Stuttgart, Mercedes, Porsche and some Solitude

(From 2011)

If all goes well then it takes a few hours to drive from Munich to Stuttgart on the autobahn. If there is an enormous traffic jam on the autobahn then it might take a little bit longer. Stuttgart would be our final big city stop before returning to Strasbourg to complete the trip. The hold up on the motorway had cost quite a bit of the afternoon and it was getting on for three pm by the time we got to the hotel. The hotel was near the airport, quite a distance from the centre, but the local railway station was a few minutes away by foot. As it turned out the train wasn't quite the effortlessly fast magic carpet to the centre that we had imagined. It was quiet, clean and not-crowded but there were many stops between the airport and the stop at the city's zoo - the destination we had chosen because it was a sunny afternoon and we could take or leave how much of the zoo we could look around before it closed. The clock was pushing past four-fifteen when we reached the entrance gates to 'Wilhelma' - the curious semi-official nickname for Stuttgart's zoo. 'Wilhelma' is named after a elephant that was once kept there, but might as well be named after the thousands of other individuals called Wilhelma since it's a normal human name too.

The zoo's website had said that although the ticket windows closed at three, tickets could still be bought at machines until five. All that was missing was to mention that the ticket machines were by the car park and not the ticket windows. So the staff at the gate taking tickets were spending all their time pointing the way to the ticket machines to just about everybody who showed up. If only somebody could invent the written language so signs saying '<--- Buy Tickets at Machines This Way' could be created. One day.

This being Germany one might expect the gates to slam shut promptly as the clock strikes the hour. This wasn't quite what happened. We were still walking around at six, and most of the buildings didn't close until six-thirty. None of the building's occupants looked bothered by the lateness of the hour. We walked around the handsome glasshouse, up the terrace past large bird cages, through a grove of giant sequoia trees - familiar from California but a strange sight in urban Germany - past the bears (polar and black), up to the very top of the hill where there was a small farm setup. The zoo was part of a larger park and at this end the only separation between the two was a modest wire fence. There were still plenty of people around, in fact there were more in the zoo than in the park.

The donkeys, camels, cows and bison in the 'farm' area lived a more al-fresco lifestyle than the rest of the zoo, (at least at the later hour). The giraffes, elephants and the leopard were all inside eating, either by choice or because the keepers needed to clean the enclosures. Despite the signs asking visitors not to use flashes on cameras there was at least one person enthusiastically talking flash pictures of the giraffes. The largest one promptly lumbered as far away as possible and turned it's back, in much the same way that cats beat an escape from shrieking four-year olds. People like this fascinate me sometimes. How can one possibly be that oblivious to the prominently posted signs? Language barriers aren't an excuse as the signs are all pictographs  The most satisfying explanation is that these same people are responsible for all the other little inconsiderate actions; not indicating in cars; proferring hugely large bank notes for tiny purchases; talking in cinema; standing stock still at the top of escalators. It would be nice to know that everyone else is a thoroughly decent person who isn't the bane of the poor zoo giraffes day.

As usual the most fascinating yet inert animals at the zoo were the big cats. The sole visible tiger was laying on it's back on a wooden platform in an uncomfortable position. Inside the cat house things were a bit more lively - the leopard was eating from it's bowl, looking like a giant house cat. There was a Serval, the African desert cat, sitting calmly watching anybody who walked past. In the front of it's cage was a large rock. Peering into it's cage at it's eye level I walked from side to side behind the large rock and every time the serval's gaze would be waiting for me. It moved it's head but I never saw it's head move. A ninja cat in other words. It was nearing seven pm and the zoo still wasn't closed. We walked through the still-open aquarium and reptile house to the front gate. Not bad considering there had been no reason not to believe the place would only be open for forty five minutes when we paid at four twenty. We took the tram back to the central Hauptbahnhof , and walked up the main pedestrian street into town, the process passing by the Steingenberger Graf Zeppelin hotel opposite the station where three of us had stayed for a few nights in 1999. The hotel restaurant where we had enjoyed some of the slowest service in Germany was still there on the ground floor on a side street.

We found our way through the surprisingly large crowds of late-evening shoppers to a Turkish bistro that was one of the better restaurants we found on the trip. For such a deceptively large establishment (there was a large outdoor terrace on the other side of the building) the service was relatively speedy by European standards. They provided separate German and English menus that didn't quite match each other but still allowed the satisfaction of being able to order in German from a German menu with full knowledge of precisely what one was asking for.

Both Porsche and Mercedes Benz are based in Stuttgart and extraordinary fact when thought about. Firstly in a world with only a few premium large volume car companies here are two in the same city. Secondly Stuttgart isn't a really big city, the population is 600,000, about the same as Glasgow, and way fewer than Munich's 1,300,000. Thirdly they have somehow never trodden on each others toes too much; Porsche makes sports cars, Mercedes makes everything including sports cars but the giant has never put the minnow out of business. Coming from a country where all the car companies are now merely 'brands' in a foreign ownership, and all the car factories are now empty spaces in the suburbs of Birmingham and Coventry  I might also add that it is also extraordinary that Porsche and Mercedes are still in their original locations, more or less. The original Daimler Motorwagen works began in Bad Cannstatt, Unterturkheim in 1890 and is still there today. This was our last full day on the road before returning to our respective homes and we made the most of it by seeing both museums. As we had done in 1999 in fact, but those had been the old museums, and both had been replaced by shiny new ones.

Both museums were huge improvements, but the contrast was greater at Porsche. The Porsche museum used to be a small dingy showroom by the main gates. Now it was an intergalactic building across the road from the factory gates. A big silver geometric lump sat over a glass atrium and supported by the pillars containing the escalators. Looked up a directly from above the reflective lower surface sent back distance reflections of us peering up at it, taking photos. At Mercedes the big improvement was moving the museum out of the factory grounds. Before we'd got on a bus and been driven down a back road behind large industrial-looking sheds to the museum, hidden amongst the sea of walls and windows. Now the whole shebang had been moved to a building that looked something like a giant submarine conning tower, clad in satin-finish silver panels with 'Mercedes-Benz' emblazoned on the top level. Once again this was a museum that began at the top level; only Mercedes had topped everyone else with a vertiginous atrium with pod-like lifts climbing up the inner walls like something out of a Star Trek set.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the Porsche Platz, containing many of the holy relics. After riding up the entrance escalator we entered the main space. It was clinical white and immaculately kept, but far from being sterile and cold. This is because everything was organised together well; here the oldest cars in chronological order, there the earliest production road cars, here the many Le Mans cars, there the concept cars. Most pleasingly nothing seemed to take priority over anything else. The only special plinth belonged to the first streamlined Porsche prototype - only an empty shell, but setting the design direction for nearly everything that followed. Many of the cars had small computer monitors next to them with information, pictures and videos. They were mounted on swiveling posts and worked by pushing the side of the monitor in the direction you wanted to navigate; an interesting idea in theory but a handful in practice. What would happen would be that to move along to the next picture I would push the monitor right, at which the screen would roll over three pictures. So I pushed it back left but slightly up too, at which the pictures rolled left and up a level. So I gave up and looked at this picture instead. Designers sometimes forget that some things (in this case monitors with touch screens) are so very good at what they do that there is no need to do anything differently. And museum designers seem to be especially prone to this. The museum cafe provided another example of needless rethinking; absolutely everybody who came in had to have the system of picking up a small swipe card which then was placed on little slot machine at the counter to order and carried to the cashier on exit. In theory it had advantages; the counter staff didn't need to listen for orders in broken German from hundreds of foreign visitors, and cashier only had to take payments once when people left. In practice the counter staff and cashier had to spent their entire time explaining the system to people so completely used the usual cafeteria system that it is probably burned into their motor-cortex somewhere next to the brushing of teeth and using bank machines.

Porsche is relative small-fry compared to the enormousness of Mercedes but that gave their museum the feel of an small art gallery or cathedral, rather than the grand "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" approach of their neighbour across the city. That feeling that everything contained within must be in some way important and storied. Most of Porsche Le Mans winners were inside, as was their sole Formula One winner, their Dakar rally winner, and other road-car prototypes and notable cars, including the one millionth Porsche 911 that was given to the German police as a patrol car. Not that these cars were too holy to touch; there was a well-mannered young guide showing round a bunch of Australians, stopping at many cars and deftly opening the engine covers and doors, thus attracting the attention of more camera-toting gawkers such as myself. It was clear from the big service bay on the ground floor and the general condition of the working parts that most of these cars were kept in working order and could be wheeled out tomorrow and driven at the Goodwood Festival in a moments notice.

At Mercedes-Benz things were on a slightly bigger scale; whole floors were given over to specific decades. It took a whole gallery just to reach the formation of the modern company, from the separate Benz and Daimler companies and incorporating the Mercedes moniker from one of Daimler's sporty models - named in turn after the daughter of one of Daimler's best customers. As well as the chronological display of cars were large side rooms given over to buses, trucks, earth movers and everything else with a three-pointed star on the nose. It was an eclectic selection; an Edwardian London bus, a sinister looking 1930s German ambulance, the Formula One medical car, the 1974 German World Cup team bus (or a replica since the original is missing presumed lost), Princess Diana's 300SL (she had to swap it for a Jaguar after government pressure to be more patriotic), and Hirohito's Daimler (he didn't have to swap because Japan didn't have Lexus at the time). Down in the ground floor was yet another display of racing cars in starting-grid formation along the edge of the room, so the display could only be seen from one side. It is clearly either the fashion or convenient way of keeping visitors grubby fingers a safe distance from the most precious metal. For that reason I think my favourite car in the place was the 1955 'Uhlenhaut Coupe' (named after the chief engineer). It was racing car in disguise; meant to be used in 1956 but when Mercedes withdrew from racing after the Le Mans disaster it got turned into the chief designers personal runabout which he used to commute between Munich and Stuttgart regularly at speeds over 150mph. In 1956. Since it was technically a 'road car' it wasn;t in the racing hall grid but perched on a plinth a few floors above, where I paced around it taking pictures of its rather wonderful profile and exquisite details.

It was getting on for four pm when we finished in the Mercedes museum and time to proceed back to Strasbourg. On the outskirts of Stuttgart I took us on a brief detour round an old road racing circuit called Solitude-ring. It was only in the Porsche museum that I had learnt that the track that was once a prominent non-Championship Formula One venue in the 1950s and 1960s was even in Stuttgart. And it was only while leaving Mercedes that I spotted where it was on the map. It was so obvious I had looked right past it several times - a red triangle of roads right next to the motorway. This had demanded a unilateral decision; I wasn't driving right past a famous old racetrack eight hundred miles from home without taking a lap. So we did, and miraculously didn't get lost and were back on the way to Strasbourg within a quarter of an hour. This made me quietly very pleased with my tour-guide instincts.

Turin, motor city Italy

(From 2011)

Turin is Italy's motor city. It is where FIAT is based and since FIAT now owns every brand in Italian car making Turin is the epicentre of all the countries car making. Naturally Turin has a motor museum, a museum we had visited in 1992. Back then it was a straightforward gallery of cars lined up in rows in a plain white interior. Now the whole place had been completely reconstructed and the museum rebuilt with more a more thematic approach. As is the fashion in many exhibition spaces these days the suggested visiting route began with an escalator ride to the top floor and continued down the stairs. The first gallery began right at the beginning and had an interesting wall of models; models of the most notable attempts to make an 'autonomous carriage' (for wont of a better phrase) before the invention of the internal combustion engine.

The rest of the floor was given over to a chronological development of (mostly Italian) cars; from the earliest types, through the grand Rolls Royces of the 1920s, to the golden age of the Italian coachbuilders in 1950s and 60s. Not a whole lot different from the Mulhouse collection except that the Italians had not put their cars on plinths or kept them at a slight distance; it makes a world of difference being able to walk right up to the cars and peer inside. Looking at rows of neatly parked cars from the front is like looking at neatly hung paintings from behind a rope. It gets a bit boring and repetitive after a while, and all the details that only appear with a close look are missed.

Not even the Italians were prepared to allow visitors to breathe all over the racing cars though. In the lower level the collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and the others were laid out exactly as they had been at Mulhouse; on a dummy starting grid display. The second floor was dedicated to Turin's part in all this. In the staircase lobby were four of the finest models from FIAT and Alfa Romeo. Then, just to remind the visitor that once up a time there were many others, the next room housed respectively a Temperino, a Storero, a SCAT Ceirano and a FOD. I had never heard of any of these marques before, possibly because they were all consigned to history by the 1940s. FOD only ever made one model. The same room also had a giant aerial photograph of the city set in the floor with labels pointing out all of the car factories and other companies involved in Turin throughout the years. There was barely a district that didn't have something automotive as it's industrial centrepiece.

Down on the ground floor was a gallery of Turin's finest designs. What Turin regarded as it's finest designs anyway, and it was surprisingly up to date with concept cars from this year. This explains why museums have taken to having this upside down arrangement with new and temporary exhibitions on the ground floor and the old things upstairs - it's much easier to swap things around in the evening if they are on the ground floor. Turin wasn't just where the cars were built but where they were styled too - in the workshops and studios of Italdesign, Pininfarina, Bertone, and others. And not just Italian cars either, most of the rest of the world's most stylish and notable cars were fashioned here. The final rooms of the exhibition were given over to a video of the personal musings of car designers and small cases holding their inspirations and other favoured designs. Most of them had picked the 1955 Citroen DS as their all-time number one - perhaps a sign of modesty as none of them had anything to do with it. The very very last room housed a small line up of cars without much comment - I assumed we were to infer that these were the very cream of the crop, or the museum's parting comment to us the visitor - an Alfa Giulietta, an Abarth saloon, a 'Disco volante' Alfa (so called because it looks a bit like a wheeled pancake) a white Cisitalia fastback, a Ferrari GTB. Nothing too showy, but all in their subtle way exceptionally fine designs.

European holiday - Cars and trains in Mulhouse

(From 2011)

Whether it is by coincidence or by intention both France's national motor museum and national car museum happen to be a few miles apart in northern Mulhouse. The rail museum began as a dumping ground for old SNCF bits and pieces but the car museum began as a private collection owned by the Schlumpf brothers, a pair of woollen mill owners, before being unofficially commandeered by the striking factory workers union in 1977 when the business fell into terminal financial problems. The brothers ran off to Switzerland and the workers opened the collection warehouse to the public. Eventually the proper authorities got involved, the government took over the cars to recoup the Schlumpf's debts and the whole caboodle was turned into a national car museum.

The car museum has been renovated in recent years but the exhibits are mostly pre-1970s cars, and of them over half are pre-WW2. In fact on entering the exhibition hall the first row of thirty cars stretching out ahead barely even entered the 20th century. One seriously comprehensive collection in other words; Panhards, Peugeots, Renaults, De Dion Boutons, Benzs, Rolls Royces, and many others of which even I had not heard of. The most represented marque was Bugatti, an obvious choice since they were made in Molsheim, a town not too far away, and the pride of place in the darkened side gallery was given over to one of the museum's two Bugatti Royales. The Royale is a mountain of car, about the same length as a large pickup truck (21 feet), with twelve litre aeroplane engine, 24-inch wheels, and right hand drive (like all Bugattis). Thanks to the Great Depression they only made six of them before giving up the project and returning to slightly more sane cars. Because cars of the time were still coachbuilt none of the cars were quite the same, despite the similar chassis underneath. My favourites were the specially designed 1936 Type 57 coupe without any windscreen pillars, a concept far ahead of it's time; and the two-tone cars painted glossy black with either yellow or red flanks, a neat touch to already very handsome cars.

Only ten minutes drive away across the northern suburbs of Mulhouse was the rainbow painted train shed of the rail museum. After the massed ranks of tidily parked vintage cars in the Schlumpf collection the train museum presented a more eclectic selection of sights and sounds. Most curious was the strident French voices playing from mannequins in some of the coaches. These mannequins were on the shoddy side, looking like something that should be on top of a bonfire, but they did have on authentic period clothings, thus giving a fair idea of what French commuters and day-trippers looked like in 1890 or whenever. The 1890 commuters must've looked a bit grimy since they were sat on the top deck of the train- not so bad one might think but the top deck was open to the elements.

The museum had also come up with the interesting idea of fitting some kind of steam canister in some of their engines so every so often they would literally blow off steam. In fact the place was a font of imaginative thinking; to show what the French resistance got up to during WW2 one engine had been tipped onto it's side as if it had been hit by resistance sabotage (or Improvised Explosive Device as we call bombs these days). This had the side effect of showing what the underside of a steam engine looks like.

The newer part of the museum was in a very dark shed with efficient air conditioning. We only noticed how efficient the air con was when we opened the door to the older shed and felt the heat. The older part was an interesting wooded-roofed shed (resembling Manchester Oxford Road and possibly of a similar vintage) and contained most of the museum's collection. Coming from the perspective of the British; who are only ever told about the Stephenson's Rocket, The Flying Scotsman and Mallard and grow up assuming that these represent the three pinnacles of train development, it is easy to overlook how much the French have to boast about. True, they weren't first with the train (and the earliest locomotives in the museum are all British-made) but they seemed to become pre-eminent in the field about the time we seemed to give up in the 1950s.

To illustrate the point no fewer than two electric engines were mounted with a plaque claiming they had set 'Record Du Monde Vitesse' of 331 KPH in 1953. Obviously being English I had been taught all about Mallard's record run in 1938 and then never received a mention of anything that happened after so I was ignorant of the precise details. Perhaps, I thought, the two engines had been coupled together on their record run. Turns out that SNCF deliberately ran both on consecutive days just to show off. They still hold the record now, as a little booth showed a film of a TGV flying to 500kph. My favourite trains were the Bugatti Railcar, which like the firm's car was heroically fast and glamourous at the time, but disappeared without a trace after the war; and the two TEE's (Trans Europe Expresses). Not only did they look impossibly chic in their silver livery and aura of seventies retro-cool, but their sleeping cars looked like genuinely nice places to be (if a bit old fashioned these days). I stood for a minute and more peering into the windows trying to work out exactly how the compartments were arranged. It looked like they had been ingeniously designed to split the compartment in half with the top bunk being a separate room from the bottom bunk. It looked better than the modern day aeroplane seat anyway.

2009 in America

Originally written in August 2009

June & July 2009

This trip came about because Nicholas needed to move his stuff from Urbana, Illinois, to Victoria British Columbia. The rest of us flew out there to help with moving and to have a road trip. Some of the days are necessarily more interesting than others. I’ve focused more on the ‘holiday’ bits since there only so much that can be written about packing boxes, loading trailers, paperwork, and shopping for sofas.

Monday 15th (Spent flying to Chicago)

After eight hours sat down on a plane you would think that being forced to stand in a queue for over an hour wouldn't be as difficult as it might be in normal circumstances. Unfortunately when the thing that takes over an hour is US immigration at Chicago airport my patience starts to fray. I have no problem joining a long queue as long as there is no possible way the queue could be made to move more quickly, Roller coasters and tall buildings being good examples. The problem at Chicago was that the entire immigration system seemed to be overloaded by more than one airplanes worth of people. The queue would've easily lasted more than two hours if the US Citizens lanes hadn't been opened to everyone. Presumably this is standard procedure or they risk a mutiny from the workers processing hundreds of foreigners while their colleagues sit idle waiting for the thirty Americans on the next flight. The only upside to this ridiculous wait is that when our turn came the officer was in hurry up mode and didn't bother with all the usual suspicious questions about your intentions and the retina photographs.

Tuesday 16th (Spent packing and loading)

Down to business. For some curious reason, presumably to do with franchising agreements the U-Haul trailer was in care of an Interstate Batteries store just out of town. Appropriately it was a Canadian trailer, with a New Brunswick logo adorning the side. It was a little rusty in places and the orange stripe on the front was pockmarked with insect impacts, but it fitted to the car fine and its lights all worked. So we headed back to base and loaded up. The trailer came with a trolley to shift boxes and I made myself feel useful by shuttling the bigger things around to the lift and down to the car park.

Wednesday 17th

We were all ready to go on Wednesday morning but the apartment manager wasn’t so we had to hang around for half an hour outside the office until somebody came back in order to give the key back. Combined with another wait at Nicholas’s office to receive a fax it was half past ten before we finally got going on the road. Passing Peoria we managed to drive for fifteen miles up the wrong interstate (the one heading back north east to Chicago) before realizing the mistake and turning around. This is where the mile markers on the roadside are useful, since it was reading these and thinking ‘well that’s not the correct distance’ that clued me up to the fact that we’d evidently been filtered onto the wrong motorway in the roadworks in Peoria. We continued with a certain resolve to pay more attention to navigation.

After an afternoon on the interstate the scenery gradually dribbled into a more built up area and finally into Des Moines, Iowa. With the prior knowledge from passing the same way in 2006 that the interstate runs through the downtown in a cutting and that the city isn’t visible from that route I opted instead to take us round the north suburbs and stop in the Merle Hay Mall. Since it was built in the 1960s it’s practically a historic building by Midwestern USA standards, but only the exterior and the space age entrance sign betray its age; it’s blandly modernised inside. You'd think they might try to push the 'retro' angle a bit more as a ploy to attract curious passers-by, even if all that is done is dress up all the shops with 1960s logos and park a few old cars out front. The day ran out west of Des Moines in the small town of Walnut, on the edge of a thunderstorm that had enlivened the last twenty minutes of driving.

Thursday 18th

Interstate highways in the USA run primarily north-south and east-west so our progress from Iowa to South Dakota involved following one interstate west to the Missouri and another one hundred and eighty miles north via Sioux City, Iowa, to Sioux Falls, where the next interstate runs west across South Dakota. South Dakota is quite a dull place for the most part, except for the south western corner where there are mountains, Mount Rushmore and the craggy expanses of the Badlands. We had lunch in Mitchell, a typical South Dakota town. A large area of gas stations and restaurants to service the interstate and a real town a mile down the road to provide people to work at the gas stations and restaurants. Presumably not all of these people are working towards university or that unspecified American further education establishment called ‘school’. There must be some benefits to living in a small town in the middle of a big flat state. Making friends must be easier and there’s less traffic and more space. It can’t be a coincidence that lots of good rock bands started in dull small towns. On the other hand you have to have friends since you’d never afford the trip to Des Moines or Chicago or somewhere else where interesting things happen on your own. Perhaps it just the state of the economy at the moment, or young Americans are generally more polite than young Britons, but it seemed that a worryingly high proportion of the service staff were young, well turned out, well spoken, and generally seemed capable of more than working at McDonalds.

We arrived at the Badlands National Park in late afternoon. The Badlands comprises several different landscapes; dramatically eroded valleys that resemble a giant disused quarry, a large grass plain, and some meadows. The visitor centre had a rather bland film about the area. It had one of those voiceovers that are slightly too drawn out and seem to take ages to say anything. We drove around the main park road with the lowering sun and fairly clear sky making the place look very photogenic. The road was clearly designed to take in the most number of different environments as possible. It ran over the main ridge like a mini alpine pass, straightened out over a meadow, (the fence posts providing perches for the local birdlife), then wandered around some low hills. One trail was marked on the map as 'fossil trail', which it was, insomuch as there were four or five weatherproofed boxes with dusty fossils inside next to a wooden boardwalk. It was a curiously half baked feature by American National Park standards and a strange mismatch of effort to build a boardwalk, a car park, some restrooms, and then give up on the exhibits. I suspect the fossils might actually have been an afterthought added later, when nobody could find a spare case in the visitor centre.

One place where plenty of effort has been made is the nearby town of Wall. From as far away as Sioux Falls the interstate was decorated with signs advertising Wall Drug, the rather awkward name given to one of the largest shops in the country that isn’t part of a national chain. It’s nice that the area has something famous to boast about but they don’t half boast about it every few miles with ugly billboards. I didn’t see anything worth getting excited about on the tens of billboards we passed.

Friday 19th

After two days of driving across flat farmland and empty plains it looked like being a more interesting day. Partly this is because western South Dakota’s most prominent mountain has four heads carved into it. One of my overriding impressions of Mount Rushmore is how well preserved and tidy it all is despite its age - if the heads were real people they would be pensioners by now, albeit well preserved pensioners. Had it been finished last year it wouldn’t look too different. The mountain is thirty kilometres from and five hundred metres above the interstate at Rapid City. The monument provided some help to make Rapid City a bigger city although it was the Ellsworth Air Force Base that doubled the city population during WWII. Ellsworth is home base for the B1 Bomber and one of them glided over us as we drove into the city on the interstate.

Not only has Mount Rushmore been very well preserved physically but the choice of presidents has stood up well. The Native American population may not have been too impressed by a giant monument of four white men being carved out of a sacred mountain but you’d have to say that Gutzon Borglum did at least choose the four best candidates at the time. Had he been more of a slave to fashion then President’s Taft and Harding could be up there with Washington and Lincoln, like those Channel Four ‘100 Greatest’ programmes where the current flavours of the month slot into 7^th, 3^rd and 2^nd on the countdown. There is still a large space to Lincoln's left where a fifth head could be added. If any tedious cynical person suggests that this will inevitably be filled with some minority person as a token gesture you can point out that back in the thirties they were going to put the suffragette campaigner Susan B. Anthony there until presumably somebody pointed out that this would be a dangerously progressive thing to do. Considering that even today Washington's coat is still only in the 'rough draft' stage and Lincoln's hair is a large chunk of cliff face it's unwise to blame the lack of a fifth figure on conservative thinking when it was actually a lack of money and momentum. I can picture the workers getting to the stage they did and thinking 'that's good enough; I'm getting sick of being up here'.

The same cynical people can look around the Western US landscape and wonder if there are any natural features that aren't 'sacred' to the natives. I'm a little equivocal on this one. The roads and cars make the landscape seem smaller than it would've been in previous centuries. It took us a few minutes to drive up the hill to Mount Rushmore on a big wide highway and a few hours to drive to Wyoming and Devil's Tower in the afternoon. Trekking across the hills on horses I can imagine how on finding a dramatic rock face at the top you would be more inclined to think of it as sacred. On the other hand it is irritating when the only reason to ban people from rock climbing is some immovable idea of sacred importance that seems totally out of proportion to the figures. The native stories may indeed be venerable but the rocks of Devil's Tower predate them by a few hundred million years or so.

Devil's Tower is conveniently close enough to Mount Rushmore to allow both to be visited in a day even with American speed limits. Towing a heavy trailer with a moderately powerful car at least makes the speed limits seem a bit less restrictive. A very tiny bit less restrictive. At least the roads were fairly quiet and free from RVs, as one might hope for when driving to a famously mystical landmark in the manner of a pilgrimage to a cathedral. There are few other places that change so much depending on where they're being seen from. From a distance the rock tower looks like a giant tree stump. One of several, in fact, since there are several other less dramatic looking formations nearby. Up close it takes on its more familiar shape, although I expected its base to be flush with the surrounding ground like Uluru in Australia rather than up on a forested hill - the whole area was generally hillier than I had been anticipated. We had some lunch at a surprisingly slow restaurant near the park entrance. Most of the staff were teenagers and all the American 'HaveANiceDay' service training in Wyoming can't entirely change that fact.

Saturday 20th

If you can make it across Iowa and South Dakota without dying of boredom then you’ll find that the driving gets a little bit more interesting the further west you go. In Montana and Wyoming the interstate highway stops being a giant conveyor belt trundling through endless fields on its way to another petrol station and becomes a road with corners and hills and towns to drive past. The speed limit is still stiflingly conservative but at least it feels like there’s progress being made. In western Wyoming is Yellowstone, the Mecca for RVs, caravans, motorhomes, pickup trucks and SUVs. You wonder why they bother really, given all the miles and miles of fire damaged trees (remnants of an epic forest fire in 1988) Yellowstone isn’t the most lovely place to be, especially, as was the case this day, when there’s thunderstorms about. Perhaps all the RV-ers are practicing dodging lightning for when they retire to play golf in Florida.

You can’t really win with lightning. You can’t stand under trees, and you can’t stand out in the open. Obviously the chances of being struck are miniscule but there are places, like the boardwalk at the Yellowstone geyser basin, that feel comically exposed. This is a way of explaining why, when wandering round the aforementioned boardwalk in the rain, I instinctively dropped my umbrella when a big spark of static jumped into my wrist from the umbrella. Since nobody nearby came running over to tell me that I’d been hit by lightning, and since my ears hadn’t exploded, the rational part of my brain assumed that it was just a bit of lively atmospherics. The irrational part took a minute or two to stop gibbering.

Yellowstone seemed busier than I remembered it from when two of us went there in 2003. That was in September, which may explain that, although over time my mind has probably been retroactively removing hundreds of people and cars from places to make them seem less busy than they really were. Most of the people were doing exactly what we were doing; driving to see the Old Faithful geyser and have some lunch in the excellent lodge, one of the best of the national parks. It’s almost worth going to without all the surrounding geysers. Most of the geysers in the park erupt at all kinds of odd hours or go for months without doing anything. The visitor centre had expected eruption times posted on boards, and, as the name suggests, Old Faithful was by far the more reliable. It even had the good grace to wait until the rain had stopped. After lunch the rain returned so we decided to drive on west as far as possible. ‘As far as possible’ turned out to be Butte, Montana.

Sunday 21st

Its six hundred miles from Butte to Seattle and we successfully managed it all in one day. It wasn’t a day for much sightseeing on foot, but there’s a few mountains to cross in Idaho and Washington states so the roads are quite scenic. The mountain passes in Idaho are quite dramatic and probably quite exciting for the truck drivers crawling up the hills and then rolling down again. At the bottom on one of the valleys we stopped mid-morning at nice little town called Wallace. Its whole main street was designated a historic district. It was fairly quiet with the odd pickup truck driving past and occasional tourists like us wandering around at the far end of the town. Some of the shops were open, including the big old fashioned bric a brac store that was next to the pizza takeout place – that was closed until noon. Unfortunately for them we were gone before that, back on the interstate. There wasn’t much open in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho at lunchtime at Sunday, except McDonalds and the gas stations. Those anti-globalization people might have to suspend their principles when it comes to driving big distances on the American interstate on a Sunday. Either that or go without lunch.

Having spent a few hours driving across the flat middle bit of Washington the truck drivers faced an even tougher hill to climb to get to Seattle. The flat plain ends with a long bridge across a lake and then a six hundred metre climb up into the mountains. Generally speaking the more dramatic a motorway is the further apart the two carriageways will be and on this bit the traffic going the other way was a long way off to the left. Towing the trailer you could get a feel for the kind of torque big trucks need to get over the hills. Or the kind of suspension they need to get over the curiously corrugated surface of the bit of interstate we drove over down in the next valley. Eventually, having driven over a few thousand juddering bumps in half an hour, car, trailer and cargo made it to Seattle in the early evening. It was grey and raining, unsurprisingly.

Monday 22nd

So we’d made it to Seattle without losing the trailer, or crashing the trailer, or having the trailer stolen, or having the trailer set on fire. And without crashing the car, having the car stolen, having the car break down, being pulled over by the police, or getting caught in any traffic jams. And without losing any wallets, or having money stolen, or being shot by men called Billy Bob and Cletus LeRoy, or being blackmailed by women called Jenna and Misty, or being abducted by aliens. No serious problems in other words (although the blackmail thing would make this worth a bit more to the tabloids). Not that the tabloids in the far western corner of Washington State would be interested. They would only be interested if there were some kind of connection to ‘Twilight’ (it’s like Harry Potter only with more vampires and its set in the area). Given the number of British people playing vampires at the moment I could perhaps get away with pretending to be one.

The car ferry to Victoria sails from Port Angeles, a smallish Hull-like port town north of Olympic national park, rather than Seattle. Towing a trailer meant we couldn’t drive up some of the mountains in the park. We wouldn’t have been able to see anything because of the low clouds. So we went and had a look at a lake (very nice) and trundled around the local roads in a big circle past several dusty looking road work crews. Back in Port Angeles we had a look around the waterfront, passing en route a few tens of shops selling Twilight merchandise, a café called ‘Bella’s Place’ (that’s one the characters) and some BMX riding teenagers making good use of the waterfront boarding ramps. Right at the end of harbour front was a small viewing tower, about two stories tall and enthusiastically autographed by the local youth population. There were a few places to eat but it was the kind of town where anywhere decent was full, so we went back to same place we’d been to for lunch – an ok kind of place where most of the local OAPs appeared to come for lunch and the walls were covered in twee paintings of wildlife.

Tuesday 23rd

The nice thing about car ferries compared to aeroplanes is that you can sit in your own car while you wait for everyone to decide that they’re ready. There’s something nice and relaxing about waiting for a ferry in a car. There’s all the benefits of driving; privacy, quiet, snugness, without the hassle of actually having to drive the next forty miles. Also, the universal sense of paranoia that has settled over airports in the last decade hasn’t quite managed to infiltrate ferry terminals. It took a fair amount of time to get into Canada but it was all pretty civilized with none of the militaristic overtones of US airports. One of the immigration officials even stood around for a chat. Even the person in the car next to ours who’d driven north from Mexico and was having his cars crevices searched wasn’t being frisked for weapons or anything.

Having unloaded the trailer I could have done with a bit of a sit down on a sofa. Unfortunately Nicholas’s new apartment wasn’t furnished and it was a bit late to be setting out on a furniture buying expedition. So we went to a restaurant instead. It was quite a nice place that served an unspecific menu of slightly overpriced food for out of shape middle aged people. There was a bar but the wine list seemed like the more popular choice since it didn’t involve standing up and embarking on a long trek across a room. The only person who was sat there was one of the staff on a break. She briefly created the illusion that the place was a hangout for thirtysomething single professional types. Maybe it was a deliberate ploy to attract more single businessmen who will eventually come back when they are married and drink lots of wine.

Wednesday 24th (first day in Victoria)

Errand time. As I mentioned earlier we didn’t have any furniture so we kept hold of the trailer for another day to go and get some. On the north side of Victoria is as very large Salvation Army warehouse that had a few cheap sofas and mattresses and so forth. The rain did its best to get everything wet but we didn’t have far to walk to load things into the trailer. Next up was a supermarket, and then a second hand furniture shop for a table, then finally the trailer could be given back to U-Haul. A week is a long time to be hauling a trailer around and we’d all had enough with lumbering around, grounding the tow bar on bumps and generally having to be slower than normal. We drove the newly liberated car round to a mall so we could have a drink and to let the car enjoy the feeling of only taking up one space in the car park. Victoria has several hills dotted around its north side and we went to drive up one and have a look at the view.

Thursday 25th

This day never quite got going to be honest. Firstly I wanted to do some laundry, which took an hour. Then Nicholas needed to go to the bank, which took an hour. Then another hour went by as we had some lunch in town at the Royal BC Museum café. Then another diversion for furniture at another Salvation Army shop, this time in the town centre. Then we drove to the cable TV place, which might’ve taken an hour. All I recall is that it was about three PM and the useable day was rapidly running out and at that time of day everything seemed to be taking twice as long as it needed to.

Like the day before we drove up a hill to take in a view. This hill however was the hill with the observatory and Nicholas’s new office on it. The observatory was built in 1918 and had visitor centre next door rather grandly (or sarcastically) called The Centre of The Universe. There were a few models of telescopes, bits of cameras and other equipment on display, as well as a very old drinks vending machine. The staff showed Nicholas and me how to open it without paying any money.

Friday 26th

In an ideal world a UK citizen could move to Canada from the USA with no potential problems. Just present a few bits of paper to show you have a legitimate job and a passport to show you are who you say you are. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. The USAs ‘visa waiver’ program has apparently been designed on the assumption that any European going across the border to Canada for a few days is either on holiday or on a business trip from Europe. Moving to Canada and then wanting to come back into the USA is an absolute classic bureaucratic grey area. And being refused entry to the USA is not something you want to happen if you ever want to go back there for the rest of your life. In fact they’d probably refuse to bury your coffin on American soil if you’d been refused entry once upon a time. It probably wouldn’t have mattered. There probably wouldn’t have been any problem. We decided to stay in Canada. Call us silly yellow chicken wusses but I say that fear of US immigration is not an irrational fear.

Having been to the Royal BC Museum café on Thursday we had a look round the rest of it today. The first floor is a natural history museum, with the usual dioramas and dimmed lighting. The second floor is an anthropological museum, with the usual cases of artifacts and recreated interiors. Hidden in there somewhere is an IMAX screen but that was only showing National Geographic Films. The first floor was fairly unremarkable. They’d done a good job of recreating the local environments, but it wasn’t especially diverting. If Vancouver didn’t have such an awful lack of museums for grown-ups (more on this below) there wouldn’t be much reason to come to Victoria just for the first floor of the Royal Museum. The second floor was better, not because it had anything remarkable in it, (no Hope Diamond or SR-71 spy plane), but because they hadn’t missed a single subject matter. There was a room full of household items, exhibits on mining, logging, farming, salmon canneries, explorers, shipping companies, railways, and, of course, the First Nations. There was also a street with a hotel, a cinema, a garage and a Chinatown. The hotel wasn’t just a façade; it had an interior with a grand staircase. The cinema worked and the shop fronts were clearly the result of much effort from local historians. It was all fantastic and the city should be proud of it. The exhibits on the natives were peppered with notices informing us of recent treaties over ownership and the contradictory message that many of the artifacts that were “on display” had been “returned to native communities”. Clearly there was some uncertainty about the future of the exhibits; whether natives wanted to set up their own museums or were happy to leave things on loan where they were. It’s a problem without a satisfactory solution since the Indians and other groups had their land confiscated before the world became an almost infinitely more complicated place and it can’t simply be ‘given back’. Most of Canada is probably owned by the Saudi royal family or Russian oil barons anyway.

In the evening we spotted another road to go for a drive on; a causeway in Esquimalt, the town to the west of Victoria. The town is effectively a navy base with houses and McDonalds attached. The map I had didn’t mark that one of the roads had a security post on it and was private, quite a big omission in a map, but since Canada hasn’t got to the British stage of sending police to intercept people for being near to restricted areas we could turn around and scarper without problem. The causeway ran out over a lagoon where some of the local amateur photographers were training lenses on the herons. We drove back to Victoria via the outlying semi-rural neighbourhoods and its very twisty roads. After days rolling along motorways towing a trailer it seemed like the car had earned something more exciting.

Saturday 27th (round trip to Pacific Rim National Park)

By European standards Vancouver lsland is quite a big place. It’s nearly three hundred miles end to end. The distance from Victoria to Nanaimo is roughly the same as Sheffield to Birmingham. The round trip to the Pacific Rim National Park that we drove on this day is equivalent to a round trip to the Lake District from Sheffield. Like the Lake District it will also rain on you in western Vancouver Island, a geographical quirk that the western side is much wetter than the east and the city of Vancouver. There are even rainforests.

It was a little galling to reach the visitor centre and look at the weather forecast for the week; rain, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun. The park takes up a part of the western coast with various different bits of forest, some beaches, a couple of towns at each end (Ucluelet in the south, and Tofino in the north), and a smallish airport incongruously cut out of the forest like something from the Amazon. At the points where the forest was at its most ancient there were wooden boardwalks running out into the trees. We stopped at one and had a wander along the path, taking note of the ‘Beware of Bears’ signs. Unless the bears were Goths or Tim Burton fans there wasn’t much for them; just lots of looming, damp trees with dangling tussles of moss, tangled roots, and an awful lot of quiet. The boardwalk was an impressive bit of wood engineering, and provided the sensation of floating a few feet above the forest floor.

Further up the coast was a long beach, called, with a dash of inspiration, Long Beach. There were a few surfers venturing into the water. Despite the un-photogenic grey sky it was probably ok weather for surfing. There was a bit of a swell and it had stopped raining. A few miles north of the beach was a small road up to an old wartime radar station, now just an open concrete bare patch. The clouds obscured the distant view to the north although even with clear skies the trees were tall and blocked out the near views. The area needed some kind of tower like the one on the waterfront in Port Angeles.

‘Tofino’ sounds like the name of some hip suburb of San Francisco rather than a small, rainy Canadian harbour town. The locals have tried their best to make the town fit the name and the advent of surfing has helped the cause. There are coffee shops and surfing gear shops aplenty. It was late in the afternoon and we’d been without food or drink for a few hours so we stopped in a coffee shop near the middle of town, (or as near to the ‘middle’ as it’s possible to get in a small harbour town). It was quite small and very yellow, and had a good selection of calorie-tastic cakes. The nineteen-eighties came booming out of the speakers in the background, making the whole place seem like one of those John Hughes (RIP) movies that I’ve never watched, obviously. (Actually, I have the seen The Breakfast Club once on TV)

Tofino was the most westerly point of our travels. The rest of the day was spent backtracking along the same roads Victoria. Near Port Alberni (where we’d stopped at midday at a Boston Pizza restaurant whose staff were reluctant to get us the bill) was a large stand of large ancient trees surrounding the road called Cathedral Grove. Like the trees in the National Park they were very tall and almost impossible to photograph without an extremely wide angle lens.

Sunday 28th

Victoria is apparently the most ‘English’ city in North America. Let’s look at the evidence. Appearing for the defense is the large statue of Queen Victoria, the posh hotel, the shop selling Iron Maiden t-shirts, the John West tuna in the supermarket, the word ‘Royal’ in various titles, the waxworks museum and the Butchart Gardens - a large landscaped flower garden that we spent the afternoon visiting. Appearing for the prosecution is the lack of speed cameras, the Orca watching tours, the ‘Save On Foods Arena’, and the girl in the t-shirt shop was cheerful and said ‘hiya’ to me, not a British shop-keeping trait in my experience (with the exception of Katy from my shop, although technically I wasn’t ever a customer there).

As far as landscaped flower gardens go the Butchart Gardens were quite interesting. They could be a victim of their own success actually – it’s so well kept that nothing is out of place and you could take it all for granted. The gardens divide into three main areas; to the left of the main entrance is an area created in the site of an old quarry, with plants and trees growing up the sheer sides. To the right, running down to a sheltered cove, is a Japanese garden. The centerpiece is a rose garden and a large lawn in the English style. In fact the whole place is in the English style, not the cutesy olde-England Jigsaw box style but the believable clone of somewhere in England style. Like the bits of the All England Tennis Club that aren’t tennis courts.

We drove to the ferry to Vancouver, hoping that early on a Sunday evening wasn’t too busy. It wasn’t. The ferry is actually advertised as the ‘Swartz Bay – Tsawwassen’ ferry, two places that are so small they don’t appear on many maps that foreign tourists are likely to have in their possession. The name ‘Vancouver’ doesn’t appear anywhere. Still, the Vancouver ferry is the largest one – the others are more like Marines landing craft than car ferries.

The ferry gave us a good view of some of the houses on Saltspring, North Pender, Galiano and Mayne islands. There are hundreds of islands around Swartz Bay and Vancouver, and most of them seem to be inhabited. One of them had lost an inhabitant somewhere though; the main preoccupation of the newspapers at this time was a 17 year old called Jodi Henrickson who had vanished from one of the islands just west of Vancouver. Unsurprisingly Ms. Henrickson was quite photogenic and ‘sociable’, and her boyfriend was under suspicion. (They still haven’t found her as I write this).

We’d decided to leave Vancouver for later and continue to the Canadian Rockies first. Finding the way around south Vancouver wasn’t easy with a USA map that only included Canada on a large scale that didn’t show all major roads in Vancouver. All the motorways run into the middle, to get from the ferry terminal to the eastern suburbs requires a little juggling of minor dual carriageways and following signs. Amazingly we made it to the suburb of Abbotsford without getting lost or being shuffled off to the middle of nowhere on an interstate

Monday 29th

Now that we were back on the open road without a trailer in tow I could do some driving. I could’ve easily done some driving earlier but it’s not like I’m itching to take over at any opportunity because Nicholas drives too slowly or carelessly or anything. I also wasn’t envious of towing a big lumbering U-Haul trailer full of stuff that didn’t belong to me. I’m also not as well conditioned in the spotting of North American style police cars. On the flat plains of the US Midwest that’s an important skill – police cars parked in the median seem to appear from nowhere. Fortunately for me the British Columbia landscape was hillier than Iowa and the undulations gave more visibility of potential police cars. There wasn’t much traffic on the motorways and they were all going at a reasonable speed. The scenery was nice too.

After two and a bit hours we stopped at a service station at the interestingly named town called Kamloops (less of a name of a town, more that of a car engine part). American service stations are vast, of course, but they don’t have as much variety as British ones. There aren’t as many flavours of crisps (I’ve recently had this independently confirmed by someone from South America), or sandwiches, or drinks, and especially magazines and newspapers. There are more ‘energy drinks’ (although they all taste the same) and caffeinated Starbucks by-products like iced tea. There’s more dried beef jerky, more types of Kelloggs bars and more car polish. In Canada they have more sandwiches, which is nice if its lunchtime, but the magazine situation is still disappointing. The strange thing is that the magazines they do have deal with what seems like a small niche – “Automatic Weapon Collector”, or “Latino Pickup Truck Driver”. Maxim or Esquire are often the only ones that I’ve heard of.

We spent the next few hours driving up the Thompson River valley. North of Kamloops there were lots of burnt trees from a large fire in 2003. All the towns in the area seemed devoted to campsites. To be honest the view was quite repetitive; the occasional small town, trees, hills, campsites - all just a tiny little fraction of Canada. It’s a big place. You wonder how the train drivers stay awake.

Tuesday 30th

The long drive had taken up most of Monday. We’d driven across the Rockies to Hinton, Alberta, an anonymous place that didn’t seem worth investigating. We’d had tea in a nice Chinese restaurant next door to the motel (it was more of a restaurant that served Chinese as well as other things). Interestingly enough Hinton is on the same latitude as Sheffield, although its winters are colder. We back tracked along the road from Hinton back to Jasper. If Aspen is the unofficial capitol of the American Rockies then Jasper is the Aspen of Canada. Except that Banff could also make a claim to being the tourist trap epicentre of the area. We had a look at Maligne Canyon, a few miles south east of Jasper. The ‘canyon’ was more like a rock crevasse, with the river churning around at the bottom. A path from the car park ran down the east side of the gorge for a short distance before crossing the gap on a bridge and continuing down the hill. We walked down to bridge, saw looked at the path continuing down to who-knows-where, then turned around and had a walk around the upstream section, where the canyon was shallower but had more energetic churning water.

The road through the mountains runs south east from Jasper to Calgary. It’s called ‘The Icefields Parkway’, a grand name for what is essentially a road. It’s scenic enough, but it doesn’t cross any actual glaciers. We drove south to the Athabasca Falls, essentially a slightly bigger version of the Maligne Canyon. Not as deep and narrow, but with more water rushing through. A few intrepid visitors were venturing out onto the rocks around the waterfall. This wasn’t illegal, the signs merely cautioned against getting too ambitious. Unlike at Yellowstone hot springs the danger was a bit more obvious. There was a big drop into the canyon. Although never underestimate what people are capable of - I have read that once somebody jumped into one of the boiling pools at Yellowstone to rescue a dog. As you do. When he climbed out he said something like ‘That was really stupid wasn’t it?’ and died a few hours later in hospital.

At its highest point the road passes the foot of the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Icefield. Naturally there was a visitor centre and somewhere for lunch. The weather gradually rolled in so by the time we went to look at the glacier it was snowing. Somehow the wind contrived to blow the snow into our faces both climbing up and coming back down again. Along the path were markers showing how far the glacier had receded (1.5 kilometres in the 125 years people have been watching.) Further down the road the snow vanished and summer returned again just in time for a fabulous view down the river valley. Nearly every car that was passing stopped for a look at the viewpoint. A couple of crows were perched on the barrier accepting donations of bread.

After a brief stop to admire the view at Peyto Lake (another long view down a valley), we turned off the Icefields Parkway short of Banff and drove back west towards Vancouver. The road ran through a pass called ‘Kicking Horse Pass’ where the Canadian Pacific railway passes through via the Spiral Tunnels, a figure-8 shaped bit of early 20^th century railway engineering wizardry designed to reduce the gradient up the ‘Big Hill’.

Up an adventurously narrow and twisty side road was yet another waterfall. This one was called Takkakaw Falls and was the result of melting glacier water flowing over a cliff. It’s a seasonal waterfall – in winter the glacier doesn’t melt so the falls are dry. About a sixth of the way from the top the water bounced off the cliff and created a distinctive plume of white water. A bit further down the water hit the cliff again and sprayed out in a haze. Again there were no limits on climbing around on the rocks – you could get as wet as you liked. We managed about half way to the ‘wet zone’ since climbing up the boulders was easier than climbing back down again.

Wednesday 1st

We’d stayed in a quiet town called Golden. The only sign of activity was in the railway depot on the edge of town and the occasional car trundling past on the street. It was quite a nice place. The constant stream of passing tourists must make it cosmopolitan for a small mountain town. At the next table along to ours the previous night had been some Australian tourists talking about the ‘SnowCat’ rides (a bus with caterpillar tracks that drives onto the Columbia icefield).

Two hours down the road from Golden is another railway town called Revelstoke. We drove most of the way along the scenic road up Mount Revelstoke. Near the top the road was closed because of a stubbornly persisting snow bank. There was supposedly a bear prowling around the car park at the top too. There was a small railway museum in the town, and we stopped for as look. There wasn’t much to it, just a steam engine, some carriages and other bits and pieces. It was educational though, with stuff about the railway’s construction and operation, the telegraph system, the Canadian Pacific company’s other businesses (hotels and planes mostly), and those perennially underappreciated people; the Chinese labourers.

It was Canada day. The centre of Revelstoke was closed with a parade marching around. By the time we’d had lunch the parade had finished. The centre of the town was adorned with maple leaf flags and various stalls with the usual carnival fare – food and miniature flags. There were a few vintage cars parked around. The sun was out and it was all rather pleasant.

A few hours later when we’d made it back to Kamloops and stopped for a break there was the other side of the coin; a very drunk native man stumbling across the car park shouting about “Stolen lands” and “Not being Canadian”. Unfortunately I happened to look vaguely in his direction and was immediately accosted with a confrontational “Are you arguing?” Fortunately I had a handy answer without having to think; “I’m not Canadian either mate” which perhaps sounded sincere enough to diffuse his addled brain and he shuffled off to shout at the customers in a nearby Starbucks. Had it been late at night in a big city centre I might have been a bit more on guard to deal with an unruly drunk. 2pm in a car park was more of a surprise, like being caught up in an armed robbery in a toy shop.

We’d booked rooms in the newest Super 8 motel in Vancouver, and it wasn’t on the directory map yet. All I had to navigate with were some directions and the low sun was obscuring all the road signs. We made it despite missing the motorway exit for the simple reason that the directions only gave an exit number and the sign didn’t have an exit number. Fortunately the Frasier River Bridge we went over twice didn’t have a toll.

Thursday 2nd

In 2003 two of us visited Vancouver for a day. That had been at the start of a road trip all the way down the Pacific coast to Los Angeles. This time Vancouver was the finish, nearly, and we’d all be going home soon. Sigh. The trouble with really great journeys is that you end up in a sulk when you can’t repeat them. The second time is never quite the same, although if Vancouver keeps building new towers at the rate they are doing then it could be a new city before long. Vancouver’s also one of those places that’s so cosmopolitan, clean, spacious and full of pretty people that I can’t help but be a bit jealous.

We took the SkyTrain from Surrey into the city centre (and it is centre in Canada). We walked around the waterfront pier and cruise ship terminal before riding up to the top of the Harbour (and it is Harbour in Canada) Centre tower. It looks like a conventional 1970s concrete office block with a large burger bun plonked on the top. The ‘burger’ section is the observation level. When they built it the place towered above central Vancouver but now it’s in danger of being swamped by all the ranks of shiny new offices and groovy apartments with trees on the roof. Vancouver looks a bit like a party for tower blocks. They’re all look the same are clustered together in little crowds.

We walked to Stanley Park, down a high street that could’ve been lifted from London. Most of the tourist maps use perspective to hide how big the park is, ie; very. It’s almost the same size as the city centre and its main attraction is an aquarium. We were aware that the aquarium was aimed squarely at children so we weren’t sure whether to bother. We didn’t. It was expensive, crowded and mostly indoors. We had a drink and got some free wildlife entertainment from an inquisitive seagull.

One thing that’s striking in Vancouver is how Chinese it is. On the SkyTrain, in the shopping centres, on the bus, in the park. Chances are there will be Chinese people or food or adverts. Naturally there’s also a Chinatown. It’s just to the east of the centre and the gentrified low rise Gastown district. Tucked in behind one of those ugly concrete two level shopping ‘plaza’ things was a proper Chinese garden, with water lilies and fish lurking in the ponds. It may have been small but they were more pleasant place to be than the Butchart Gardens, which may have been well kept but were a bit sterile in places.

In 2010 the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, and most of the area around the end of the city’s central inlet harbour is being turned into the Olympic village. The only building there now is Science World, another one of Vancouver’s attractions that’s aimed at families with children. Perhaps they have a deal with the Royal B.C. Museum not to provide any museums for grown-ups in Vancouver so people make the trip to Victoria. When we got there it was still open but the IMAX screen had finished showing anything interesting for the day. It was late in the afternoon. We caught the SkyTrain back to the park and ride at Surrey, drove to the ferry terminal and went back to Victoria.

Friday 3rd (last day in Victoria)

In the evening three of us rode the Victoria Clipper (a smallish catamaran) to Seattle and took a taxi to Sea-Tac airport. Before that we’d looked round the Maritime Museum, in the old courthouse in the centre of town. The ground floor had exhibits on explorers, traders, pirates and everything else that happened in the area when ships had sails. Up on the second floor were cases of ship builder’s models and an very comprehensive history of BC Ferries. There was also an exhibit on the Vikings with TV playing a forty minute show about the discovery of Greenland and Newfoundland. At the top of the building was a preserved courtroom.

Saturday 4th

The Fourth of July on a Saturday and Seattle was very quiet. We took a bus into town and had a look around. Most of the cars on the streets were taxis, and most of the pedestrians looked like tourists. We had a look at the new central library, which was closed for the holiday, then walked down to the monorail to ride down to Seattle Center (back to the American spelling) and the Space Needle. The monorail only has two stations, one of which sits outside the second floor of the Westlake Shopping Center downtown, and is barely a mile long. It was built as a novelty to get people to the Space Needle during the 1962 World’s Fair and never demolished or extended. Instead of building more monorail Seattle has built a mile and a half of ‘Transit Tunnel’ under the city centre. This was a feature of the city I had never heard of until the bus drove into it.

It was a hot day by Seattle’s normal standards – nudging the 30 degree mark. Up on the Space Needle the view was clear enough to see Mount Rainier in the distance. It was quite crowded at the top the tower. Since it was built in 1962 the Space Needle wasn’t built to be wheelchair accessible so its outside viewing area is reached by stairs and normal sized doors, so a little patience is in order. Since it was Independence Day somebody had asked two of the staff to dress up as Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty. ‘Uncle Sam’ looked a little young to have a grey beard and young Lady Liberty was worryingly sexy swishing around in her green drapes and crown.

Squatting underneath the Space Needle is the purple, silver and blue blob of the Experience Music Project (or ‘EMP’), built as Seattle’s tribute to Jimi Hendrix, the city’s most famous export after the Boeing 747, Microsoft Windows and Starbucks coffee, by the billionaire Paul Allen, aka other person from Microsoft. Frank Gehry, who also did the Guggenheim in Bilbao, did the architecture, and it’s very interesting, looking like a bit like a smashed electric guitar from above with an appropriate ‘Purple Haze’ finishing. Since I’d last been here in 2003 they’d built a new bit called the Science Fiction Museum, making the full acronym of the building ‘EMP/SFM’. The EMP bit hadn’t changed much, with a floor of exhibits, a floor of the usual ‘interactive’ things, and a giant tower built from guitars. One of Michael Jackson’s sparkly jackets was on display in the entrance as a hastily assembled tribute. The ‘SFM’ was new to me and apart from the theoretical ban on taking photos (that many people were flouting) it was very good. There were many first editions of books, and props from TV shows and films. On the ground floor was an exhibition of Jim Henson’s puppetry (Muppets, Ninja Turtles, Sesame Street etc). Not exactly ‘Science Fiction’ but it was a temporary travelling exhibition.

Seattle sells a single $50 ticket that is advertised as being for all their major attractions. This is almost true, except that you have to choose between the EMP and the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Since we wanted to go to both, that was a little annoying. We walked to the Seattle Aquarium on the waterfront, near where the Victoria Clipper had docked the evening before. It was divided into two parts; the original bit, a 1970s construction, and a newer section, ironically built in a restored older warehouse. Half of the new bit was an open pond contained various starfish and sea urchins that could be touched. I could imagine any Australians present balking at touching anything with colourful tentacles despite the assurances that they were harmless. The older section was built as both an aquarium and a large salmon hatchery. It was made from concrete and was horribly ugly. Since the sun was shining and the place was clean and well kept it was possible to look past the weathered concrete and enjoy it. There were some sea otters and seals pratting about in their usual style, although it wasn’t salmon spawning season so the concrete salmon steps were empty.

The waterfront in Seattle is about forty metres below the rest of the city behind it. Hanging over the edge of the steep hill is the famous Pike Place Market. We walked up there and had a look around. Since it was 5pm the fishmongers were packing up and going home but there were still stalls open and people milling around. After a bit of fruitless wandering around we eventually found a restaurant that was open, a ‘Chinese Bistro’, which meant that some of the menu could be eaten with chopsticks if you wanted. We actually sat in the bar section and had the bar menu since the main restaurant floor was full with a forty minute wait. The bar menu was perfectly acceptable really, and the forty minute wait only seemed worth it if you had children and couldn’t sit in the bar section.

A pleasant day was slightly spoiled by two slightly drunk ‘homeboy’ types on the bus back to the hotel. They weren’t aggressive, just very loud, and sat several rows apart SHOUTING! to each other. One was talking in great detail, in the way drunks do, about what he’d been eating, and got the other started about how his “uncle in Hawaii” cooked, which led to how “my man” Barack Obama is from Hawaii, and eventually how “they killed Michael” (Jackson). Thankfully they didn’t ride all the way to SeaTac and the last twenty minutes were relatively quiet. It was a little sad to see such an unfortunate case of stereotyped racial roles being played out on the bus. The older and whiter people had sat as far forward as possible away from the potentially unruly young black men and their choice been proven to be a prudent one.

Sunday 5th

In the morning we caught another bus to the Museum of Flight, which is halfway between SeaTac and downtown Seattle. The museum is adjacent to Boeing Field, Seattle’s original airport. It was built in 1928 and was the place where Boeing made planes before moving north to the current factory in Everett. The original ‘Red Barn’ workshop is still there as part of the museum and contains an exhibition about the early years of the company, including a mock-up of a 1918 Boeing ‘Model C’ as it would have looked being built (a large wooden frame with wires), and a Second World War design office.

The main building was four floors tall and had the standard arrangement of planes hanging from the roof and arranged on the floor. The museum isn’t only ‘The Boeing Museum’ so they had all sorts of stuff; Ford TriMotor, SR71 Blackbird, MiGs, Cessnas etc. There was a replica of the Blackbird’s cockpit you could climb inside. It was surprisingly easy to get in, and not as small as I’d expected, but it was a bit of a struggle to get out again with any dignity. There were some 1920s air mail planes arranged to look like they were being loaded up. I particularly liked the mail van bearing the promotional message ‘Air Mail Is Socially Correct’. Down on the ground floor was a gallery about Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad, who had donated his memorabilia to the museum. He became an astronaut despite having a penchant for doing things like sticking cartoons and a picture of a nude pinup girl in the Apollo 12 moon walk task list. There was a copy of the task list on display, and funnily enough it didn’t contain all of the original pages…

Up on the third floor was a room with a view of the airport called ‘The Tower’. This was a new exhibition about how air traffic control works. Basically, a different person does each bit. So there’s ground control, ramp control, taxi control, approach control, and area control. Once in the air, the display said, the pilot’s workload decreases ‘dramatically’. A monitor showed all the current movements in the Seattle area and in the whole country and played the current ATC chatter. I quickly understood why controllers work short shifts. The area map didn’t look all that crowded, but the planes were travelling across it quickly. There’s no ‘hang on I’ll be back in two minutes’ in an airport control tower.

A separate gallery had a comprehensive array of WWI and WWII fighter planes, including the first ever fighter plane (an Italian Caproni Ca20 from 1914). There were some slightly unconvincing British accents in the recreated WWI RAF briefing room – they really should put in a TV showing Blackadder Goes Forth instead, it’d be more true-to-life (“I say sir, you mean it’s finally time to give Harry Hun a good old British-style thrashing, six of the best, trousers down? … You mean ‘Are we all going to get killed?’ Yes.” If I were museum curator I don’t think I could resist putting a picture of Biggles Is Extremely Silly (by M. Python, 1970) somewhere in the displays.

Over the, on their shiny new footbridge, is the Air Park, which has quite the selection of big stuff. There’s a Concorde (“The only one on the West Coast!”), an Air Force One 707, a 727, the first 737, and the first 747. The Concorde and Air Force One were open to look inside but only a few people at a time, a contrast to museums in Britain where they don’t care how many people crowd on. So there was a bit of a queue. Fling into Chicago I had seen a big blue 747 in a separate area on the ground, and had suspected it was the Presidents plane (what else would it be?), and the evening news confirmed that the President was ‘back in Chicago’.

In a supreme piece of timing a bus we thought had passed turned up a few minutes late as we were walking back across the bridge. We rode back into the city and, after a bit of consulting timetables and passersby, worked out which bus went to the city zoo. It was due in about ten minutes. This was good since I really needed the toilet and there was no way I was sitting still on a bus for quarter of an hour. The bus stop was next to a big Macy’s department store; I checked the floor directory… men’s restroom is on the… FIFTH floor! Eight minutes! I’ve rarely walked so fast through a department store before.

Seattle’s zoo is a nightmare to navigate around. Its paths loop around and dump you out in a totally different bit. Each junction has a multiplicity of choices. It’s quite easy to do what we did, and be led around most of it without ever getting to one of the corners. Still, most of the wildlife seemed to be making the most of the un-Seattle like warm weather. The orangutan was lolloping around, the lion was prowling around, and the bears were asleep. One of the enclosures was empty because, ironically enough, a wild bald eagle had made a nest in the tree. The Komodo Dragon in the reptile house was busy exciting the nearby children who were managing somehow to say things like ‘I’m like, a foot from, like, a Komodo, like, Dragon’ with absolute sincerity but without actually sounding excited. It was, like, sarcastic without the sarcasm.

That’s about it. We didn’t miss either of our two flights on Tuesday. Nobody had to sit next to a baby. No thunderstorms kept us on the ground for five hours this year. There was even free cake in the departure lounge at Seattle, as somebody on our flight had won a trip to Paris to see the Opera, or something.

2010 in America

Originally written in 2010

2010

We got in to Dallas Fort Worth Airport about an hour later than scheduled thanks to some 'Weather' (as pilots call thunderstorms), both at Dallas earlier in the day, that had delayed our plane, and then some more 'weather' in New York that created an impressive queue of taxiing airliners at JFK. Still it gave me some time be impressed by the level of wealth in the USA as I was sat on the plane next to two teenage friends/siblings (couldn't tell), who let's be charitable, didn't look like the most likely to become Nobel prize winners but were weighed down with a large pile of electronic toys; laptops, Sony PSPs, phones, and even a drawing tablet for using to colour in some Anime style paint-by-numbers things on the laptop. Also a testament to the teenage attention span since all these gizmos can't have been in use for more than five minutes at a time. All of American Airlines' finest IT technicians efforts to retrofit Wireless Internet capabilities to their old planes were rewarded by about a minute of looking on Facebook.com before becoming distracted by something else.

Dallas is an extremely hot place, even at dusk. It's the kind of heat that makes you wonder about cars and aeroplanes and whether ingesting such hot and damp air can be good for their engines. Then factor in the air conditioning unit and all the heat radiating from that and you've got some seriously hot moving parts. Hence all the water pouring out of every parked car on the airport drop off point and taxi rank. Still they keep it clean, unlike some other hot places I could mention (the lift at Nicholas's old apartment building in Illinois had all kinds of fluids dried onto it's floor).

Nicholas was staying in the northern suburbs at the intercontinental hotel, while being engaged in combat at the World-ish Scrabble tournament. Our arrival coincided with the end of that tournament, and the players were gradually dispersing including Nicholas's room-mate Marty, whom we met briefly the day after as he was off to catch his flight home. We also spotted the World Champion who pleasingly seemed to have few social skills and looked keen to leave the hotel accompanied by a nerdy, and slightly sinister looking sidekick. When we'd finally let Marty get off to (hopefully) catch his plane we headed off into downtown Dallas after collecting the rental car - a Chevrolet Malibu with most of the latest gadgetry, a slightly too low steering wheel, and a comfortable but horrid cream and brown interior. Not what I'd have specified if I'd been buying it at a dealer.

It's quite a small downtown given the size of the rest of the city, about one mile each way and surrounded by motorways and intersections. Three roads, Commerce, Main and Elm Street run east-west through the middle and converge at the western end before shooting out as one under a railway line. Back when this was all laid out the city built a small plaza around it and named it after a local newspaper publisher. Unfortunately for George Bannerman Dealey (1859-1946) he was rather overshadowed by November 22nd 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated here by the Mafia/The FBI/The CIA/aliens/Cuban agents/Dallas police/The Army/The Navy/The Coast Guard/The Vice-President/Himself-from-the-future/The Shadow Government/The Federal Emergency Management Agency (they who organised Hurricane Katrina). I think that's covered everybody who could possibly have been involved. Excepting disaffected book warehouse workers with Marine corps rifle training, a Russian wife, and a big pile of pro-Castro literature, of course. But that's more at the fringe of the accepted theories, at least most ordinary people's perceptions anyway.

Naturally the city has preserved the area around the assassination, leaving all the buildings as they were in 1963. The Texas School Book Depository (built in 1903 for the Southern Rock Island Plow Company) is now the Dallas County Administration Building, and the infamous sixth floor is now The Sixth Floor Museum. Outside the building is a commemorative historic plaque, recording the building's history being where President Kennedy was allegedly shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22nd 1963. The word 'allegedly' had been vigorously underscored by enthusiastic visitors.

The exterior looks like it did in 1963 (except for a large Hertz rental car billboard that used to sit on the roof - I guess the city council weren't going to give Hertz free advertising for the rest of time), but the interior is now a large open space much like converted warehouses in the rest of the world. Lee Harvey Oswald's (alleged) sniper's nest is recreated behind the window in the corner. It's surrounded by a plexiglass wall so you can't actually go up and have a look. The rest of the museum is laid out in a timeline, with large photographs of the presidency up to 1963, and the events earlier in the day. Followed by the reports of the shooting, various preserved printouts and wire-news transcripts. Then the aftermath, with cameras used by the witnesses, a large model of the area used by the Warren Commission, various forensic investigations, and a look through some of the conspiracy theories.

Personally having now seen the view from the sixth floor I'm of the opinion that if it's so inconceivable that a former marine couldn't make what looked like a very short shot (about 75 metres) on his third attempt then US Marine training badges are easier to come by than one might imagine, or second hand rifles in the 1960s were less accurate than the kind of thing Mr. Whitworth was building in Victorian times. True, having also had a nosey around the world famous Grassy Knoll where the second gunman was (also allegedly) standing shows that was a pretty easy shot too, if a little bit too close to all the other spectators for comfort.

On the seventh floor of the building was an retrospective exhibition of the photos of Robert Jackson, the man who took the picture of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby. The picture won him a Pulitzer prize and that was also on display, thus satisfying my curiosity as to what one actually looks like, and what the letter telling the news that you have won one looks like too. There were other photos of the events as Mr. Jackson covered them, including the motorcade, the (alleged) sniper's nest moments after the shooting, after Oswald had (allegedly) commenced his run down the stairs to the staff canteen so he could be discovered innocently on his break (apart from the big pile of boxes with his fingerprints on he'd left by the sixth floor window). There were also pictures of Mrs. Oswald, formerly Miss Prusakova of Minsk, now Mrs. Porter, being questioned by police. She still lives in Dallas. Whether she's been to the museum or not is unknown.

All the oil money in Dallas is clearly spent on three things; art collections, hence the Dallas Museum of Art we headed to in the afternoon. Expensive women's designer clothes and men's suits. And air conditioning to allow women to wear their designer dresses and men to wear their suits without melting. Apparently the weather in Dallas was hot and humid even by Dallas standards. Just about the only people out on the streets were the destitute, the street cleaners and one insane jogger. The Dallas Museum of Art was about half a mile across town from Dealey Plaza and was more like a museum of archaeological artefacts. The standard issue paintings were matched in number by various folk art and cultural thingamyjigs from every perceivable pacific island, Indian tribe, and extinct African civilisation. All packaged up in a funky building that was essentially one long corridor sloping downhill with rooms leading of it. It was all rather nice in a civilised, British Museum, type way.

We had evening food in a shopping mall near to the hotel, after having first made a abortive pass at finding the way in, like a light plane circling an airfield. During dinner entertainment was provided by the adjacent ice rink, as first the local children's ice skating club went for a spin, then the local children who weren't quite as talented went for a wobble, excepting somebody's much more competent big sister who one couldn't help but think was showing off a bit in the middle while toddlers tried to stand up all around. Then finally one big general public free for all that showed conclusively that all boys are interesting in skating and falling over as fast as possible, and all girls are interested in spinning as fast as possible. It was hard to stop watching the red-jumpered young lady who was quietly being way more talented than everybody else running through the full repertoire of spinning manoeuvres.

Thirty miles west of Dallas is it's twin city, Fort Worth. Fort Worth is headquarters of cow country, even with it's stockyards closed years ago, the cattle raising, rodeo riding types all congregate. It feels more stereotypically Texan than Dallas. We headed for the 'Cultural District' which in Fort Worth isn't the old brownstone cafe district, as it is in Dallas but the bit round the cattle showgrounds and rodeo arena. We'd stopped first in the city centre, had a drink in a coffee shop, and belatedly realised this being a Texas scale city the more interesting looking cultural district was several miles away across a large river. So we had to get the rental car back out of it's car park and drive over.

The cultural district was built on the kind of scale that is possible when there's plenty of space and petrol is cheap. Somewhere in the wide open spaces were an art gallery, a science museum, the Will Rogers Arena (most US guidebooks should come with an introduction explaining who Will Rogers was since he pops up everywhere), the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and lots of showground-type buildings; low white sheds for storing cattle. Since we'd already seen an art museum the previous day we headed for the Science museum. After a bit of wandering around looking for the entrance (Texas is not a place that is in danger of overdosing on signposts) we found a rather grand looking square that looked out on the quietest road in the city. Texas being the scale it is they can evidently afford to build a entire plaza simply for the purpose of loading and unloading school buses. Being a 'Science' museum there were school parties in evidence but they weren't too intrusive. The place had begun as one of those 'exploration' type places for school children and had evidently branched out at some point into exhibitions for grown-ups.

We watched the planetarium show. At first it didn't look much like the advertised show about Exoplanets (planets in other solar systems) since it began with a portentous voiceover about global climate patterns. But the narrative got back on track after the first two minutes, as if the writer had suddenly remembered he wasn't writing the keynote speech for the United Nations conference on climate change but was supposed to be talking about astronomy. Another gallery held a travelling exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci, complete with scale models of his various inventions. Or rather, various ideas of things that might have worked if they hadn't been made out of wood. The things that had practical application were mostly pulleys and cranes, but give him some credit; somebody recently showed the parachute would've worked. Next door to the da Vinci gallery was the local history section, describing how the city had largely grown up around the streetcar lines (what we would call a tram. What they call a tram we call a cable car. What they call a cable car, we also call a cable car. Although I don't think there are any San Francisco style Cable Cars in Britain)

The last gallery was devoted to the local trade; cattle. One sign board explained the grammar of the situation. I probably should've made a note of what it said, but it was something along the lines of 'cattle cannot be used after the word "some"' and 'cows are female and males are something else, unless they are bulls'. Anyway, the exhibit explained how Fort Worth had come to be at the centre of the cattle drives of the mid 19th century. A map with little illuminated lights showed the various routes converging on mid Texas. Further along a similar map illuminated the railroad lines that made the cattle drives obsolete, complete with a little cartoon train chugging along the route. Nearby a case stored a wall's-worth of boot spurs, and hanging overhead was a very large collection of branding irons. All, strangely, largely belonging to the past these days since the Stockyards have closed and become a theme park. How exactly Fort Worth's cattle business is actually done these days wasn't entirely explained but there was a small room that looked suitably 'digital', as it were, with references to online cattle rustling so I suppose somebody is still making their money somewhere. And all those steak restaurants are being supplied somehow.

They had dinosaurs in Texas too, once upon a time. The museum had reconstructed the 'State Dinosaur of Texas', something called a ''Paluxysaurus jonesi'' ("Jones" being the discoverer presumably) and various other bits of dinosaur shaped rock in cases. Like all these museums nowadays the authenticity of the pieces was beyond doubt since the laboratory they had been polished up in was at the end of the room, with a couple of palaeontologist types sitting around looking through microscopes. Presumably these people don't mind thousands of brightly t-shirted summer camp kids looking at them all day. I'm guessing the only thing allowed in the lab is work, no emailing or drinking coffee, so it's not as though your privacy is under threat. Either that or the glass is one way and they're never let in on the secret that they are working in a museum.

The ticket to the museum also gave entry to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in the building next door. Presumably this is because they secretly know that not too many people are going to go in of their own volition, so a little incentive is needed. Nothing against the cow girls it just doesn't sound all that scintillating a place if you're not from Texas. However, it's an interesting enough place since the definition of 'cow girl' has been stretched slightly to include women jockeys, people who played cow girls on television, and the various sideshow performers and rodeo riders who travelled around the country getting on with their job in the days before professional sanctioning bodies were created so women could be denied membership to them - an ironic consequence of progress that seems to mirror the history of motor sport. They had lots of old stuff too, always a good sign in a museum, and it was educational in the way that any museum devoted to an alien place and lifestyle is inevitably going to be. I can't help think that the shop missing a trick not selling calendars called 'The 2011 Texan Blondes In Cowboy Hats Lassoing Cattle Calendar' though. Something tells me they'd be popular sellers down Fort Worth way.

It was time to hit the road and see how far west we could go from Dallas in one day. This would involved a morning driving up a dual carriageway (or 'divided highway' as Americans call them) The main interstate westbound from Dallas heads south to El Paso, the Mexican border, and Southern Arizona. We wanted to take the more northerly route to the north of Arizona and southern edge of Colorado. After a few monotonous hours, a driver change, and a sandwich, we pulled up to have a look at something buried in a field near Amarillo. Some things, actually. A row of 1950s Cadillacs buried nose-first into a farmer's field near the interstate. It's called 'Cadillac Ranch' and is just about the only notable landmark in the whole of North-Western Texas. Next to the lay-by there was a unlocked gateway in the fence, presumably put there to stop the local youth coming down here of an evening and engaging in un-wholesome acts with various substances and each other, and a path running about one hundred metres away across the ploughed field. Ten large, tailfinned, relics of the 1950s sat in a row like something Andy Warhol would've built as a parody of a prehistoric monument. They had largely degraded into empty shells, and some looked in danger of collapsing into a heap, but what remained has been enthusiastically decorated with spray cans. A few other people had also stopped to take a look and to pose for a few 'Would you look where we are?' type photos, although despite the countercultural vibe none of them were tie-dyed hippy types. It was extremely windy, with dust and grit from the field blowing in the air. Conditions which might make my imagined local youths think twice about some of the things they were thinking of doing here.

A little while later we came to a town called Tucumcari. Tucumcari is apparently one of the best preserved Route 66 towns left in the west. Unfortunately for our purposes this meant it had one petrol station on the road into town. The town had many quaint looking motels, but no shiny plastic-y looking signs advertising the presence of ''SHELL'' or ''TEXACO'' or even ''BURGER KING'', so we pressed on.

After a whole day on the road we finally made it to our agreed destination for the day, Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the previous hour or two New Mexico had gradually announced it's arrival. The land had become redder, with one road we drove up while shortcutting between two interstates providing red hillsides, spiny looking vegetation, and various signs to remote sounding campgrounds and holiday ranches. The kind of backwoods place where children ride small bikes along the side of the road and the pick up trucks actually look like they've been used for picking up things. The American equivalent of the British mud covered Land Rover with a sheepdog in the passenger seat. A world away from Santa Fe, of course, where the small square next to the cathedral is full of upper middle class tourists studying windows of the various gift shops disguised as art galleries. People who look like the only time they get their feet muddy is when the local pedicure place slaps a few kilos of 'healing' mud on them. Santa Fe is the kind of place that on first inspection is rather annoying. A hippy-dippy place where pedestrians crowd across the road and you feel slightly guilty for being in a car at all, yet nobody seems to mind the parade of bikers on their absurdly loud flame painted choppers, and the cyclists who seem to have forgotten that the rules of road also apply to them. The kind of place where the road is inevitably closed without much warning for some 'Event', probably involving somebody strumming an acoustic guitar or having a Save-The-Whales fair. And where any half decent looking bar or restaurant is packed full and people are overflowing onto the street.

Given a little time though, (about five minutes) and you'll start to warm to the place. For one thing the weather isn't half bad. There's a nice little cathedral, cunningly angled so the setting sun makes it glow red. The 'Event' that had closed the centre and sent us on a wild goose chase looking for a car park wasn’t a concert by some PETA-approved Joni Mitchell wannabe but a swinging Native American rock’n’roll band who played Jimi Hendrix covers. Since Mr. Hendrix was part Indian himself you could understand their angle. And the car park was free in the evening. The bars were all packed of course, but we found a nice mid-market bistro place up a flight of stairs that wasn't even half full. Perhaps it wasn't quite the top end of Santa Fe dining, but the service was fine, even if the waitress was called, rather unexpectedly for someone who looked partly native American and sounded as if she'd smoked for New Mexico, Tiffany.

Looking at a map of the American west gives the impression that there are three types of things people have built on the landscape; houses, roads and reservoirs. Any map of the area consists of blobs of habitation interconnected with lines of roads, with a large reservoir in between the two. Occasionally the ground changes colour to designate an Indian reservation or military base but mostly it's just vague emptiness until you reach the next reservoir. We stopped to have a look at the reservoir north of Santa Fe called Lake Abiquu. The dam holding it back was of the large earthen bank type and was just over one hundred metres tall. A group of summer campers were standing around near the edge being told all about the dam by one of the employees, or maybe it was one of their guides. Either way his voice was loud enough to carry in the still air that we could hear the whole spiel. It was, in that usual American way, being presented as if the Army Corps of Engineering were engaged in some kind of sacred duty in providing electricity and a boating lake to Northern New Mexico. But if you are tasked with trying to sell your job to a bunch of children then it must be tempting to jazz it up a bit with some drama. At least American children, at least the ones who go to summer camp, do seem a damn sight more polite and willing to stand still than their British counterparts, even if they're anything but quiet when in motion en-masse as any visit to a Science museum will attest.

Leaving behind The Abiquu Fortress of Electricity Generation, as I'm sure the Army corps employees would love to call it, we headed north west to Durango, the quintessential southern Colorado town with a narrow gauge railway. You do rather get the impression that the Durango Silvertown Railroad is the ‘guv'nor’ of the town, or at least the biggest wig on the Chamber of Commerce. The tourist guide in the motel had a full cover picture of one of their trains on the cover. Our atlas highlighted the railroad in it's special yellow backed font designated for especially interesting places. I'm not suggesting anything but the fact that one of the two biggest 'yellow' sights in San Francisco is apparently the DIY Bear Factory, of which I have never heard, does at least suggest the possibility that the designation of the 'yellow' sights might just possibly be influenced by generous donations to the map makers. Maybe...

Durango marks the southern end of the Colorado Rockies. We weren't heading any further north at this point. Our destination was Mesa Verde National Park, thirty miles to the west of Durango, where some extraordinary cliff dwellings, and some dramatic scenery, are preserved for posterity. Around the 13th century the area was where the local Indians, called Anazasi, lived in large communities built along the cliff faces. Thanks to the efforts of time and earlier souvenir hunters the structures look much like medieval castle ruins, albeit made of orange sandstone and perched on the natural ledges in the cliff faces. The strategic benefits of such precarious looking homes become clearer when seen in person. The mesas are very high up, hundreds of feet above the river valley below, with panoramic views over the surrounding areas, and easy to defend what with their being no 'behind' to attack from. It must've been a good way to stay protected from forest fires too. From the number of burnt trees in the park, they seem to be pretty common occurrences. Perhaps too they built such places because it was just a really cool place to live, both figuratively and literally. Quiet, too.

The quiet was the most immediately noticeable thing upon getting out of the car for the first time. There are no through roads to anywhere else in Mesa Verde so the effect of reaching the far end of the park, where one section of the cliff dwellings are to be found, is to find a very tranquil place. It helped that it was late in the afternoon, and there were few visitors on the little multi-trailered bus that trundled round a narrow trail stopping at various points of interest. The bus did it's best to break some of the quiet with it's noisy bio-diesel engine, (and ensured that it was quite difficult to ask the driver any questions), but it was fun to ride on something without any doors. It always feels quicker and a bit closer to nature with the various plants brushing past.

After a brief stop next to what looked like a lunch tent for school parties the bus trundled round to another stop where the driver switched off his engine (so as to be heard presumably) and announced that this was the penultimate bus of the day and that there would be one more bus in half an hour. Anyone left over after that would be picked up by a warden and handed a fine for their trouble. We and two other people got off and had a wander around some of the earliest remains in the area. These were not cliff dwellings but more conventional stone huts. That's not to say they didn't have some nifty architecture. One building had a tunnel connecting it with another. Possibly for making a quick exit without paying or just to avoid the possibility of stepping on a grumpy snake in the dark.

We made it to the bus stop in plenty of time, and the other two people joined us a few minutes later. As it was the last bus we could get off and look at the two major cliff dwellings on our own as long as we came back again promptly. Each stop consisted of walking down a brief path winding down through some trees, which stopped at the cliff edge lookout. The cliff houses sat down below the viewpoint in the 'V' of the valley. Both of the two little communities looked very similar to each other but were in completely different valleys, with no obvious connection between the two. And these places have been scanned with lasers to see what lies beneath the cliffs, so we know there's no connecting tunnel or anything like that. Whether or not the people who lived there visited each other frequently, had a rivalry going on, or were isolated seems to be in 'who knows' category. Certainly the wild horse that came over to see if any of us had any food didn't seem too troubled by the question. It's not unusual to see crows crowding around tourists in national parks but I've never seen a scavenger horse before.

We drove over to the largest and most photographed cliff dwelling in the area, the one called Cliff Palace. It was too late to take the tour round it, but the people on the tour did at least give some scale to the scene. And the lowering sun made for some interesting looking photographs. We watched the sun set from the park's fire watch station, perched at the highest point of the park. Then drove back down the excitingly twisty, and pleasingly empty, road back to the main road to Durango. If you've been paying attention you will note that we apparently didn't stop for lunch. This was not a problem however, since American petrol stations sell Funyuns, a snack food substance based vaguely around the concept of onion-flavoured rings. Whatever they are actually made from is anyone's guess but they are jolly nice.

There are, as all we know, fifty states in the USA, but only one place where four of them meet in one place. The south western corner of Colorado meets the south eastern corner of Utah, the north eastern corner of Arizona and the north western corner of New Mexico in a flat grassy plain about thirty miles west of Mesa Verde. At the exact spot is a small market place of Indian stalls selling various souvenirs, the state flags of each state flying in the breeze, and a brass plaque on the ground, where everybody gets their various photos taken in different poses depending on how athletic they are feeling. One girl, clearly a kindred spirit of the girls who were showing off on the ice rink in Dallas, was trying the full two feet, two hands backwards arched back pose. Despite the obvious popularity of the place there weren't too many people crowding around so it didn't take long to wait to take your own photo. The little park was in the process of being renovated when we were there. The rickety looking old stalls were being replaced with newer concrete structures, albeit without the obvious touch of theming each one depending on which state it was in. The whole place did seem to be lacking somewhat in imagination on that front. There were the flags of course, and an information board telling how the area had been mapped, but nothing else about the four different states. Off the top of my head I can suggest planting a few native trees, putting up one of those novelty sign posts pointing to the landmarks in the state and the distance to each, some statistics on each state (population, area, etc), even putting up each state's speed limit signs. Unless there's a law against private citizens putting up speed limit signs, which there probably is.

Arizona has two major landmarks; the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, the ubiquitous backdrop of Mesas and buttes used in countless old westerns. We were on our way to the former by way of the latter. To put it mildly this is one of the more geographically curious places to drive through in the world. The more we drove west the stranger the land became. The rock strata began to bend and slope at strange angles, and red cliffs of sandstone rose up in the distance. We took a detour up a small, unpaved road marked on the atlas as the 'Valley of the Gods'. The road looped round on itself to rejoin the main highway not far from the first turnoff. Total distance was seventeen miles, trundling along past isolated mesas, cliffs and other formations. The road was mostly smooth, and occasionally a car came past in the other direction, confirming that the whole road was passable, but at five or six places the road descended steeply into a wash. Fine and without problems in a car, but justifying the 'No Caravans, Trailers or RVs' sign at the junction. The rock pinnacles were traditionally believed to be manifestations of Gods on earth, watching over the native peoples, hence the name.

With the unpaved road having given the car a suitably rugged covering of red dust we drove on to Monument Valley. The main highway approaches the valley high up on the cliffs to the west, on top of the strata of rock that suddenly splinters apart creating the area of monolithic rectangular blocks sat on the grassy plain below. A visitor centre sits on the lip of the cliff, with an overlook down into the valley, and here we parked with the cleaner and less adventurous vehicles There was another unpaved road running down from the visitor centre into the floor of the valley. Unlike the previous road this one was not such a smooth ride. For much of the early part it ran over plain rock, ground down slightly by the traffic but still very rough even at slow speeds. Eventually the road improved a bit and we could concentrate more on looking at the scenery. Two of the buttes are called 'The Mittens' since they are large square formations with thin towers split from the main butte like opposing 'thumbs'. Between them is a large symmetrical rectangle that looks like a giant stone toaster. The road ran around in a loop, around a even larger mesa, and back on itself by way of several viewpoints, where we stopped to take in the views. Seeing as Monument Valley is neither a national park or a national monument but the property of the Navajo nation the viewpoints had souvenir trinket sellers waiting for passing trade. Normally this would be a bit naff and spoil the tranquillity of the place but there were only a few little stalls and cars. It looked more like a car boot sale than a concerted effort to extract money from visitors. The roughness of the road probably mitigates against too many souvenir sellers dragging their fragile wares several miles down a dirt road. The road was supposedly a one way affair but a couple of cars appeared to have not read the sign and came past in the opposite direction. This may not seem that dangerous but some of the official guided tour trucks had been using the opposite side of the road and had been barrelling past at a fair old lick.

We continued on towards our overnight stop at Page, Arizona, the only town in the area and home base for the hikers, mountain bikers, canoeists, climbers and all the rest. This was outdoor 'activity’ territory, partly out of necessity; most of the sights do not have roads leading to them, so a little walking or paddling or climbing is a requirement. Whole lifetimes could be spent exploring every slot canyon and climbing every mountain and outcrop. Tourists like us who were just passing through have to be content with the views from the road. Leaving aside the danger caused by some of the local drivers it's probably the safer option though; storms and flash floods sweep through and take people with them. Eleven tourists drowned in Antelope slot canyon a few years ago only a few metres from the visitor centre.

Page began as the workers town for the Glen Canyon Dam, one of the largest in the USA. The irony of the area is that the dam flooded many of the slot canyons and left them totally submerged, but none of these places would have nearly as many visitors without the Dam, Lake Powell recreation area and the town. So thousands of people come to see an area that isn't quite as interesting as it was before the 1950s. Still somebody once wanted to build a dam in the Grand Canyon, that is how much standards have changed. Nicholas and me had been to Page in 2003, but it was dark by the time we got there, so we didn't look at the dam. This time, after booking a hotel, we drove round to the viewpoint and had a good look. A couple of park rangers were in the car park inviting passers by to have a look through a couple of telescopes trained on the setting sun and the moon. The other three stopped to have a look but I deliberately took my leave and walked down the hill to the overlook. Given that two of us are, respectively a cosmologist and the son of a dam engineer I figured that there were things they could talk to the rangers about on their own. I know that sometimes in situations like this I can seem a bit aloof and ready to distance myself but it's sometimes my way of making some space so I can have my own independent conversation, in this case at a slightly less advanced level. So I had a look at the dam, then walked back up to the car park and had a look through the telescopes. The sun telescope was, obviously, filtered to stop the viewer's retinas being fried. At first look all I could see was an orange circle, but after half a minute the details of the surface appeared as darker orange spots and ripples. It would've been fun to watch the sun set through the telescope but the clouds rolled in and covered it up (the sun that is, not the telescope).

Page and the Glen Canyon dam are forty miles north of the beginning of the Grand Canyon. But of course the roads don't run directly to either the north or south rims of the canyon. Starting from Page there's a choice of one hundred and twenty five miles to the south side or the same distance to the north. We chose the north for three reasons; none of us had been there, it was nearer the route to Las Vegas, and it's quieter. We drove south out of Page, along a highway that plunged down through cliffs and down to the level of the Colorado river. A steel arch bridge crosses the Colorado at this point, the last crossing before the Grand Canyon starts to grow and makes such bridges a bit pointless. From there the road ran past red cliffs, aptly named Vermillion Cliffs, before rising up into the forests. The north side is eighteen hundred metres above the river and about five hundred metres higher than the south side. This means that there are forests and meadows to the north that aren't possible on the southern side.

It's very easy to be under whelmed by extremely large things upon first sight. It's happened to me many times; Niagara Falls, the redwood trees in California, and especially the Grand Canyon. My initial reaction was always 'Hmmmmm...', followed by a gradual appreciation lasting until I'm fully satisfied several months later. My theory is that things can become so massive that you start to compare them with other larger things. So the redwood trees are so tall that they start to compare with totally average buildings. So the brain thinks "those aren't that tall really". But they are for trees of course. Same with the Grand Canyon. It's so big it looks like a mountain range, a medium to average mountain range, rather than an abso-freaking-huge canyon. I found that thinking "it's a canyon" while looking at the view helped to overcome the scale problem.

I'd been worried that the reason only ten percent of the annual total visitors to the Grand Canyon come to the north side was because the view was not as, well... grand. But I'd been a bit too fixated on the area around the visitor centre. I hadn't noticed the road that ran thirty miles round to several viewpoints, some of them looking north into the beginnings of the canyon, and some looking south to the classic view of thousands of posters. We had a look in the visitor centre before taking to the trails out to the edge. Unlike the south rim, which is essentially a large car park right on the edge, the north side felt a bit more rugged and wild. A bit of walking along some adventurously narrow trails was needed to reach the farthest outcrops, where a bit of safety fencing marked the edge of the precipice. Nicholas and me marched along in line for a bit behind a two French-speaking women whom I could swear I'd seen somewhere before. Perhaps all young French-speaking women adopt the same look depending on hair colour and short haired brunettes always pair with the perma-tanned frizzy haired blondes.

We had lunch in the lodge, an excellent building as these things nearly always seem to be in American national parks, then drove round to look a some of the other lookouts, around the thirty mile road. At one the rock outcrop had a large hole in it, forming a precarious looking arch. At another the edge appeared to be cracking and splitting away. At each spot the view was divertingly different from the last, and there was always something new to see. A few clouds and mist rolled in for about half an hour, but it cleared as quickly as it appeared and didn't spoil the southwest view into the heart of the canyon. When we'd had our fill we drove back to the visitor centre for an ice cream, out of a plastic container made from plant fibres, before hitting the road for the trek to Las Vegas.

Despite being able to take advantage of Nevada's speed limit of seventy five miles per hour it was dark by the time Las Vegas loomed into view on the horizon. We had dinner in an Italian restaurant in the Stratosphere Casino. This casino is the first one on The Strip you reach if coming in from the north. So it's ideal for people like us who have been driving all day and aren't actually that interested in looking round Las Vegas. Two us had been before, had seen it all, and noticed how similar all the casino's were to each other. The Stratosphere is easy to drive to and has a tower to go up. A new feature of the tower since 2006 was the Sky Jump. This was a ride where 'jumpers' were harnessed to a cable and jumped off the observation deck. The cable is counterweighted like a lift so it's all entirely safe and predictable, but that's easy to say as an observer. Standing up there 350 metres above Las Vegas, looking straight down from the overhang, it looked like the kind of thing I might only consider after four or five pints of lager and maybe a few financial or personal incentives. "Bleedin' terrifying" in other words.

When Las Vegas first started to become a tourist attraction in the 1950s it advertised itself as a place where atmospheric nuclear bomb tests could be observed. These had started in the years immediately after the second world war, and Nevada became the prime location. Eventually everybody cottoned on to the idea that atmospheric tests weren't all that great environmentally speaking, so they conducted tests underground instead until 1992, when everything went into hibernation after the end of the USSR and the Cold War. Now it's all commemorated by Las Vegas University in the Nuclear Testing Museum. We'd driven past this the previous night while escaping from an unexpected bit of gridlock in the centre of Las Vegas so we knew how to get there. Unfortunately we got there a bit early, since Lonely Planet guidebooks hadn't noticed that the museum had moved it's opening time back from nine AM to ten. Perhaps anticipating this problem the museum had opened their side gallery to visitors. The gallery exhibit was a history of the photographers who'd filmed and taken all the pictures of each nuclear detonation. In a small compound in the Hollywood hills the nuclear media department had produced classified movies to document the tests, with a little artistic licence; the "sailor" on the navy destroyer presenting the film was actually an esteemed character actor of the day decked out in a uniform and gravitas-inducing pipe in hand. Other photo units had their own planes to fly past the bombs, complete with sets of high speed cameras peering out of the fuselage. It looked like quite a fun job, as long as you got the shots of course.

Inside the actual museum was another, slightly larger, movie theatre. It was themed to look like the first nuclear tests in Nevada, where soldiers and officials watched from rows of benches several miles from the blast. The film began with a countdown, an explosion and a surprisingly powerful rush of wind from the front of the auditorium. There followed a brief film about the history of the test site. There was a brief mention of the regular protests at the site, with some allusions to the spread of radioactive fallout in the area and across the country. But the two most prominent talking heads were former employees who were unrepentant and 100 percent convinced of the fact that they had played a vital role in protecting the country. And that was the only mention of the opposition. As comprehensive and interesting as the exhibits were the political context was largely absent, except on a timeline of 'world events'. Still, they did get up to lots of interesting things over the years. There was a brief mention of army units being deployed with portable nuclear warheads in Europe in 1962 (there's a bit of history that doesn't get much mention). Nuclear rockets were tested with a view to flying to Mars (they didn't). Nowadays the contaminated ground is used for various 'storage' and training disaster "first responders" (police and fire usually).

There isn't much to see between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Just a desert, the road, the traffic, and the cloudless sky. The temperature in the desert rises far higher than on the coast, so there isn't much incentive to live there. There are only a few small towns; Baker, Barstow, Palm Springs. Baker features the 'World's Tallest Thermometer', a 130 foot tribute to Death Valley to the north. Disappointingly it's not actually a 130 foot-tall mercury thermometer but an electronic sign with a red stripe painted up the side. A few miles away is the interestingly named settlement of Zzyzx, connected to the interstate by Zzyzx Road. If you think that it was named in order to be listed at the end of the index, and to surprise passing tourists, then you would be correct.

Los Angeles county sits isolated on the coast sandwiched between the ocean and the desert. There aren't any 'suburbs' in the conventional sense, just lots of different incorporated cities sitting in one big mass joined together by interstate highways like arteries. It's sixty miles from the eastern end to the sea with an uninterrupted built up area on both sides of the road, albeit mosly hidden behind noise barriers. Luckily for us the traffic was with us; driving west we passed three seperate traffic jams heading east. Nicholas had become familiar with the city of Pasadena thanks to various astronomical conferences so that's where we stopped. We impulsively chose the first motel after the interstate junction and immediately noticed that it was the same motel two of us had stayed at in 2006. So much for the impulsiveness. We're predictably impulsive. After stuffing our laundry in the wash, impulsively taking advantage of the lack of any other people using it, we drove into town. Pasadena by night has a very European feel. By that I mean there were at least two restaurants with tables outside, and those restaurants were both full. So we went to the one across the road that wasn't quite so full.

Deciding what to go and see in Los Angeles can be a difficult task, especially if only staying for one day. Minus Disneyland and the pseudo-theme park that is Universal Studios, the city has no obvious national institutions or iconic landmarks but many potentially interesting things, so much procrastinating goes on in trying to decide where to go. Eventually after mulling over the various options we decided on going to the Getty Center, since it was quite cheap ($15 for parking and no other fees), and none of us had been there before. The Getty is a large complex of art galleries that sits like a small university campus on a hill looking over Santa Monica. It was built in 1997 by the trust of the estate of J.P. Getty, the billionaire Oklahoma oil baron who fought his way up from being the rich son of another wealthy oil man to being an even richer inheritor of his father's company. Then he decided he'd rather live in Britain and spent the last twenty years of his life in a Tudor estate near Guildford, occasionally being visited by Alan Whicker and his camera crew. Unfortunately for Guildford his money stayed in Southern California and thus so did the Getty Trust's art collection.

Since the museum is perched precariously on top of a hill, leaving no room for car parking, the car park has been dug into a very deep hole at the base of the hill. After driving down many levels, and wondering whether the car park just kept going down forever, past many large cars parked in the 'compact' only spaces (do these people ever get ticketed for their wilful ignoring of the rules?), we eventually came to the level that was empty. Feeling a bit like coal miners at the end of a shift riding the lift back to the surface we ascended back to ground level and emerged at a small train station. With so much money the museum could afford to do much better than a couple of minibuses and had built a whole cable tramway simply to move visitors up the hill and provide a panoramic view of the highway below. At the top was a complex of ten buildings, all solidly rectangular with small windows, as if it was designed with Lego bricks, and faced with rough white travertine blocks. The kind of high maintenance surface that can be built when it hardly ever rains. Even the Getty foundation would think twice about the cleaning bills that would be needed in British weather.

Five of the buildings were given over to the actual gallery, the others were part of the various activities of the Getty trust. Each gallery was connected with the other by elevated walkways and, on the southern end, balconies looking out over the city to the south. In the first gallery we looked inside was a travelling exhibit of the works of the French Academicist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1902), of whom I had not heard (I hadn't heard of Academicism either). Possibly this was because he fell out of style for a long time; this was the first exhibition of Gérôme in forty years. He was fond of painting classical subjects in a romantic style, so there were many colourful paintings of Greeks and Romans going about their business. He was also fond of setting his paintings of famous scenes after the famous events had happened. His version of the assassination of Caesar has none of the 'Et tu Brute' drama but a bunch of senators heading off for a pint at the Domus Publicus. His idea of a gladiatorial fight scene was to show the cleaners mopping up the mess. He was also the originator of the 'thumbs down' myth with the painting ''Pollice Verso'', which also inspired Ridley Scott to make the movie "Gladiator". He also took some visits to Turkey and Egypt, and painted lots of pictures of mosques, snake charmers, market stalls and the like. In his later years with photography becoming cheaper he documented his day to day routine in his sculpture workshop. Or rather, as you discover when looking at the exhibition of photos, the bits of his day which involved his female models not wearing any clothes. Well, photography wasn't ''that'' cheap, so he still had to stick to the bits of the process he thought the most important to capture for posterity.

There was more photography in the next gallery in an exhibition called ''Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties''. The subject was photojournalists reporting on wars, disputes, social problems and other subjects worthy of taking time to create "photographic essays" as the museum called them. There were sections on mid 1960s racial tensions in America, the Vietnam war in 1971, Seattle homelessness and gang violence in 1983, a 1970s Japanese industrial pollution dispute, and a Mennonite community. Two exhibits were in colour: one on the female cosmetic surgery and 'body image' industry, and one about Nicaragua's 1978 revolution (the colour being a departure for war reporting at the time which was usually monochrome). One wall had a large collage of photos taken of a US Army field hospital in Iraq. Clearly this was meant to convey a deliberately shocking, anti-war message, and was labelled with warnings about it's graphic nature. But I found it to be less interesting than the other exhibits and somewhat out of kilter with the theme. If the skill of photo-essays is to simultaneously cherry-pick the best photos whilst also providing the broader context of the events then this felt too simplistic and lacking in information. Without context it was essentially a collection of photographs taken in a hospital, and frankly in conceptual terms no more shocking than setting up a camera at any normal hospital's trauma theatre and making a collage of what one would find there. By contrast the exhibit about the Japanese fishing town polluted with methyl mercury from a local factory was far more informative and 'shocking' for it's detached observation of the town's disabled children, protests and the subsequent trials.

If you've ever wanted to know how to make sculptures then the Getty Center had not one but two different exhibits on the process. One was a painted wooden Spanish figure of the 17th century. Unsurprisingly it was a figure of a saint (Saint Ginés), but surprisingly when viewed from below it was revealed to be a well disguised wooden box with many parts stuck onto it. The other was a bronze figure, also from the 17th century, but from a Dutch artist this time, one Adriaen de Vries. Interestingly despite newer techniques being available, Mr de Vries chose to stick with a lost wax casting process that could only be cast once. He obviously liked to live on the edge with his craft. Put simply he built an iron armature, covered it with clay, stuck a load of air channels to it, poured his bronze, cut off the sprues and gave it a polish. Phew. And all to create a small bronze man.

There is the proverbial day's worth of stuff to see at the Getty Center. The most valuable artefact is undoubtedly Van Gogh's "Irises" (cost $53 million back in 1987). Unlike many of the travelling exhibits they actually own it and get to keep it. Interestingly it's only protected by a glass screen. Edgar Degas's ballet dancer is familiar to anybody who has bought a computer recently (not me unfortunately), apparently it's a pre-packaged desktop background. Even when the museum didn't have the original works they had the original plans for the works. One exhibition had a large collection of drawings of the Florentine renaissance, most quite small and unremarkable as art, but remarkable for their survival for hundreds of years. The fact that somebody has kept each of these original little sketches somewhere for that long without them being thrown away, lost or burnt in a fire is quite an arresting thought. The same sentiment could also apply to the medieval Dutch illustrated manuscripts; all about A5 size and looking almost new. A gallery across in the separate research and library building held prints by Charles Le Brun, who had "unprecedented control of the visual and decorative arts in France" during the reign of Louis XIV, until the king got bored and Charles had to go back to being just another artist wondering if their stuff will be on show in museums centuries in the future.

Even if you had never looked round the galleries then the grounds of the Getty Center were almost worth visiting in themselves. A compact garden with a meandering path and stream running through underneath ran down to a pond with a maze of small hedges floating on the surface. There were buckets of cream coloured umbrellas for shade in between the trees. Near the garden was a cafe on the veranda. It was such a pleasant place to sit we went there for lunch and afternoon tea. It was west facing so the number of available seats in the shade gradually reduced as the sun passed over - naturally being Los Angeles the sky was completely cloudless.

We went for a drive around Beverly Hills, up in a long snake of cars through Coldwater Canyon road to Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive runs along the top of the hills that divide Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard with the studios of North Hollywood. By American standards it is quite narrow, old and serpentine, yet perversely it appears to be the only road in the USA where drivers can drive around corners with any kind of speed at all. We drove west for a few miles then turned around and stopped at some of the overlooks to enjoy the view. At the eastern end was an overlook down over the Hollywood Bowl, the Hollywood sign, and downtown Los Angeles - where we had driven through to get to the Getty Center earlier in the day. We had it mind that we might find a way up to the Hollywood sign but all the roads in the park that lead there had closed gates at the junctions. We also had it in mind to drive up to the nearby Griffith park observatory but unluckily for us there was some kind of summer outdoor theatre event being held next door at the Greek theatre so the roads were filled with parked cars. So we gave that a miss and went back to Pasadena, having dinner at an Indian (subcontinent Indian, not native American Indian) restaurant Nicholas had visited previously during a conference. It was very dark inside and that exacerbated the effects of the Indian lager I was drinking, although the food was nice.

If the locals want to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco they either fly or drive straight up Interstate Five. But Interstate Five runs inland, so tourists like us are recommended to drive up the coast, supposedly one of the most scenic coastal drives in the world. I say 'supposedly' because both times I've driven on it it's been covered in sea mist. First time in 2003, we drove south to Los Angeles in a blanket of low hanging cloud. This year the sun was shining on the so-called 'Californian Riviera' - Santa Barbara, Ventura, Oxnard; the small coastal cities with beaches, surfing and the homes of ex-pat English comedians (John Cleese and the late Douglas Adams, (who died in a Santa Barbara gym), to name two). We then drove all the way from San Luis Obispo to Monterey in fog that was even worse than the first time. I did the driving on the coast road and quite a bit of the way was in a queue following behind an outsize truck that looked like something military surplus would be selling. On the undulating road the truck rarely broke past 30 mph and even the large RV that was first in the queue behind was being held up. After ten minutes it was clear that the precarious looking military truck wouldn't be pulling over to let anybody past and without there being any sea views at all it was quite a boring forty minutes.

So the day became a bit of a washout. We spent several hours looking at fog and then got stuck in very British-feeling traffic south of Santa Cruz when the dual carriageway out of Monterey turned into a small two lane road for several miles. Monterey seemed like a nice little seaside town but the afternoon was becoming the evening and we had to get ourselves nearer to San Francisco, so we couldn't stay. The sun came out suddenly in Santa Cruz but all too soon was setting again as we arrived in Palo Alto, one of the cities of 'Silicon Valley', home base of Stanford University and the office supplies megalith Hewlett Packard. The luck of the day seemed to continue as we tried to find somewhere to eat. There was a small shopping mall nearby, within walking distance (and thus not requiring one of us to stay off of the drink and be the designated driver, a concept that is essential in most American towns), but all the restaurants were closing up. So we drove around to the main street of the town, and the first restaurant we tried was also closing early. Across the road was an Italian run bistro, with a genuine UEFA Champion's League football match on the TV, authentic sounding Italian waiters, and accommodating European opening hours.

The motel we had chosen in Palo Alto was quite a compact place with a car park underneath. Holding up the roof above were large yellow pillars that made each parking space quite narrow. In the morning we had planned to drive to the small museum at the headquarters of Intel, the ubiquitous computer chip manufacturer, and have a look around before driving north to San Francisco. However, the yellow metal pillars had another idea and put a large dent in the door when Nicholas reversed into them while instinctively swinging the front round. I can sympathise entirely. I find low speed manoeuvring of American cars quite difficult compared to European and Japanese cars. The visibility is quite limited given how wide the cars are and the steering's pretty woolly too. The door was damaged and slightly out of alignment so we took the car down the road to San Jose airport and swapped it for another car. It's a relatively simple process really, it must happen quite a lot and the whole purpose of insurance is to cover such incidents. And it could have been worse; there's a clip on the internet of somebody in a too-tall camper van accidentally knocking the roof off of a petrol station by hitting it at no more than a few miles per hour, (petrol station canopies are clearly not designed to be hit in such a way and whole thing topples like a petrol station made from three playing cards). The new car was a dark blue Nissan Altima with a very grey plastic interior. In most respects it was inferior to the Chevrolet; it was clearly older, had less legroom, no USB connection for my iPod (we used a radio-frequency tuner Nicholas had brought along, which worked fine until we drove into a big city and all the radio frequencies were taken with radio stations); and was, in my humble opinion, uglier. In that peculiar Japanese way where their intention is clear but the execution is lacking in refinement. However it did have a nicer driving position; the Chevy's steering wheel made it feel like a bus and made my arms hurt.

Silicon Valley has a computer museum where most of the relics of the past sixty years have been preserved, but unfortunately for us it was closed for refurbishment. Refurbishment of one gallery, which for undisclosed reasons meant the whole museum was shut. Their loss was the Intel museum's gain. It was quite a small place, a room in the headquarters building (The Robert Noyce Building, named after the founder – it’s a good thing ‘Building’ isn’t a common surname isn’t it?), but it had various interesting old microprocessors and other bits and pieces. There was the Intel 3101, the first "64-bit bipolar static random access memory chip", the original commercial microprocessor (the 4004), and some of the computers they were put in, all preserved reverentially in glass cases. This may seem to some like a bit of a creative use of the word "interesting" but they had made some effort with the presentation, such as putting everything in chronological order, and you were allowed to take photos (hence my uncanny recollection of the name of the Intel 3101 and it's details).

We drove the new car north to San Francisco and took a brief tour of the city, via the waterfront and the very steep hills nearby. Some of these hills are so ludicrously steep one wonders why anybody thought to build houses on them. On some the cars were parked facing the pavement and tilted over at an impressive angle; the owners must have to be careful when they open the door not to let go or the door could fly open and the hinges could be as damaged as they would be if they'd hit a large yellow metal pillar. So we had a short drive around San Francisco's pleasant streets to the California Academy of Sciences museum, the large science museum in Golden Gate Park (which, despite the name isn't that near to the bridge). We got there about three, giving us about one and a half hours to look round after a stop in the cafe. (Cafe being a slightly inadequate word for such a large outfit). Upstairs in the museum was an exhibition on "Extreme Mammals", basically a fancy way of saying "The Range of Mammalian Characteristics". Down in the basement was a large aquarium, home to an albino alligator, a rattlesnake, and lots of fishy things in very large tanks. Looking round that, and having a brief look at the 'green' roof, took up the rest of the time that the place was open. Thousands of people were hustled out the front door at five pm (why these places cannot stay open a bit longer in August is a mystery to me) and like us they probably drove round to look at the Golden Gate Bridge. Thanks to the cold weather the top third of the Golden Gate Bridge was hidden behind a blanket of low cloud.

After looking in the gift shop, something Nicholas and myself didn't do in 2003, possibly because the area was still closed for security reasons, and using up every minute of the parking meter, we joined the traffic on the bridge itself. Heading out of the city there was no toll, and nor was there a toll on the next bridge across the north end of the bay on the road to Berkeley - the college town opposite San Francisco on the facing shore. Berkeley is the original student activist town, and got the nickname 'Bezerkley' for it's more aggressively left wing inhabitants. When we arrived the campus of UC Berkeley was packed with new students - freshers week, obviously. The university itself looked unpromising from the street; lots of ugly 'sixties concrete plazas and uninspired Brutalist architecture, not added to by the masses of new students. But it got more green and serene further in. Like a park with education thrown in. We could have spent an hour walking round but three of us weren't quite as interested as Nicholas was and subtly walked back down towards the main street looking for a restaurant, something that turned out to be a surprisingly rare beast in Berkeley. There were many takeaway places and coffee bars, but nowhere with seats and waitresses. The whole place felt downmarket and potentially rough; like Kings Cross or the shabbier corners of Shepherds Bush in London, and not a patch on the far more civilised main street in Pasadena. Eventually we found a large bistro-type establishment on a corner next to the BART (for "Bay Area Rapid Transit") station, where the food was excellent and the view outside was of a man in a large coat holding court outside the entrance to the station with a shopping trolley.

Originally we'd planned to drive north a few hundred miles to Redwood National Park, which is on the coast near the Oregon-California border, but after several hours of rolling up Interstate 5 it was clear that we would be arriving there very late indeed and we may as well stop and look at something else. What prompted this decision was stopping to look at the large Shasta Dam near the town of Redding and discovering that the tour was free. So instead of plugging on few another three hours on a twisting two lane highway we had a look round California's largest dam instead. Personally I would have liked to have stopped in Sacramento, the state capitol a hundred miles south of Redding, and looked round the California Railroad Museum if I'd known we were going to stop somewhere for the afternoon but I'm not complaining because the tour of the dam was worth a few hours of time. Aside from the usual hassle of going through a metal detector and carrying one's passport in a trouser pocket because no form of bag is allowed no matter how small and innocuous, it was quite a good humoured and informative tour. The guide had an unusually deadpan sense of humour for an American. I find Americans are no less humourous than the British but they do tend to be more obvious with humour; watching the morning news programmes there are constant little quips and jokes but they are all in their own special place, and I get the impression sometimes that the news anchors are all competing to be the funniest. Finding an American tour guide who drops jokes subtly "You can take photos of everything with the strict exception of me" is a rarer thing in my experience.

The road to Redwood twisted and turned for several hours over rolling hills and through forests. It was a pleasant drive, with ample overtaking lanes for the occasional lorry - we could do with these on the roads in the Peak District. On one section a motorcyclist came past, (the first motorcyclist we'd seen going quickly, there are hundreds of them in Derbyshire), and he flicked a 'peace' sign as we slowed up to let him by. He then immediately got stuck behind another car further down the hill who was sticking rigidly to the speed limit and entirely predictably did not do as we had. It's a shame cars can't somehow record acts of courtesy like ours and give considerate drivers some kind of tax or insurance rebate. The nearest convenient town to Redwood was a place called Arcata and we stopped in the out of town 'motel zone' to get rooms before trundling into town to see what there was. What there was was a large square surrounded by small businesses; like Santa Fe but far less crowded and with grey Pacific cloud hanging overhead instead of a New Mexico sunset. We found a window table in a very large combined restaurant and bar and waited. And waited. It was Friday night of course, something that is easy to forget on holiday, but the service was a bit slow, and as we later found, slightly inaccurate too. But, mistakes by waiters aside, it was seemed like a nice enough sort of a town. If I absolutely had to live in a remote town under perpetually grey skies I would certainly put Arcata, California on the list. It's streets were a nicer place to be than infinitely more famed but disappointingly ordinary-feeling streets of Berkeley anyway.

Redwood is an unusual national park in that it is really a scattered collection of state parks, beaches and preserved groves of coastal redwood trees rather than one cohesive whole. There was no entrance station on the road we drove in on, and thus no fee to pay. The first place we stopped was the Lady Bird Johnson grove, an area of redwoods high up a hill a few miles inland, dedicated by the ex-first lady and President Nixon in 1969. The weather was chilly and misty but the walk around the mile long trail was diverting enough with the lofty trees high overhead and relatively few other visitors on the path. However it was comprehensively blown away by the other grove we walked around that day. This was down at sea level, on the banks of a river, and the perfectly level ground and relative lack of undergrowth made the trees seem more imposing and extraordinary, standing like giant monoliths on the bare ground. The sun had come out too, so the light filtered in a photogenic pattern and lit up the colours, bringing the place much more alive than the mist-shrouded mountain grove. All around trees had fallen leaving enormous stumps on their side and craters in the ground. Huge branches loomed overhead; no hard hat would help if one chose you to drop onto. Down on the riverbank a few people were climbing on rocks and lounging on the shore. A couple of children were swimming in the river. I dipped a hand in - it was cold. Not really cold but cold enough to make me think twice about swimming. A skinny, and slightly lopsided bridge led across to the other side and we wondered over and back, looking to see what if anything lived in the water. The sound of fire engines came from the direction of the main road, indicating something might be up.

Sure enough, after we rejoined and headed up the hill, we encountered a worryingly permanent looking queue of parked cars. After ten minutes it was clear that either somebody had had a crash, so the road might be closed for a half hour or so, or there was a fire, so the road might be closed indefinitely. So we turned around and headed back to the coast road. The route to Oregon was forty miles further than the road we had been on, but there was plenty of time left in the day. We stopped at one lookout point to see the Pacific unencumbered by cloud - we'd tried the river mouth in Redwood but had seen a whole lot of sea mist and not much sea. The wind was blowing a gale, explaining why there was no cloud at this point, and why the car had felt a bit unsteady on the road.

Another long drive on another two lane highway took us back inland to a brand new motel near a small town called Creswell, a southern suburb of the larger city of Eugene, Oregon. It was dark by the time we got there and we couldn't be bothered to drive to the town or to Eugene so we drove over the motorway to a small restaurant which was fifteen minutes to it's closing time. Fortunately some more people came in after us to spread around any potential waitressal resentment towards us. Anyway any restaurant that closes at 9 pm on a Saturday cannot seriously expect to be able to turn out the lights on the dot every night, especially a restaurant next to the main north-south interstate.

Our final day in the wilds of the Pacific northwest was spent driving to Seattle by way of Mount St. Helens; the volcano that blew it's top, and most of it's side, on May 18th 1980. In doing so it blew down millions of trees, buried the river, the lake, the main road, and took a few people with it. As a consequence the visitor encounters first a visitor centre, then a brand new road (well, new in the mid 1980s), a much wider river valley, full of light grey volcanic deposits, and a second visitor centre at the top named after one of the scientists the eruption took with it. Nicholas and myself had been up the road before in 2003 but had only seen thick fog and a few smashed tree stumps. We'd also driven up the other side (via a completely different route) and seen a bit of the lake at the top and the dead forest peering through the foggy soup. Nicholas had tried to go back last year but his car's electrics went haywire in the lower visitor centre's car park. So this was a case of third time lucky. Or rather third time almost lucky since the very top of the mountain and its crater was still under low cloud. We could see the base of the mountain, the landslide, the lake, the blown down forests, but not quite to the summit. Still it was an arresting sight, a collapsed mountain and the remains of lava flows and what had been the summit spread across the surrounding area. The cloud fluctuated every so often and revealed a few extra bits as we walked along the trail past the smashed tree stumps. Signs in the ash reminded everybody to stay on the path to avoid damaging the fragile ground but there were still a few footprints off of the trail here and there. No accounting for selfish people who can't even be bothered to respect such a basic request unfortunately.

Inside the visitor centre was a short film, which was probably the same one two of us had seen in 2003, only this time when the screen lifted at the finale to 'reveal' the mountain behind there wasn't an amusingly silly view of impenetrable fog that rather spoiled the intended effect (and is one of the few times I've heard good natured ironic laughter from an American audience), but a relatively clear view of the mountain. There was also a rather good model of the area complete with little fibre optic effects showing the various stages of the eruption, including where the blast zone and the landslide reached. Displays told the stories of people caught in the eruption; since the sideways explosion was much larger than expected many people were in the 'safe' zones, including loggers and people camping by the river. Since the area was until 1980 the local place for anything involving tents and tramping about in stout boots, and May 18th was a Sunday, there were plenty of weekend campers caught in the disaster. One man told of how he and his girlfriend were camped out miles from the mountain, in what they still thought was a safe place even after the eruption was visible in the distance, when the river swelled in seconds and they were swept downstream clinging to logs like Indiana Jones. Fortunately they both made it despite the girlfriend being tipped into the water - he'd fortuitously grabbed her arm and dragged her back up again.

The display had many extraordinary photographs taken of the eruption, some just as dramatic as the famous sequence seen in a thousand books. Why these photos never seem to be reprinted anywhere I have no idea. I had a look in the gift shop, honestly expecting to find a book containing them, but no, nothing doing. Gift shops are frequently lacking in things I'd like to see in them. For example I came back from this trip with one poster from the Golden Gate Bridge shop showing the bridge under construction, and a few t shirts. I can't say I'm particularly smitten with these items it's that they were literally the only things out of the mountains of stuff in these shops that I felt like buying. The Space Needle and air museum in Seattle are a couple of exceptions to this problem; I came home with a giant card space needle model (now constructed it's about four feet tall and impressively lifelike), and a nice t shirt last year. The replanting of trees was much in evidence along the side of the road back to the interstate. Signs usefully indicated the age; most of them planted between 1983 and 1988. Leaving behind the volcano with it's dramatic new bridges, and many visitor centres, the landscape became more conventionally rural for a few miles before the interstate suddenly interrupted and we were on the way to Seattle.

Thanks to traffic it took a bit longer than expected to get to Seattle. We settled on a hotel that sat in a zone of nothing but hotels and empty lots that was near enough to the ferry terminal and the hire car return, and looked safe enough to walk around in. In the morning we booked a ticket on the one place none of us had been to in Seattle; the Boeing factory tour. Since that was in the afternoon we drove to the Museum of Flight, the same museum that three of us had gone to last year but Nicholas hadn't managed to get to on his various travels in the Pacific northwest. The Museum of Flight is at Boeing field, Seattle's first airport, but the Boeing factory itself is not there but thirty miles north of Seattle in the northern suburb of Everett (where land was cheaper to build a giant hangar). Little had changed there in one year, except for the temperature wasn't pushing thirty Celsius this time round.

The Boeing factory tour was pretty much as I had expected it to be, with a few exceptions. For one thing the guide was a small blonde lady from from Manchester, which is a bit surreal after travelling such a long way. Secondly there was also a large exhibition space in the visitor centre, something I wasn't expecting given the size of the Museum of Flight one would have thought that area was covered. Naturally no photography was allowed, or any electronic devices at all. "You don't want to set off any alarms" was the ominous warning from the tour guide, albeit without any explanation of how such alarms would work. The tour took in the main assembly hangar, with a brief bus tour around the airfield. Inside each section of the hangar the bus stopped and we walked along a tunnel underneath the factory floor to a large service elevator that clanked up to a high mezzanine in the rafters. From here was a grand view of each assembly line; one each for the 747, 777 and new 787 respectively. Each line had five or six planes on it in progressive states of assembly. The first stage was the main fuselage as to be expected, then the wings (with weights to simulate the weight of the engines), and the interior fittings before the whole caboodle is wheeled off to the paint shop. The paint shop was in another hangar which is sealed up like a laboratory to prevent dust and thus off limits to tours. The only bit that was painted in the main hangar was the rudder - the guide explained how it needed to be finely balanced and the weight of paint would throw the balance off, which would be a bad thing.

The irony of the assembly lines was that the once amazing Boeing triple-seven was now the oldster of the factory, with the new 787 on the way and the 747 entering yet another updated incarnation. The 787 line looked like each plane wasn't so much being built as willed into being by lots of people at computers. Effectively true in a way since the components are being sourced from all around the world and most of the people working at the factory are there to make sure the parts are there on time and the right way up. Not something they are doing well apparently, but that could be the media looking for the negative story as usual. While we were looking down on the 787 line a couple of pigeons came and perched on the terrace below. Possibly the real reason why they don't want photos taken; a pair of visiting pigeons doesn't sit well with the shiny corporate image. Although in fairness there are lots of people working in the building, and not in any particularly glamourous jobs either, and perhaps they don't want tourists taking their picture all day.

The exhibition space in the visitor centre couldn't match the flight museum for amounts of stuff but was impressively packed with information none the less. Considering that the layperson won't see much difference between the 707 and the 787 from the outside (and may be moved to wonder why Boeing don't build something more advanced) there were many displays spelling out just what's advanced so much in the last sixty years. Put very simply the 787 is made of 50% composite materials instead of aluminium, is lighter and stronger, chews less fuel, can have larger windows, and requires forty thousand fewer rivets. Unexpectedly for an American museum there was an old 727 cockpit to sit inside and play around in. I say 'unexpectedly' because it's full of pointy bits and low panels anybody could bang their head on (and I did) or scratch their arm, and thus launch a lawsuit for grievous bodily and mental distress. Perhaps Boeing can afford the risk.

We ended the day at a restaurant in the city centre, by way of a stop in the scenic Gasworks Park where bits of the old gasworks have been preserved looking out over an inlet and across to the middle of Seattle. The old gas works buildings had been kept in a good state of repair and added interest to what would have been a nice but undistinguished park with a Glastonbury Tor-like mound in the middle. I read that after the gasworks closed in the 1960s the area had been acquired by the city for a park at the urgings of a councillor, who had then died before any work had been done. Naturally the park was going to be named in her honour but when the architect announced that he wanted to preserve bits of the old gas works as decoration the family of the councillor indignantly withdrew permission and took the name to another park. Upon opening Gasworks Park won an American Society of Landscape Architects Award, a President's Award of Excellence, was hailed as benchmark example of land renewal and decontamination, and recognised as a landmark moment in the preservation of important industrial architecture. Shows what some people know about what's good for a city.

On our last morning before returning the hire car and sending Nicholas off back to Victoria on the ferry we had a look round the Seattle Museum of History and Industry. An interesting enough place despite Seattle's relatively recent history. There were the usual displays on the founding businessmen, the salmon fishing, and banking and all the rest of what goes into turning muddy shore land into a city. One particular technique that Seattle had embraced was to level out some of the hills so Seattle now looks much less like San Francisco than it once did. The museum found some space for some larger things; a small seaplane, a 'Toe Truck' shaped like a large foot, and a speedboat called “Slo-Mo-Shun IV” that had once held the world speed record. I had heard of the boat but had not expected to find it in a museum in Seattle. I can add it to my collection of record breaking machines I’ve seen around museums in the UK and USA.

In the afternoon we sent Nicholas on his way back to Victoria on the Victoria clipper, and wandered back up to the Seattle Center - the large park containing the Space Needle built for the Worlds Fair in 1962, and a few blocks from the hotel. We had look round the Experience Music building to see if anything had changed; it had, as well as allowing photography (something that was not the case last year) a whole new gallery had been built full of early electric guitar prototypes. They must have been worth a fortune, and had obviously been tucked up in some safe somewhere until presumably enough visitors suggested that a music museum would be more interesting if more stuff was in it - hence the new gallery. We had one more fill of American calories downtown in the huge Cheesecake Factory, which despite the name is really a restaurant with a large cheesecake counter attached, and turned in for a early night. The taxi to the airport was at 6:30 am, and it was a long, if relatively hassle free, way home. Even my Golden Gate Bridge poster was only mildly creased when I unpacked my bags at home the next day.