Sorry for the Group Email

Watch this in high resolution (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?