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.