name of the person who owns the car.

You also need to pay a bond for your car: essentially a guarantee that you’ll take the car out of Mexico at some point. You can pay this in cash, or let the Mexicans put a hold on your credit card until you officially remove your car. Paying in cash, to us, sounds like a colossal pain in the arse. Seven-day permits, apparently, are free, although we didn’t notice any signs to this effect at the border.

A note to Americans heading south: if your registration is handwritten, like our Illinois registration is, expect problems. Either bring your title, which should solve everything, or buy a temporary registration in Arizona. US$5 gets you three days’ of temporary registration, and Mexican officials, for some reason, seemed ok with it. Ideally, you’ll also brush up on your Spanish.)

As we left the border crossing, every horror story I’d ever heard about Mexico muscled its way to the front of my mind. Every tale of mechanical failure, horrific crash and roadside bandits kept cropping up.

“Ah, yes,” I would think. “When the banditos attack, they’ll probably be coming from behind that rock.” Or, “I wonder if it’s really true that you go to prison if you have any kind of car crash in Mexico?”

The latter, not to alarm you or anything, actually is true, at least for those without insurance. If you head to Mexico with only your American insurance – even if that policy covers you in Mexico – you’re as good as uninsured to a Mexican policeman. So, if you crash into anything, you’re going to prison until things are sorted out. Luckily, we had spent the preceding day with a charming woman who worked for Sanborn’s, an American company that specialises in Mexican car insurance for Americans. For US$281 we got a six-month policy that not only covered us for the obvious – crashing, vandalism, theft, that kind of thing – but also for acts of plain stupidity: running out of fuel or needing oil on the road. We were covered for all kinds of mechanical failure, as well as the costs associated with taking the car to be fixed somewhere. And, should the car fail totally, we were insured for everything after the first thousand dollars and then we’d be flown back home.

Still, we didn’t crash. At least not that first day. We drove a conservative sixty-five miles per hour, passed by a constant stream of articulated lorries and American RVs.

Paul Theroux – and it’s at this point I wish I was researching things a little better because I could give you the actual quote – once said something to the effect that the best travel writing comes from the worse trips. It’s certainly true that the next few weeks passed in a cheerful succession of sunny campsites, cheap motels and sandy beaches. We stayed in small seaside towns where nothing much happened except for sunbathing and enchiladas.

A funny thing happened while we were in Phoenix, Arizona. We stopped for petrol, and I paid an Indian chap behind the counter. He looked curious when he heard my accent.

“Where are you from?”

“England, actually,”

He regarded me wistfully for a moment. “I go to bed dreaming about the curry houses in England.”

He was right. But a close second to Indian food is Mexican food. In the States Mexican food tends to be a once-a-week kind of deal: drowning in cheddar and sour cream. It’s delicious but if you had it every night of the week you’d be dead in a month. In Mexico the food is earthier, less fatty, tastier and spicier. If I could somehow arrange to eat an English breakfast in the morning, a Mexican lunch and an Indian dinner every day for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man, palate-wise. I’d also be fat. Very fat, probably.

And then, with very little warning, it was Christmas. Strangely, Christmas in Mexico looks a lot like Christmas in the United States, right down to the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, presumably sweating like shit in his big red coat, fluffy white beard, and 35-degree weather. Commercial symbolism trumps aesthetic practicality.

Christmas was rather odd. Christmas, for me, is the time when the family gets together, drinks excessively, watches whatever happens to be on the TV, and generally gets along. We sit by the fire and toss whatever happens to be to hand – wrapping paper, bits of food, the weakest of the group – in to keep it going.

It’s a good time. So it was more than a little sad to be away from it.

To compensate, we moved out of our tent temporarily and into the most stylishly-faded hotel in Acapulco. There didn’t seem to be much to recommend Acapulco, from what we saw of it: eight lanes of solid traffic in the outskirts, a beachfront of toweringly monstrous resort hotels, and very little of the charming, colonial architecture we saw in Mazatlan, which is a few hours up the coast and was beguilingly, calmly, wonderful.

Los Flamingoes, our stylish hotel, however, isn’t in Acapulco. It’s high on the cliffs about a mile out of town, and for a few days we didn’t leave the hotel. We stayed behind the gates, swam in the pool, and ate in the restaurant.

Los Flamingoes is quite famous: it was owned by John Wayne in the fifties, and almost invariably when a movie is filmed in Acapulco – and that’s a lot of movies – everyone goes to stay there. There are pictures of Hollywood’s glitterati on the walls, and tour groups go to Los Flamingoes just to have a look around. It was unspeakably cool to be a guest there, while sweaty Americans tumbled out of a succession of mini-vans, poked around the pool for a few moments, and then got driven somewhere else. God knows why, of course: Los Flamingoes is almost certainly cheaper than the downtown Holiday Inn. And Tarzan stayed there.

Dave hasn’t been writing for a bit. I’ve been taking pictures full-steam ahead though, so why not enjoy the Mexican set on Flickr?

We slid out of town and headed for the Hoover Dam; partly because the Hoover Dam is one of the most impressive man-made spectacles in the world, partly because the Hoover Dam is on the way to the Grand Canyon.

Here’s a genuine piece of travel advice for anyone going to the Hoover Dam: don’t pay for parking. Approach the dam from the Nevadan side and you’ll find a large, multi-story carpark that will charge you an optimistic US$7, before funnelling you towards the museum and gift shop. Cross over the dam, however, to the Arizonan side, and there are four or five large, free car parks in which you can park, apparently, for as long as you want.

Of course, we didn’t realise this until we were across the Dam. In fact, we crossed the dam three times, twice on foot, and then once again in the car. On foot, of course, is best, because you can peer over the surprisingly-low wall and speculate as to how many times you would flip over before you lost consciousness, or crashed fatally into the concrete at the bottom. The Hoover Dam is more than seven hundred feet tall: it starts more or less vertical, then tapers into a steep, sloping curve towards the bottom. It cost – and you can skip to the next paragraph if you’d rather not learn anything – three-quarters of a billion dollars to build in modern money, and more than two hundred people died during its five-year construction.

There are a few places you can visit the Grand Canyon. This isn’t surprising, as the Grand Canyon is, by absolutely any standard you care to measure it by, immense. You can see it from space. It’s ten miles across and nearly a mile deep. It is, in short, quite something.

There was quite the palaver in 2007 when the Skywalk over the Grand Canyon opened. I vividly remember watching it on TV. A newsman looking just a little shaky, if I recall, stepped out onto a cantilevered bridge that hung sixty-five feet out over the canyon. Even when the canyon isn’t at its full mile-deep, you could still drop a penny and wait a very long time to hear it hit the bottom, so standing on a glass bridge over one of nature’s most impressive abysses must be one of the more reliable ways to prompt oneself into accidental urination.

The land on which the Skywalk stands, however, is a national park, as far as I can tell. National Parks, in the United States, are reasonably-priced, and the Grand Canyon will set you back US$25 per vehicle. But the Skywalk is at the Grand Canyon West, which is two hundred miles from the actual Grand Canyon park, and is on a Native American reservation. The Native Americans in question are the Hualapai tribe, and in an apparent (to say nothing of successful) bid to squander the goodwill owed to them by America, have priced their slither of the Grand Canyon at stunningly optimistic prices. If you want to go and look at the Skywalk, you’ll need to shell out US$29.95, which will buy you parking, a “Hualapai Visitation Certificate”, and “Photo opportunities with Hualapai members”, which just sounds too painful to contemplate.

If you want to do something as rash as to actually stand on the Skywalk, why, that will cost you another US$29.95 each, and you’ll have to surrender your camera on your way out to the bridge. On the upside, you can buy someone else’s photo of you afterwards, which also sounds too painful to contemplate.

It seemed, frankly, like a rather expensive way of looking at the canyon, particularly when the official National Park, which costs twenty five dollars for an entire car and is otherwise free, was on our way to southern Arizona.

(If you’ve turned up from Google, by the way, you’ll be delighted to learn that there’s a lot of conflicting information regarding the Grand Canyon West. I’ve been as accurate as I can in terms of prices, but you should note that there are apparently child prices for the Grand Canyon West which aren’t on the official website, and that this third-party website has entirely different prices. If you’re willing to part with what either way will be a significant amount of cash, I suggest calling first.)

We drove for another three hours, until it got dark, and stayed the night at the Hill Top motel, which among its various charms (it was open when we got there being its first and most significant), sported an effective heater, free wireless internet, and a deep brown shag carpet of the type American motels seem to have bought in bulk at some point in the mid-seventies and never got around to replacing. Excitingly, it was also on Route 66, the legendary, now largely-defunct, road through the USA.

The next day we visited the Grand Canyon.

I had imagined – and maybe you have as well – that the Grand Canyon would be a kind of huge gorge. You could stand on the top of it and peer down into the Colorado River, but you’d be able to see the other side. It would be a kind of enormous crevice in the surface of the earth.

It is much more.

The Grand Canyon looks as though someone abruptly pulled a huge, irregularly-shaped piece of rock out of the Earth’s surface, leaving behind an extraordinary landscape. You cannot see to the other side of the Grand Canyon from virtually anywhere along its rim: at some places you can’t see to the bottom. The Colorado River – a huge, raging torrent of water – is but a calm thread of tranquil silver below. At various points there are huge peaks, almost as high as the rim, and at others the base of the canyon is flat. It takes three days to hike from the top to the river, and people have died doing it. It is, undoubtedly, the Very Biggest Thing I have ever seen.

It is so big, in fact, that it is virtually impossible to photograph. The best times to catch the light are early in the morning or around sunset, when the sun brings out the reddish rocks properly. It was one of those times, I’m afraid, when you just had to be there.

We spent the afternoon driving along the edge, pulling over at various points to take more pictures and to peer down.

We had intended to camp at the Grand Canyon: one of the finest pieces of small print in America’s National Parks is that you can camp virtually anywhere within them, but a weather forecast in the visitor centre advertised an overnight low of 20 degrees, or minus seven. There are places to stay inside the National Park – great-looking places with towering oak beams, lusciously thick rugs and roaring fires in the reception. Unfortunately they cost upwards of US$200 per night, which was a bit much for a pair who had just recently been contemplating camping. We headed back into Valle, where we found, to our relief, a Motel 8.

Motel 8, and I can say this with all the certainty of a man who has visited two of each, is superior to Motel 6. I’m not sure why the higher number should be the better hotel, but there you are. You get free wireless (at least in both the hotels we stayed in), a free breakfast, and, in the times we’ve gone, the rooms have been nicer and larger, and cheaper to boot.

We stayed in a Motel 8 that night, and awoke to a car park encrusted with frost.

Never mind, we thought. Phoenix would be warm.

Dave quite fancies a week’s camping in the Grand Canyon. Anyone else?

(Via Blip. Music is something or other by Fatboy Slim. It sounds, like Dylan Moran says, like a million ambulances chasing a million fire engines, but in this case that’s quite appropriate.)

Here’s a funny thing about America. You may be familiar with the story but bear with me.

In 2004, a well-known singer called Janet Jackson performed during the Super Bowl. During her performance, she exposed, apparently accidentally, her right breast.

The only thing more unbelievable than her claims of wardrobe malfunction (how many people who wear nipple clamps don’t wish people to see them?) was the number of complaints received after the incident. Ready?

Five hundred and forty thousand.

That’s a pretty big number, even compared to the massive audience that watches the superbowl every year.

From this, you might conclude that Americans (although not any I know, I should hasten to add) are a pretty conservative bunch. But if Americans are repressing their sexuality and bad behaviour into a tiny, spicy, rubberised red ball (I’m thinking specifically of the type in Pulp Fiction), the place it all comes out is Las Vegas. Its catchphrase is “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, which should be warning enough.

This is before you actually approach the city. You don’t get this treat if you fly in, as the airport is virtually downtown. But from the road – and specifically the road from Utah – Las Vegas emerges as a mirage from the desert. It is almost literally in the middle of the sand, miles from anywhere.

This is how toxic I am, it seems to be saying. Toxic enough that it has been strategically-placed hundreds of miles from anywhere. At three hundred miles from Los Angeles it’s close enough that you could drive to it in time to lose your savings over a weekend, but far enough away that your misadventures won’t actually turn up on your doorstep.

Even the highway is lined with grungy sex. As we drove in we saw signs from a creatively-named company called Bait n’ Tackle who would, the signs promised, pay you five hundred dollars if you were prepared to masturbate in front of a camera. I am not deducing this from the signs’ careful imagery or clever double entendres, but from the phrase “for a tug”, which leaves sufficiently little to the imagination that I can imagine uncomfortable silences in cars containing inquisitive children.

Our hotel was a bargain, and if you’re in the market for a cheap room in Vegas I recommend the Howard Johnson chain. It was close enough to the Strip that you could walk it or make a cheap taxi ride of it, and the room was huge and air-conditioned. Best of all, alongside the Las Vegas de rigours – a pool, a bar, a restaurant selling cheap, hearty breakfasts – there was, through a set of double doors in the lobby, a small wedding chapel. This was the Vegas I had come to see. A town where fortunes were lost, mistakes were made and absorbed, and where even Britney Spears could find someone to marry her, if only for twenty-four hours.

We slept off our drive from Utah and struck out in the evening.

We walked up the Strip. Sex was everywhere. Everywhere. We saw one billboard, ostensibly advertising some kind of timeshare arrangement, which led with the line “AND A FREE BJ!” I’m not sure what exactly what was on offer (or what was on sale, for that matter), but that’s not really the point.

Vans drive up and down the Strip all night, advertising GIRLS!!! DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR!!! As if they were obliging pizzas.

Very convenient, I thought. But not very nice.

We ate at a surprisingly cheap burger shack on the Strip, then committed ourselves to wandering. The Strip is a solid collection of hotels and casinos. Some hotels have casinos in them; some casinos have hotels attached, so you could, if you wanted, commit yourself to an entire holiday of never seeing fresh air. I heard a rumour a little while ago that claimed Las Vegas hotels – those with casinos in them, at any rate – actually pump extra oxygen into their rooms, thus keeping their inhabitants awake and more likely to visit the gaming rooms, longer.

We went into some, of course. We tried a few, not least the MGM Grand.

One of my favourite films is Ocean’s Eleven. I had been hoping for Ocean’s Eleven. Rows of beautifully-tailored, smiling people behind every set of revolving doors, cheerfully blowing away chunks of money and, occasionally, every now and then, winning a load back.

There were happy people inside the casinos, but they were drunk and, like us, there to watch, rather than play. Every single person I saw sat down in front of the machines looked as though they’d rather be somewhere else, but were, by eleven o’clock in the evening, in so deep that they may as well keep going. Everyone there looked as though they’d recently made a large, expensive mistake that they fully expected to pay for. As we wandered past one machine, staffed by an octogenarian with purple tints, I caught sight of the amount of money she had remaining before she would need to feed it again.

$327, the machine read. The last digit was ticking down at a rate of one dollar per second. She didn’t look happy either, but then I suppose you wouldn’t if you were almost certainly about to lose three hundred dollars. That much, I reasoned, missing the point a little, would get you nearly seven nights in the Howard Johnson.

No-one seemed to be winning. The machines were making encouraging sorts of noises, but no-one leapt from their seats and shouted “There’s Little Timmy’s college fund sorted out!” or anything like that. Everyone just looked a bit unhappy and both casinos we went into smelled like the kind of provincial nightclub I used to go to when I was eighteen: sugary alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. Las Vegas is one of very few major cities left in the United States that allows smoking inside. Certainly that evening, if everyone holding a cigarette had had to go outside to smoke it, the casinos would have lost far more than I imagine they do in actually paying people who won.

Of course, it was spectacular to look at. There is more neon in Las Vegas than in the rest of the world combined, and if that sounds made up, it’s because it is. It should be true though, if only to lend Vegas one more eye-popping feature. Everything clicked and hummed: we walked past hotels that had their own rollercoasters popping out of the pavement and whirling in death-defying loops and swirls around their host architecture. We saw just-miniaturised versions of Manhattan, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

My favourite was the Bellagio.

Here’s a short story. A few years ago we, as a family, went to the Isle of Wight. I don’t know if this is true for you, but family holidays seem to improve greatly once everyone grows up and moves out. Perhaps it’s because the kids start seeing their parents as normal adults; perhaps it’s vice versa. Perhaps it’s simply that it’s finally acceptable for everyone to drink a lot of alcohol, and who can’t get behind that as a reason to hang out with your siblings and parents?

The Isle of Wight, of course, was as crappy as everyone remembered it. I don’t wish to offend anyone who lives there, or who has a particular affinity for dirty beaches, hit-and-miss food and bad weather, but the fact is that an awful lot of what is on the Isle of Wight exists elsewhere, frequently in sunnier and better-quality forms.

Except the Waltzing Waters. Someone had recommended it to my dad at some point and, given the choice between doing nothing, visiting the Waltzing Waters, and go-karting (which I hate and makes me want to vomit extravagantly), we bought tickets.

Waltzing Waters is quite the strangest thing I have ever paid to watch in my life. Technically, it is the strangest thing my parents have paid for. The thrust of the marketing is that it’s a kind of aquatic fireworks: a complicated and breathtakingly-choreographed set of fountains shoot hundreds of gallons into the air, stunningly-lit and perfectly synchronised to music.

The auditorium itself was the size of a medium cinema. There were six of us, and a confused-looking Japanese family at the back. The auditorium smelled strongly of mildew: the kind of smell you get if you unpack a tent that got wet eons ago and hasn’t been removed from its bag since.

It was crap. The waters themselves worked fairly well, as in no-one got wet, but they shot perhaps ten feet into the air, faintly lit by multi-coloured disco lights. The music reached the point of Abba but no further. We were, by the end of it, in a darkened room watching animatronic hoses dance. It was the kind of crap entertainment that only the British can really do. Show it to any other nationality and they would leave halfway. We watched it through to the end. The Japanese family left looking disappointed and I nodded helplessly at them on the way out.

The fountains at the Bellagio are world famous. In a single performance they use over a thousand “water expressions” (industry-speak for fountains) and four thousand lights. And, instead of multi-coloured disco lights, which lent the Waltzing Waters canons a sort of school-disco feel, they use a classy, white-only number, and pump out deafening music, perfectly in time with the canons. And, because it’s outside, it doesn’t smell terrible, and you get to watch what is, after all, a pretty impressive implementation of waterworks.

It’s also just about the only thing in Las Vegas which is family-friendly. Perhaps Janet Jackson should take her superbowl show there.

Dave lost precisely one dollar in Las Vegas, but still isn’t sure how.

Links

Excellent site by the designers and builders of the Bellagio’s fantastic waterworks.

The UK’s own version. Worth a daytrip, surely? For a real giggle visit the Testimonies page.

Get paid $500 for wanking. Obviously this link isn’t particularly safe for work or the faint-hearted.

The Flickr set.

(Via Blip. Music is Eli the Barrow Boy by The Decemberists. This video is the bookends of the Las Vegas video here. We went to Utah, then Vegas, then the Grand Canyon. It didn’t make much sense with Vegas in the middle. Hopefully you’ll allow me this tiny fraud.)

Once we’d finished variously fitting new tyres and tinkering with our new reflector, which had mysteriously malfunctioned overnight, we bade Tyson goodbye and drove off.

We did this cautiously, because the day we left was the first day of Colorado’s snow season. Lots of states in the USA have snow seasons, but few of them embark on the season with the kind of gusto as Colorado. The snow was coming down in solid avalanches and the streets were covered with a compacted light brown coating of condensed snow. The highway was as well. Highway seventy, which curls out of Denver and out into the Rocky Mountains is a challenge when it’s dry, at least by American standards. It switches back on itself and curves through stunning valleys and gorges as it winds up and down thousands of feet.

It’s harder when it’s covered in snow. The problem is, of course, that it’s hard to tell which parts of the road are simply wet, and which shiny parts are condensed patches of ice that, should you do something rash, like steer, will send you careening through the central reservation and into the path of an oncoming truck, or something similarly catastrophic.

We inched out of Denver.

After less than an hour we had made barely any headway, but we had started to see signs towards Buffalo Bill’s grave. American highways are great like this. They’re stupendously long, of course, and Americans will drive nearly unthinkable distances on them. Partly this is because they’re easy: well paved and often straight for hundreds of miles you can cover stunning distances in single days. And, in the name of pacifying backseat-ridden children, every so often you’ll find signs to some roadside miracle: a cave, perhaps, or a petting zoo, or the grave of one of America’s greatest entertainers.

It isn’t politically correct to celebrate Buffalo hunters now, largely because there used to be millions of the creatures in the United States, and a single specimen could handsomely feed an entire family, providing days of meals for native American families. Buffalo (or bison, if we wish to be precise) were the most numerous large mammal on Earth. Then the settlers arrived, and the number promptly fell to just a few hundred. From the famed native American method of using the whole buffalo in the name of economy and good hunting practice, settlers would kill a bison for the skin alone, leaving the rest of the creature to rot. Sometimes bison were hunted specifically to starve native Americans out of desirable lands.

So Buffalo Bill’s tally of more than four thousand bison in eighteen months could be taken in two ways, I suppose. In fairness, the man’s prowess when it came to knocking off bison was matched only by his ahead-of-the-time ecology: he was in favour of a buffalo season and was against hide hunting. But what made him famous was his shows: after his career as a hunter had ended (not enough bison left, perhaps), he took his show to Chicago, acting out his exploits for citizens of the big cities. He even took his show on the road, touring the UK and Europe. He met the pope.

Even if you don’t know who he is, the name is famous.

We trudged up the side of a hill to the grave, our footprints the only ones in the fresh snow. Then, we had a coffee in the deserted giftshop, and resigned ourselves to a few more hours sliding cautiously along the highway.

We spent the evening near Grand Rapids, about which I can tell you nothing. It does have a Subway, for instance. It also has a motel, but because I didn’t take notes that night I can’t tell you what kind.

The next day we broke into Utah. We turned left off the highway and headed to Moab.

Moab itself is a pleasant-enough town. It has a few restaurants and a couple of giftshops, which sell stickers of the Give Peace a Chance variety. The reason Moab exists, or at least the reason it exists in its tourist-friendly form, is the Arches national park a few miles from its limits.

The Arches are a series of seriously impressive rock formations out in the middle of the desert. Sand and wind erosion have carved spectacular rock formations from the sandstone.

The entire park – and a lot of national parks are like this – has road running through it, which means you could, if you wanted, see quite a lot of the rock formations without leaving your car. But The Arches national park has the kind of stunning natural sights that it is impossible to go there without wanting to get out of your car and head, running, into the desert.

Such an act would be rather foolhardy, of course. You’re in a desert, after all.

The most famous of The Arches is Delicate Arch, an elongated, upended horseshoe-shaped rock overlooking a canyon. This is the one in all the postcards. It’s possible to drive to a nearby lookout to peer at the arch, but the best way to see it is to walk. Delicate Arch even worked its way into the newspapers in 2001, when a photographer lit a fire beneath the arch to demonstrate night photography techniques to a group of students. The fire damaged the arch, and the photographer in question, Michael Fatali (who now no doubt wishes he’d chosen a different subject to teach), was promptly assessed a ten thousand dollar fine.

We trod carefully. Luckily, even without misguided pyrotechnics (is there any better kind?), the walk is excellent. On the way you take in Petroglyphs, permanent paintings etched into the cliff-face by the Ute Indians for whom Utah is named. You also go by Woolf Cabin, a distinctly remote-looking log cabin built by an early settler.

The Arches landscape is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Deep red rocks lurch out of the ground at every turn; some of them hundreds of feet high, while others, like Delicate Arch, appear to defy the laws of physics, and look like they might topple over at any moment.

At Delicate Arch all we could hear was the wind whistling up from the canyon floor, and the noise of our own feet scuffing along the rock. It was entirely peaceful.

So it only made sense that our next stop was Las Vegas.

Dave is adding Utah to the list of places to go back to. At this rate we’ll need to do another trip just to see them all.

And while we were in Utah we visited a real live ghost town - Grafton - for lunch. We were only there for about an hour, but you can find the pictures here. More Utah and Arches pictures can be found here.

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.) (Via Blip. Music is Sew My Name by Josh Pyke.)
The next day we drove for an exceptionally long time. All told, according to Google, De Soto, Iowa, to Boulder Colorado, is a shade over seven hundred miles.

From the road, at least, Nebraska doesn’t have too much to recommend it. There are a few gentle curves here and there, and once and twice we had the distinct impression of climbing or descending a mild gradient. I realise it’s bad, bad travel writing to say somewhere was dull, and I’m sure Nebraska’s a fine, fine place (Kool-Aid originated there, fact-fans), but on the trip of a lifetime there’s not much reason to stop.

We treated the car to a car wash. I mention this for two reasons: firstly, on a day when you drive clean across an entire state , anything passes for news. Secondly, I’d never driven a car through an automatic car wash, and four dollars seemed like a low price indeed for a first like that.

In these economically-straightened times I was delighted to see that four dollars will buy you the experience of having your car pulled through a shed by a robot and sprayed, buffed and dried (which is good enough in itself, surely), but that it does a good job as well.

Our car sparkled. It gleamed a fierce red in the winter sun and, not for the first time, we congratulated ourselves on finding a bargain.

I was so chuffed with how it looked, actually, that the next thing I did was back it into an electricity pylon.

After ten hours driving I’d been feeling a little under the weather. The first tell-tale sign of this was drifting much, much closer to a passing truck than safety would suggest was normal. So, instead of having a horrible, high-speed accident on a highway, I opted to stop for a perk-me-up coffee. And a horrible, low-speed accident in full view of twenty people at a petrol station.

In my defence, most American car parks don’t have large lamp-posts and electricity pylons in them. When they do, they’re surrounded by lovely, deformable plastic barriers, because every so often they disobligingly disappear into people’s blind-spots and people reverse their cars into them.

The electricity pylon disobligingly vanished into my blind spot, but instead of having a lovely, deformable barrier around it was made of stout iron and, I noted later with a small sense of schadenfreud, dented and surrounded with other people’s smashed headlight glass. I wasn’t the first, at the very least.

The car made the kind of noise you might get if you took a handful of aluminium foil and screwed it up. I stood on the brake and we went to have a look.

There really was quite a mess. A clear twelve inches of scratches, some of them down to the body, had been clawed their way along the side of our spotless car, and a dent the size of a bowling ball added a certain je ne c’est quoi to our three-day old car. The reflector covering the brake lights was broken as well, and was now hanging crazily off the back of the car.

I was furious. Reversing cars into other things isn’t something I’ve made a habit of since I got my driver’s licence. I’ve driven through Marrakesh, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, and I’d just done a permanent amount of damage at less than ten miles per hour in one of America’s dullest states.

“Shit, man. I was looking at a map in my cab. If I’d looked up a second sooner I could’ve used my horn and warned you guys.”

A man in a FedEx uniform wandered over from his truck.

“Looks like that’s happened to that pole before.”

We agreed sadly. He commiserated for a few minutes more (Americans really are very, very nice people when it comes to strangers), then climbed into his truck with drove off with a conciliatory toot.

Eventually, I had to look on the bright side. The damage looked bad; it wasn’t enough to actually affect how the car drove. The reflector was off course, deeply buggered and we needed to improvise it back together with duct tape, but the bulbs were fine and we could, we estimated, go a few days before finding a replacement.

It was well after dark by the time we arrived in Boulder. Boulder, Colorado, is famed as a ski-resort, and as one of the finest towns in America, so it remains a mystery why it took us so long to find it. Viewed from space, our route to Boulder described a kind of enormous spiral, one that took hours and miles of unnecessary driving to complete. Infuriating barely began to describe it.

At length we arrived in a car park in Boulder, where we met Tyson. Tyson – and I’ll forgive you for not keeping up here – is Jordan’s sister’s (Garett) boyfriend. Jordan, if you recall, has a dad who helped us buy our car. Also she gave us a duvet so we wouldn’t die while camping.

“So, you guys are going to follow me up into the mountains,” he announced. “There’s going to be some smoke.”

His Volkswagon belched into life, drove a hundred metres, and then pulled over, wobbling on its deflated rear tyre.

We liked Tyson from the minute we met him. Besides being magnanimous about his tyre, we were about to stay with him and Garret for two days and he didn’t seem to mind a bit. More than that, he has two mechanical degrees and a pilot’s licence, and is on his way to a third degree. He is, pretty obviously, an interesting guy.

Garret is too. Not an interesting guy, that is, but the first things she did when we arrived were a) commiserate sympathetically about the car without asking how it could be that I could reverse into something so large and permanent as an electricity pole, and b) give us a huge box of chocolate, snackfoods and Gatorade, the better to sustain us on our four thousand mile journey south to Costa Rica.

Their apartment was buried in the mountains over Boulder, and it was bright, warm, and their beer was cold.

Things were looking up.

The next morning we needed repairs. The dent we could live with: it was (still is, now that you mention it) sad to look at but it didn’t actually make any difference. The busted taillight, on the other hand, was going to get us pulled over at some point in the future, if not in the United States, then almost certainly in Mexico and Central America.

Luckily, Tyson, our new friend, had a flat tyre, so we dispatched Garett at her office and embarked on a morning-long tour of Boulder’s tyre shops and mechanics.

The initial news was bad. A man scratched his head and looked sorrowful.

“I can get it for you,” he said of a new tail reflector. “But it’ll cost $109 and it won’t be here until Friday.”

We went instead to Denver, which is thirty miles south of Boulder. There, Tyson discovered a scrap dealer that not only had our reflector in stock, but had it for fifty dollars, and had a stock of used tyres. We were delighted: our new reflector even came with a pair of bulbs.

Colorado, as any fan of Jack Kerouac will know, is tantalising. It was certainly beautiful. The mountains were capped with a layer of snow, Boulder’s shops, which we visited that evening, were warm, and the centre of town had even been pedestrianised at some point, which in the United States is news indeed.

That afternoon we visited Nederland, a mountain resort north of Boulder: Tyson was enquiring about a job and we fancied visiting a mountain.

Nederland, which sits more than eight thousand feet above sea level, is a Nirvana for North America skiers, and we were instantly smitten. At the base of the ski resort sat an assortment of wooden coffee shops and restaurants. We visited one that had taken up residence in an abandoned train car, and then drove past immense lakes. We trekked up small waterfalls through pristine snow and drove on mountain passes that smelled of clean air and pine trees. It was adorable, and it was made even better by its contrast with Iowa and Nebraska.

Boulder has clean streets and nice shops, and Colorado even has its own breweries. The USA has a deservingly poor reputation for beer, but Colorado goes some way to redressing the balance: try Fat Tire, if you get a chance.

Kerouac thought Colorado was one of his favourite places in the United States. After less than two days we were taken with it, but the next morning Tyson and I stood in driving snow (it’s like driving rain, but colder and it unhelpfully hides any tools you’ve put on the ground) as Tyson fitted first his new tyre to his car, then our new reflector to ours. He’s a handy fellow and if you break down west of Illinois you should really look him up.

We were off to Utah.

Dave recommends, when buying your next car, that you carefully examine how easy it is to check your blind spots. That’s right, I’m blaming it on the car. What?

The problem with any road trip through America is that America is a big country. And, like anything big, there’s a lot of it that really isn’t that interesting.

For instance, America has New York, San Francisco and Chicago, and for almost anyone’s money these are three of the most interesting places on Earth. But then it also has Iowa and Nebraska.

We had spent the night with Jordan and Kieran, our Chicagoan (that’s really what they call ‘em) friends, who had sent us packing with an entire duvet set, so worried were they that we’d die of exposure before we hit Mexico. We left Chicago amid flurries of snow, and, for a good ten minutes things were pretty interesting. Scenic lakes passed by the window, snow perched picturesquely on top of traffic lights and roadside houses.

Then we reached the highway. American highways are monumentally, invariably and depressingly dull. They have to be: trucking is the number one way goods get to shops and supermarkets in the USA, and so it makes sense that the roads used by truckers are as flat and as straight as possible. Unfortunately, topographically uninteresting states such as Iowa and Nebraska mean road planners really got to go to town. If we’d had a steering wheel lock and cruise control we could have nodded off at the forty-mile mark and set an alarm for six hours later.

Of course, there are things on the side of the road. Mostly this was cows and the such, and occasionally worrying signs that said things like “gunssavelife.com”, which is as good as indicator as any that if you plan on breaking down, it shouldn’t be here.

Most significantly, Iowa has the World’s Biggest Truck Stop. We pulled diligently over to have a look.

The World’s Biggest Truck Stop is certainly big. Contained within it is a cinema, a church and a barber, which I presume offered variations on the mullet, of which there were billions. And, like virtually all rest stops on every highway in the world, there was no good food anywhere.

(The one exception to this is the mini Marks and Spencers at the end of the M4 in the UK.)

We stopped and ate at Wendy’s. I’ve always been curious about Wendy’s. Partly it’s the advertising – it’s Real Meat! they say, and Much Better Than McDonald’s! and so forth. And the burgers always look, y’know, tempting and whatever. I love a good burger. And this was a truck stop, for God’s sake: how could they not offer good burgers to hungry, sleep-deprived truckers? I remembered reading somewhere that the reason truckstops had become popular with non-truckers is the quality of the food: truckers are on the road all day, after all, so they need something a cut above average.

My burger from Wendy’s couldn’t have qualified as food if it tried. It had a kind of grey, mottled texture and was wet, which I’m sure isn’t what Wendy had envisioned when she first built a burger stand (or whatever). It disintegrated when I picked it up, leaving my plastic tray covered with tiny flecks of grey rubber. Even worse, having paid for it and being starving, I had to eat it. The only other option was Taco Bell, a kind of toxic stomach-lining destroying faux Mexican food that I only want when I’m drunk.

It was horrible. It was probably the closest I’ve ever come to having a soul-crushing experience while eating, which is something that I do a lot and love. The most extraordinary thing is that Wendy’s has been going since 1969, so it can’t always have been bad (can it? Are people that tolerant?). It was started by a presumably well-meaning soul called Dave Thomas, who died in 2002. Perhaps he ate one of his own burgers.

Then we drove in a straight line for a lot, lot longer. Highway 80 lasers across Iowa for hundreds of miles, making it possible, if you want, to get fully across the state without really seeing anything at all.

Eventually, we happened across Des Moines, and stopped a little outside it. We found a hotel in De Soto, a town which consists of precisely three hotels and a petrol station. For fifty dollars we found a motel with a chocolate-brown carpet and the distinct whiff of decades-old cigarettes. Outside someone had parked a pickup truck for the night, filled with caged hens.

We completed our micro-tour of America’s fast food establishments with a quick stop at Subway. I’m happy to report that there is nothing to say about it at all.

Dave recommends Gourmet Burger Kitchen in London. The burgers are unwieldy (you have to eat them with a knife and fork, which isn’t quite the point) but good.