The State Premiers are in town for a high level meeting with the Prime Minister. I picked up one or two from the Hyatt to take for a short ride to The Commonwealth Club, where a dinner was being held in their honour. Just round the corner, really, but you can’t expect such folk to walk.

The Commonwealth Club is one of those exclusive places dating back to Canberra’s earlier days. Its members include the top public servants – Departmental Secretaries, judges, politicians, community leaders, knights of the realm and so on. Personally, I find it rather stuffy and the food bland, but doubtless it is a comfortable home for the cream of Canberran society.

I picked up some locals as well, from a nearby suburb. Three senior members of the legal fraternity, judging by their conversation, which I listened to with one ear open, just in case they issued instructions to the humble driver.

“I won a prize today!” one of them said. “A weekend at any Australian hotel in the Medina chain.”

“Oh, well done! How did you score that?”

“Qantas puts on a shindig each year for its Gold frequent fliers, and they give out door prizes.”

He went on to describe the annual Qantas travel expo, where the airline rents out a convention hall and invites hotel chains, car rental companies and the like to man stalls showcasing their various products. The Commonwealth government has a huge travel and accommodation budget, and the high fliers often have their fingers on the government credit cards.

This was the answer to a question I’d been pondering. I scored an invitation several years ago, when I became a Platinum member of the Qantas club, and since then I’ve attended several of these events. Qantas pays for food and drinks, and there’s always the chance to win one of the door prizes. I’d dropped down to Gold this year, yet I’d still received an invite, and I’d put it down to sloppy book-keeping, but hurried along for the free tucker, a showbag full of glossy brochures and promotional pens, and the general atmosphere of travel and far places.

So. It wasn’t just Wanker Platinums like I’d been, but also Scum Gold like I’d now become.

This year’s theme had been rather bittersweet for me. Texas!

All the Qantas staff wore fluffy plastic ten gallon hats, t-shirts with various Texan themes (including one young lady who filled out her “Route 66″ shirt very nicely, and if I’d had a few of the champagnes on offer, I might have the nerve to ask her to pose for a photograph with me. Sadly, taxidriving is a profession where the allowed blood alcohol level is zero, and so I’d had to watch the trays circulate without me.

There’s always a theme and a game or two – like toss the hoop over the Eiffel Tower to win a bottle of French perfume – and this year they had a mechanical bull, which wasn’t getting a real lot of wear from the public servants making up most of the crowd. Nor from your humble night cabbie, neither, though a few bourbons might have changed my mind. Some of the younger attendees had a go, but I’m far too old and dignified.

I love Texas, and the announcement that Qantas is now flying a direct route from Sydney to Dallas/Fort Worth was a pleasing one. Not only is Fort Worth one of my very favorite cities, full of atmosphere and style, but the DFW airport is a hub for Qantas’s US partner American Airlines, and it’s a good way to land in the heart of the nation, just one hop away from anywhere.

I’ve visited Dallas twice now, both times making a poignant pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza, but its the sister city of Fort Worth I love most. The Kimbell Art Museum has a gem of a collection and there’s always an interesting travelling exhibition filling the other end of the gallery. The Stockyard District is nicely corny, with a daily longhorn muster, a hokey shoot-out between the campy sheriff and some wildly over the top black hats, and the old stockyards station is home to souvenir shops, Texan eateries, cowboy boutiques and the like, where tourists can happily spend a fortune.

Well worth a visit, by the way, it’s a lot of fun, and I had the best steak of my life late one night at Riscky’s Steakhouse, washed down with a bottle of Lone Star.

The Botanical Gardens are a treat, with a huge rose garden, ornamental lakes with snapping turtles, some grand old trees, and acres of peaceful parkland. The real treasure is the Japanese Gardens, where a small admission fee allows entry to heaven.

Fort Worth distills Texas, in my eyes. Cowtown has the atmosphere, the people and the happy surprise of real art and culture. There’s also various NASCAR and quarter horse and rodeo events, for those less inclined to Mondrian and Mozart.

The sad part of the new Qantas Texan connection is that it comes at the expense of San Francisco, which is, along with Paris, a city I love dearly. When Qantas brought in a direct transpacific flight to San Francisco, I couldn’t stop singing to myself for days. I’ve taken that trip a few times now, and I was on one of the last Qantas jumbos out earlier this year.

I guess that, next time around, I’ll just be forced to fly on Qantas from Sydney to Dallas/Fort Worth, and catch American Airlines to San Fran.

In previous years, I’ve anxiously scanned the little signs stuck up on the exhibition booths. Most of them display details of a freebie night or car hire or something for the bearer of a lucky door ticket, and I’ve always missed out, though I’ve done well for little giveaways of pens and notepads and mints and once even an airliner model.

This time I spotted my number! Woot! A night away in a resort in Perth. Airfare not included. I like Perth, and this would be a great excuse to visit, but I’m saving up my pennies for other things, not least a new house, and instead I’ll send the voucher to a Perth friend, who can treat herself to a free night in a luxury hotel and clean out all the fancy toiletries.

So that was nice. I enjoy these Qantas junkets, with the endless coffee and the light lunch that I go round again for a second serve and the pastries and the pens and the brochures. They might be enticing me to spend up big on travel but, apart from my annual round the world trip or the five weeks I spent doing the Route 66 thing in April, I am unmoved by blatant advertising ploys.

“…and you know what?” my dinner-suited lawyer passenger in the back seat continued to his colleagues, “The place was absolutely full of these jumped-up public servants! They fly all over the place on government tickets and get Gold cards.”

His friends tut-tutted. The elite flying levels are intended for the true elites. The judges, department heads, vice-chancellors and so on who tuck into lamb chops, three veg and sticky date pudding at the Commonwealth Club. The lower classes might dream of Bronze status from the crowded rows at the back of the plane, but it’s the true gold members of society who deserve the perks and the champagne.

We pulled up at the clubhouse portico, and the lawyer beside me paid the fare with a government card.

“Tell your mate,” I whispered to him, “that I didn’t see him on the mechanical bull.”

–Skyring

San Francisco! One of those places, like Paris or Texas, where I’ve always got a happy grin cemented onto my face. It might be just airport code SFO, but I’m still bouncing along pushing a luggage trolley, leading a party of five off to the hire care precinct, smiling at random travellers and humming songs about golden gates, cable cars and sunny California.

We took the lift up a level and boarded one of those automated trains a couple of stops to the rental depot. “You can drive,” I told my son as we sprawled our baggage over the front of the carriage.

The van was booked through Netflights, home of amazing car rental deals in English pounds. Dollar Rentals had the best rate and here we were lining up to collect the keys. We pretended it was just Twinkles and I doing the driving, avoiding the $25 daily fee for younger drivers DD and DS. The Aussie dollar had hit parity with the greenback, but five weeks of twenty five bucks wasn’t to be contemplated.

I passed, with heavy sighs, a long line of Mustangs on the way to our silver Chrysler Town and Country. One day, I’ll drive Route 66 in a convertible, but that day wasn’t this one. We had five people and a stack of luggage and I was aiming for comfort over speed and style this time around.

We filled her up, I sat in the commander’s chair, contemplated the array of buttons and dials ahead of me, punched a few for luck, fired the ignition and rolled grandly down the ramp into America.

Not my first time at the helm of a Yank cruiser, so I had a certain amount of confidence. And a certain amount of worry that I’d forget and go the wrong way at an intersection. I didn’t, but I kept drifting right within my lane, a common failing amongst we Aussies, as we automatically found our comfort zone on the right side of the left lane. Sort of having a dollar each way.

The job of the co-driver in the front passenger seat was to nudge the driver back into position, screaming now and then if a streetlamp or bridge railing came too close.

The plan was to fill in the time before we could check in at our Fort Mason youth hostel with a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito for lunch, a drive around the Marin headlands to catch some of those postcard views of the bridge, bay and city, and then see how we felt. Maybe jetlag would see us hitting our bunkbeds early, maybe we’d be out of phase and partying until three AM.

I hadn’t felt like hiring a GPS for five weeks, so had bought a Tom Tom at home that came with a free international map download. I’d picked the North American map, and despite a little hassle with websites and software installs, had gotten it loaded up. They could make these things simpler.

It worked once it got a good look at the sky, and I set Sausalito as the destination and off we went. I’d expected to be directed straight up through downtown and over the bridge, but it sent us further west and we dived under Golden Gate Park and through chunks of suburbia. I think I might have made a wrong turn somewhere while it was searching searching searching for satellites.

Not to worry. We were just hanging out of the windows, having a ball, pointing out road signs and black and whites* and all the things you see in the movies. “Oooh!” Futurecat squeaked in delight, “California poppies!”

Soon enough, the towers of the bridge were rising up. I pulled off into the visitors centre, where I knew there was a parking area, a shop, and some fantastic views. Been this way before, you see.

Darling Daughter has somehow inherited the whimsy gene. The mention of flowers reminded her that here we were in San Francisco, and like the song I’d been singing to myself, we’d better get some flowers in our hair. And photographs taken. Here are Twinkles and DD, appropriately beflowered. There were also some shots taken of your humble narrator, but as this is my blog and my story, they will not be seen here.

We will, however, feast our eyes on FutureCat, a Newzealander who received her screen name from Americans puzzled as to how it was always a day ahead where she was and could she send them the lotto numbers, please?

We were all smiling. It was just fantastic to be there after all the planning and dreaming and have the day go so swimmingly.

I ducked into the visitors centre for some change to feed the meter during the picture frenzy. I had some US notes, but nothing in the way of shrapnel. I spotted an area with National Parks Service stamps and passports for sale and I was mildly interested, but I didn’t buy one. I’ve been kicking myself ever since – I missed out on dozens of stamps until I finally bought a book in Maryland. Have to go back to collect the whole set, I guess!

Finally we piled back into the van and I found my way out of the carpark onto the bridge. I probably went a few turns too far, and at one point we had gone under the approach ramp and were heading off to Seal Rocks. But I was dead scared of making some fatal error. You know those “Wrong Way” signs they put up? Well, they put them up for people like me.

Here we are on the Bridge. The image is tilted because everyone apart from me was hanging out of the right side of the van to take in the view. That little yellow thingamajig is a Ballycumber, the emblem of the BookCrossing.com community to which Futurecat and I belong. I’ll explain later, but it’s a lot of fun.

We whipped past the freewheeling cyclists on the way down to Sausalito, parked the van and went exploring. Palmtrees, sunshine, smiling faces, restaurants, souvenir shops and always the Bay in the background. The kids ducked into a toy shop and didn’t come out again until they had played with everything. I contemplated buying a bumper sticker.

A firetruck drove past, the back crowded with tourists and a couple of cheerful guides pointing things out. Just one of those quirky San Francisco sights. Apparently the guides sing and dance and just have a wonderful time showing the place off. I love this town!

A little further along the way was the fish and chip shop I’d found in 2010. This time I plumped for a table inside and we ordered up various meals – the first decent tucker we’d had in all of a 48 hour Friday, I guess. In what became a father-son bonding ritual, I asked for a couple of local beers, which of course were Anchor Steam. We clinked our glasses and posed for the camera. Fish and chips, a beer and the Golden Gate. Here is paradise!

I saved the bottle and soaked the label off later, to stick in my travel journal. Perhaps I’m a little nutty, but I have fat journals for most of my trips, full of tickets and maps and receipts and beer bottle lables and bumper stickers. One day, when I’ve spent a fortune on a lifetime of memories and have developed Alzheimer’s, I’ll be able to go back and do it all again.

In another of my nutty rituals, I pulled into a Starbucks, where I bought a super-ginormous coffee mug, the souvenir San Francisco edition. Towards the end of the trip, the van was fairly rattling and clinking along on groaning springs, and I had to subsidise the US Post Office to a breathtaking degree.

There were galleries and boutiques, restaurants and real estate agents. I could think of worse places to live. This guy was singing on the dock of the bay, just piling up the tips, selling homespun CDs and putting a bit of cool into the sunny day. We lingered, listening.

And then we bade farewell to fair Sausalito, heading off for the Pacific coast and the Marin headlands.

The Tom-Tom wasn’t much use here. It didn’t show hills, and what looked like a good direct route would often turn into something you’d be worried about hiking along, but we had a grand time amongst the green hills, old military installations, dusty lookouts and groves of trees. It was all ridiculously scenic.

We all know about Amelie and the kidnapped travelling garden gnome who gets photographed in various exotic locations? Well, meet Wolverine. DD’s boss has this plastic Wolverine figurine she keeps in her office, supervising affairs from a bookshelf. Wolverine got kidnapped, and we were forever finding new places to pose Wolverine and his razor claw hands along the way.

That was fine, and DD’s boss was doubtless charmed to receive emailed photographs of her plastic friend teetering on safety railings above iconic landmarks for the next few weeks, but what added a whole jar of spice to the adventure was the fact that the original internal rubber linkages allowing Wolverine to move his limbs or bend and turn his head had long since perished, and every now and then an arm or head or torso would fall off as he was being positioned for the photo.

We tried to keep him together with Blu-Tac, but that wasn’t as secure as it might have been, and a fair proportion of the trip was spent retrieving bits of Wolverine from the landscape.

Like this one. Just over the safety rail is a drop that plummets down to rocks on the shoreline via gullies and near vertical slopes. Wolverine’s arm plopped off onto the wrong side of the barrier and teetered, like a movie car, on the edge of the drop. DD scrambled over the fence to get the body bit back, Twinkles hanging onto her rainbow belt in case she slipped. I didn’t really need this level of excitement, but we got the limb back. And DD.

But, OMG, the view! This was like living in a postcard. Simply stunning. I’ll come back one day with a bigger camera.

Before we left Marin, I took a picture of the New Zealand flag I’d hoisted onto the van’s aerial and secured with a ball of chewing gum. I wanted to make FutureCat comfortable about being a lone New Zealander in a van full of Aussies. Besides, I figured people would think it was the Australian flag anyway. See how there’s a little nick in one corner? Over the next three weeks the threads gradually unravelled and by the time we got to Washington DC, we were British. Barely.

And then we entered Fisherman’s Wharf into the GPS and followed the voice back over the bridge. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve stayed at the Fort Mason youth hostel, but it was a welcome sight on the grounds of the old military base as we parked the van, pulled out our bags and checked in. There was a young lady on the desk and she handed us forms to fill in as she gently extracted money off my credit card.

“You know,” I said, “It’s really comforting to us Aussies that youse have got all these gum trees here.”

“Double You Tea Eff?”

“You know! Gum trees!” I pointed out the window at a nearby grove.

“Oh, those are Eu-cal-ypt-us trees!”

I rolled my eyes. “Geez, how pretentious can you get!”

“Pretentious? Moi?”

–Skyring

* Black and whites = cop cars. Just like in The Blues Brothers and Dukes of Hazzard except they weren’t leaping about so much.

You remember, a few months back, I narrowly missed attending an Amanda Palmer ninja concert at the Carillon in the middle of a savage thunderstorm?

Well, I guess if the same thing happened now, I’d happily go get soaked.

It was somewhere in Illinois when the subject came up.

“Oh, hang on,” said Discoverylover, “I’ve got her album on my ipod.”

And we plugged Amanda Palmer into the van’s sound as we headed into downtown Springfield, aiming for Lincoln’s home and another of those National Park Service passport stamps.

We didn’t make it by about five minutes. It had been a late start, we’d bumbled our happy way along Route 66, and by the time we realised that it was a long way to St Louis, the sun was going down.

But I didn’t care too much. Discoverylover was playing the songs, and I was particularly fascinated by one called Map of Tasmania. There were other songs, but the image of Amanda Palmer “walking down the street, showing off my map of Tasmania” just cracked me up. The refrain, “Oh. My. God!” was about all I could say for the next week and a half as a response to anything.

“Here’s your salad, sir.”

“Oh. My. God!”

Swatt! – sound of Pete being hit over the head with rolled up beer bottle by Discoverylover.

She had actually been to a couple of Amanda Palmer concerts in New Zealand. Dragged her mother along to one, as well. DL’s Mum is one cool lady, I must say, having met and hugged her once or twice, and they must have had a ball together. My mother would never have taken any of her children to a show where the lead act is introduced as “Amanda Fucking Palmer!”

We got a coffee and continued on into the dusk. The story of what happened when we stopped for dinner in Litchfield and asked for “a local beer, not any of those big national brands like Coors or Millers” will be told later. In the meantime, I was wobbling all over the road. If I wasn’t laughing, I was beating time to the music.

 There’s some wonderful songs on the album, including a new national anthem for New Zealand, which frankly I think would be an improvement on their current dirge, albeit overly focused on one particular person’s menstrual cycle. There would be smiles all round as the New Zealand flag was hoisted at the Olympics, the majestic ukelele playing, hands on hearts, stars in eyes etcetera.

I immediately went off to iTunes and bought the album. It’s a cracker!

There’s a new version of the old standard Makin’ Whoopee and a delightful ode aimed at Vegemite, which is apparently Australia’s national food. Her husband, Neil Gaiman, loves the spread. Amanda doesn’t.

I love you, and no matter what you eat,
I’ll always love you completely,
I might just always leave the room at meal times,
Or refuse to touch or kiss you for a week,
If you insist on putting that foul death paste in your mouth.

Magic stuff!

We found a fantastic hotel in St Louis, just a Tim Tam toss from that amazing arch, where next morning we squelched over wet grass to get the stamp. Would have taken the lift up, but we were late and had to be on the road. It was about noon by the time we got our Drewes Frozen Custards and headed west out past Shrewsbury along Route 66. Drewes Frozen Custard is the exact antithesis to Vegemite. There was a line about a mile long, and it was a very soggy workday, but Oh. My. God! it was so worth it!

We had moved on to a Neil Gaiman book by that time, just to keep it in the family. The Graveyard Book on audio, ghouls and ghosts and assassins making a charmingly offbeat children’s story.

That’s one thing about modern roadtrips. It’s more than the scratchy AM radio the original Route 66 voyagers would have seen as an effete luxury. It’s ipods and ipads, DVDs and audio books, computer games and mobile internet nowadays.

We were never bored.

And next time Amanda Palmer and I and Discoverylover and her mum occupy the same nation, we’ll be there in the mosh pit.

–Skyring

We cruised our way out of Oklahoma, through museums and hokey little towns, capturing a border sign at Texola and the leaning water tower in Groom, but we were really aiming for Amarillo. In fact, we were aiming for Albuquerque, but we were doing so much lollygagging and having so much fun just poking our way along old 66 that there was no way we were going to make it all the way across Texas in daylight, and we ended up settling for “Tucumcari Tonite“.

But that’s another story. A whole other bunch of other stories. The big thing about Amarillo is that just outside is one of the most famous Route 66 icons – and it’s not even on Route 66!

The Cadillac Ranch lies a few hundred metres south of I-40, and Route 66 (as “Indian Hill Road”) is about the same distance north of the interstate. Not really visible from the old road unless you’ve got telescopic eyesight. We had to get onto I-40 and then onto the south frontage road before we even got to the parking area, which is just a wide spot on the verge.

Originally, we’d planned to have MissMarkey from Oxford with us, and she had wanted to see the Cadillac Ranch. We could have done it – I’d do just about anything for MissMarkey – but it would have involved a lot of hard driving to get from Washington DC to Amarillo in the five days available to her. As well as do all the other stuff we all wanted to do. Regretfully she sent us off and flew home to England, but before she left she gave me a Route 66 shirt, which I loved immediately. I’m not a flamboyant dresser, and my clothes advertise ancient database products, like as not, but this gaudy item sang to me.

I changed into it on the roadside, the evening air chilly on my freshly exposed skin, and thought about how much more fun it would have been to have her aboard. Travelling companions can make or break a holiday, and MissMarkey’s ability to not just seize the moment, but jump up and down on top of it, would have made this trip truly epic.

Next time.

We could see the famous Cadillacs planted nose-down in the wheatfield. There were some vehicles parked nearby, but no apparent way of driving through the turnstile gate in the fence, so we, like everybody else, walked.

I’d heard that, very soon after the cars had been planted, visitors had begun souveniring smaller pieces, and graffiti-tagging the bodywork, in effect adding to the artwork. Certainly the gate had been well and truly tagged.

But as we approached, it became obvious that the cars – or what was left of them – were a uniform blood-red colour. A fresh artistic advance, supplied by a team of painters, clad in white overalls and spattered with gore. It was their vehicles parked by the Caddies, and they must have gone through a tonne of paint that day.

They were winding down from their effort, slightly demented after a day in the field, proud and protective of their achievement. “Fresh graffiti on car eight,” someone called out, and a painter was despatched to cover the offending tag.

The cars are covered in layer upon layer of paint. Apart from the graffiti, there are enough periodic repaintings that the paint sometimes sloughs off in sheets a centimetre thick, and such fragments litter the nearby field. Chunks of car have been removed – in one case an entire roof panel has been taken away for illicit display – and the whole installation is gradually deteriorating.

But it’s still spectacular. We posed for photographs, the low sun on the red paint making the scene even ruddier, poked around, left a book inside one car, and then hurried back to the van. It was cold out there in the Panhandle breeze, and we still had a long way to go.

Oh yeah. The story of the ranch is that an eccentric millionaire bought ten old clunker Cadillacs and buried them nose-down in a wheatfield, the angle of the cars exactly the same as the slope of the Great Pyramid. The trademark fins of the Fifties and Sixties Cadillacs pointed up into the sky and people came from all over the world to marvel.

When Amarillo expanded out over the surrounding farmland, the cars were exhumed and re-interred three kilometres further out. They are probably safe from encroachment for a decade or two, but there may not be much left by then. Just shells of paint.

We had to get back on the road, and we pushed through the barbed wire fence in the approved Australian manner, me lifting the strands apart so Discoverylover could push through. Just behind our plain-as-pie van was a fair dinkum classic Cadillac, straight out of American Graffiti, fins as sharp as razors, front end loaded down with chrome that sparkled like a galaxy in the level sunlight. It was gorgeous, and the driver was even more so. My Route 66 shirt was gaudy, but this chap had on a shirt that was elegant in a way that only Americans can do. Plain black with the Cadillac logo embroidered across the back in glittering thread. He was wearing a ten gallon hat and a tie in the shape of a set of tailfins, held down with a Cadillac pin in what looked like and probably were diamonds and gold.

“Now ain’t that something?” he asked, sticking his thumbs in his belt and pointing with his chin at the row of Caddies.

“Going to park your car there?” I asked him mischievously.

He looked me up and down, and seeing that I was smiling, he broke into a big Texan laugh. “Naw, they can plant her right alongside when the good Lord calls me home, but until that day, I’m going to enjoy me my Coupe DeVille. Ain’t she purty?”

“Sure is!”, I agreed, wondering if I could possibly arrange a swap.

“She was state of the art in her day. Power steering, power seats, Hydramatic transmission, Four Thirty Vee-Eight..,” he rattled on and on, “…four barrel carburettor…”

My ears glazed over after a while, but he was fired up. “Lookey here,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket, “The keys are individually matched to the original factory serial number.”

He hauled out a keyring – more diamonds – and some small change and a couple of golf tees spilled onto the ground. We bent down to retrieve them from the Texas dust.

“What are these?” asked Discoverylover, holding up a golf tee with a tiny Cadillac logo. She’s not a great sports fan.

“Oh, that’s what I put my balls on when I drive.”

“Wow,” she goggled. “Those Cadillac people think of everything!”

Later:

From the photographer’s caption:

After the perfect blue New Mexico skies of the day before we awoke to a cloudy and windy morning. We made our way out to Cadillac Ranch intending to add our names to the thousands of spray painted “tags” that decorate this iconic art installation, only to find that a group of students from Denmark had just finished painting the cars to resemble their national flag.The students were still on site admiring their work,and I didn’t have the heart to be the first to deface their “flag”,so I just shot a couple of pics and headed into town to see what was left of Route 66 in Amarillo.

Earlier:

People climb up on these things to tag the rear ends and to pose for photographs in a suitably heroic manner, so I guess that the pillars on car number two just rusted out and gave way one day. This photograph shows the ranch in November 2010, and given that the hood has folded in two, it’s probably from the weight of someone climbing on it and getting a nasty surprise.

A little serendipity: someone has painted a Danish flag on the flank of car number one!

I love flying out of Sydney. I get to use the awesome Qantas First lounge. Even if it’s only a cup of coffee, sitting away up there with the huge windows, the smiling staff, and the art on the froth of my latte sets me off on the right foot. I glide down the hall and float onto the plane.

Not this time. I’ve dropped down to Gold, so it’s just the normal lounge, and although I’m allowed a guest, I’m travelling with three companions, so two would have to wait outside. Which means that we are not going into any lounge.

DD will feel this most keenly. Twice I’ve taken her into the First lounge, and she snuggles up like a cat in the comfort and love that Qantas gives to elite flyers.

We both eye the sign saying “Lounges” and sigh dramatically.

There are other pleasures. Duty-Free shopping is something I usually gloss over. The savings in Australia just aren’t there, except for alcohol. And then there’s the hassle of actually carrying the stuff aboard and making sure it stays secure under your seat or in the overhead locker. And I’m not that much of a drinker, anyway. I’ll glance at the electronics, but generally stuff will be cheaper where I’m going to, although I will sometimes buy something just for the pleasure of fiddling with it during the flight.

But the kids went wild in the Duty-Free precinct. They saw the prices for grog, the girls experimented with the free testers for perfume, they just browsed and browsed. DS had a happy smile when he picked up a jumbo bottle of Jim Beam at a very agreeable price. I think he had plans to make the flight a very enjoyable one indeed!

We had lunch in the food court. Overpriced rubbish, mostly, and consumed with other travellers jostling past. I sighed again.

The usual delays as we waited to board the plane. Security checks, a long walk to the western end of the terminal – I made my usual joke to some random travellers, “Geez, I didn’t think we’d have to walk to San Francisco!”, and they dutifully smiled.

And then we were patting the hull of the jumbo, smiling at the cabin crew, arranging ourselves in our seats. The flight to San Francisco doesn’t have a First service, so Business passengers get the First seatbeds (and Business service), Premium Economy get the Business seats, and a lucky few Economy passengers get the Premium Economy seats (and Economy service). Somehow I’d managed to retain enough eliteness to score four of the Premium Economy seats on our discounted Economy tickets, so that was a big plus. I even felt chipper enough to give up my allocated window seat to my son, accepting an aisle in the centre section. He hadn’t flown over the Pacific previously, whereas I’ve lost count.

Pushback, taxi, and takeoff. I love these bits, and I’m usually hanging out of the window to experience the unusual situation of the comforting solid land tilt and dwindle and disappear, leaving us in a realm of air and clouds which we are quite unevolved for. It’s a kind of magic, and my spirits always lift along with the Boeing.

Dinner was served as we raced towards twilight. “Portuguese Style Beef and Chorizo Hot Pot with Pilaf Rice”, according to the menu. It was okay, but nowadays I’m inclined to see economy food as an inconvenience, cluttering up my tray table and setting uncomfortably in my stomach. I selected a red wine to go with my meal, but it was sour and unsatisfactory to the last drop. The best part of the meal was the glass of Mr and Mrs T’s Bloody Mary mix. Spiced tomato juice makes me happy.

And then the long night. On a thirteen hour flight over the Pacific, you’re going to get a big chunk of darkness however you cut it. I watched a movie, but unusually for Qantas, the selection of viewing wasn’t as broad and as satisfactory as I like, and after a while I cranked the seat back and slept. Premium Economy gives me enough room to find sleep, instead of fitful catnaps. I got up a few times to use the facilities and wander through the rear cabin – the rare joy of an aisle seat.

Dawn and breakfast arrived, and my excitement level soared again. I opted for the hot breakfast, my nose twitching at every savoury waft from the galley before my tray was plopped down in front of me. OJ, Melon salad, scrambled eggs with bacon, sausage and mushrooms, and a new attraction of “Mango and Vanilla Pain De Me”, which was enjoyable, despite the disturbing name.

Washed down with hot coffee.

I caught glimpses out the distant window as we came in over the Golden Gate and turned to land with the rising sun at our backs. I love San Francisco, and even if it’s just an airport, with bleak expanses of concrete and long immigration halls, there’s always a smile on my face.

Immigration was painless – we actually got out ahead of most passengers – and before too long we were rumbling a trolley or two into the arrivals hall, where we were to meet FutureCat, flying in on Air New Zealand from Auckland. We had an hour before her flight landed, so we found a coffee shop and I shouted drinks and snacks for the group. My daughter needs her caffeine in the morning, and what with the jump in body clocks, the need was very keenly felt at this time.

There was another customer at the coffee kiosk. A blind man with a seeing-eye dog was waiting patiently, sipping his drink while his dog contentedly licked itself. The very picture of happiness all round.

I nudged my son, pointing at the dog. “You know, I’ve always wished I could do that.”

“Well, Dad,” he replied. “Now’s your chance. It’s not as if the owner’s going to see what you’re doing, eh?”

We woke up in Paris. Paris, Las Vegas. But that’s another story.

We paused for photos at the town sign – it has its own car park and Elvis impersonators – but that was only a minute or two.

Henderson was a longer pause, for Starbucks and an emergency shop for a camera battery charger. That involved a chunk of online research and Google Maps and following the GPS voice, but we were back on the road soon enough.

Where things really began to go wrong was at Hoover Dam’. Until a few months ago, US 93 went straight over the top of the impressive chunk of concrete that holds back the Colorado River (forming Lake Mead) and makes power to run all those lights in Vegas. But there were hairpin bends, vehicles had to be checked for security, the road was narrow, and sightseers often jammed the road. So they made a high-level bridge downstream, and while you can’t see the dam from the roadway, there’s a walkway on the dam side offering views previously only available from a helicopter.

Trouble is you have to pass through security, find a space at the small carpark, use the facilities and then zigzag up the hillside walkway to get to the observation area. That takes time, but the view is worth it, and as an added bonus, you get to photograph the Nevada welcome sign, which is impossible from the highway unless you stop where you can’t stop, or accept the blurry chance of a moving shot.

And then. Well, we’ve got these US National Parks passports, you see, and we’ve been collecting the stamps available at national parks, historical monuments and so on. A lot of fun, and I’ll look closer at the program later on. Let’s just say it’s a good fit for an obsessive-collector history nut like me. And Discoverylover.

Lake Mead is on the National Park list, so we figured we’d just duck into the visitor centre at Hoover, collect the stamp and be on our way. I’d told The Chief Markeroon we’d be there mid-afternoon, and we were going to be well past that, given the delays. A few minutes for the stamp.

Back to the van, take a few hairpin turns, and there’s the dam up close. Visitor Centre this way. Right. Where do we park?

Multi-story carpark, perched on the side of the gorge. It’s the only place you can park that doesn’t involve an hour’s hike. Costs seven dollars and we had to scratch around for the money. Thrusting a motley collection of notes and quarters and nickles at the attendant, I explained that we’d blown our dough in Vegas. “I feel your pain,” she grimaced.

We parked, we walked along to the visitor centre, where we had to pay $15 each to get in. Odd, but we’d come this far, we wanted that stamp! Luckily they took credit cards – mine was wearing very thin by this stage, but still worked without alarm bells going off.

It was all very nice and historic and I had to prise Discoverylover out of the interactive exhibits, but where were those dratted stamps? We wandered outside, grabbed some shots of the awesome dam and the high-level bridge, but decided that the visitors centre wasn’t the place they kept the free stamps.

Back to the carpark building, where there was a snack bar and a souvenir shop. Souvenir shops are usually where they have the information, the books, the mugs, the passports, the passport stamps…

Nope. Everything but the stamps. Discoverylover asked at the counter. “Naw, sugar, this ain’t a national park! You need the Lake Mead center. Here, lemme draw you a map.”

Bugger. We’d wasted an hour and a bunch of money on a wild-stamp chase. On the high side, we’d gotten a good look at Hoover Dam, which is really worthwhile for those with a spare hour. There were examples of 1930 Art Deco embellishments against the industrial triumph of the Depression, so we snapped the angels with soaring wings. The whole shebang is really a geekfest for the sort of people who watch that “Awesome Megastructures” series. People like me.

Back in the van, we followed the GPS voice towards Quartzsite, where The Chief Markeroon lived in an RV in a desert hideout. Back along 93, back through Boulder City, take the turn onto 95 heading south. Uh-oh! Long highway spearing off into the desert. Only a quarter tank of gas. We’d better refuel before hitting the serious road, or there could be serious inconvenience or injury ahead.

So that was a bit longer, to find a servo, pay at the pump and overcome the “please enter zip-code” problem, look through the junk food and grab some root beer and mixed Chex to pass for lunch.

Then we made tracks. Gotta say, it’s a long straight road south. Dark Desert Highway stuff. The temperature climbed and the sparse traffic didn’t thin out. Nowhere to go, you see. Just the highway through the empty land.

Impressive landscape actually. We were never out of sight of mountains for the next two days, but it was all desert in between. We get this sort of land in Australia, but usually without mountains. Here, it was flat and dry expanses between low ranges all around. Weird.

We passed the California line somewhere between Searchlight and Needles. At Needles we crossed Route 66 and its faithful shadow I-40, but we didn’t stop. The sun was sinking low, and the last thing I wanted to do was to blat around the desert in the dark, looking for a lonely campsite.

Then it was Arizona again, fertile land, a river crossing. On to Quartzsite!

At this point my navigator was asleep, but we had the turn by turn instructions on the laptop, complete with distances and lat/lon coords for the geeky. How hard could it be?

We arrived at Quartzsite, broke out the directions and puzzled over them. They didn’t make sense. We shouldn’t be in Arizona, we should be in California, near some place called Blythe. Blythe was half an hour away. I blamed the GPS initially, but then realised that The Chief Markeroon’s RV was a mobile home, alternating between longstay reserves at Blythe and Quartzsite. Couldn’t stay more than two weeks in one location. It was all in her blog…

I hauled out the road atlas, now rather tatty after five weeks of being jammed down beside the driver’s seat, and worked it out. The GPS lady had taken us the most direct route, instead of going via Blythe, which would have worked well.

We were into early twilight now, and after a quick pause at a surly supermarket for a sixpack, we hit I-10 west. A fortunate interstate to gobble up the miles. Bless you, President Eisenhower, for that superb freeway system uniting the US. There’s even an Interstate in Hawai’i.

Blythe: a small town in the desert, and Discoverylover read out the streets and landmarks to take. Past the school, past the dump, bend in the road…

By now we were way out of town into the desert again, the light was growing dim, and the instructions had us turning off the paved road onto dirt tracks. We followed along until the tracks turned into empty desert, the light was almost gone, and there was The Chief Markeroon waving at us beside an RV in the middle of nowhere with low shrub.

We embraced. I’ve known Linda for years, and she has been my hero all that time. She rides a big bike over deserts and mountains and canyons, lonely campsites lit by the glow of a laptop. Her Little Twist of Texas travel book is a delight. We first met in Fort Worth, visited Niagara Falls the next year, strolled through Charleston the year after that, and here we were.

Her husband limbered up from the campfire to greet us. Beers were broached, spuds in foil set to cook, and we caught up, the stars coming out in a splendour unseen all trip long. Friends in a far place, linked by blogs and internet communities. In fact, Linda and her husband had been one of the first internet romances. She’d flown from England to meet her Californian cyberbuddie, loved him and married just over the Nevada border on a motorcycle trip.

Apart from writing books, she’s also a BookCrosser and a correspondent for an online newspaper. She had covered the royal wedding a few days earlier and was exultant at the tens of thousands of hits her articles had received.

They showed us the inside of the van. Compact, but full of homebrewed technology to cool the inside, power the satellite dish, feed in the internet and warm the cats. I was entranced. Here were two geeks, all but independent of the world.

We went back outside. The baked spuds were delicious, and we followed them up with very British tea and a cake. And then it was time to go. We were tired after our travels and the nearest motel was back in Blythe. Linda and her husband climbed in amongst the rubble of the back seats, guided us out to the road and pulled us up by a historical marker.

Linda runs a web community called Markeroni, a thoroughly fascinating hunt for historical markers around the world. History geeks take pictures of themselves and/or their toy mascots at plaques and statues and landmarks. Members are called Markeroons and Linda is The Chief Markeroon. It’s a lot of fun. Naturally Discoverylover and I are markeroons.

We paused and posed and hugged each other goodbye. Bear, penguin and giraffe perched on the marker. Tears were shed. It will likely be years before I see Linda again, even though we read each other’s blogs, are Facebook friends and all the rest of it. She has a prime part of my heart.

And she is one of the reasons I travel. Her delight in seeing new places, uncovering the stories behind the plaques, understanding the thoughts of the people of the past and the way they felt the land is inspiring. She sees the world through sparkling, spiritual eyes.

Now you go through Saint Louis,
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.
You see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Don’t forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernandino.

We ticked them off, one by one, aiming to get a photo of the town sign for proof. Not sure we got St Louis, but we got plenty of that famous arch. As compensation, we nabbed Shrewsbury on the way west, as we sucked up the last dregs of a Ted Drewe’s frozen custard, carefully posing my BBC Radio Shropshire bear against the sign. He’s been around the world seven times – and a few halves – since I was given him in Shrewsbury at Easter 2006 by the marvellous BBC presenter Jim Hawkins.

This day was a highlight, from the moment we woke up in Tucumcari and realised it was snowing outside. We had at least nine hours of driving ahead, before our booked accommodation at the Grand Canyon, so we wanted to travel fast.

But first, we needed a photo of a “Historic Route 66″ sign. “Collect the whole set,” has always been my motto, to the despair of my wife in a house full of clutter, and I wasn’t going to miss out on the New Mexico version. We found a bunch of banners along the main street, but they weren’t the genuine article.

Somewhere out in the wild and wind we found a sign. Generally they mark the old highway after an intersection, when there is some doubt as to the correct way to turn. Finding one with room to pull over and a generous supply of light on the sign was sometimes a bit tricky, but here the light under the overcast sky was generally dismal and if we hugged each other for the shot, it was for warmth!

The temperature dropped and the snowflakes got thicker as we lifted ourselves up over Sandia into Albuquerque. 28° F outside, and the snow was making patterns on the road surface in the wakes of the speeding semitrailers on the Interstate.

Gallup, New Mexico wasn’t too hard. The sun was beginning to smile around the clouds, and we found a couple of big signs, obviously intended for Route 66 junkies like us. We didn’t even bother to get out of the warm car – just aimed the cameras out of the window.

We found a bit of Route 66 here and there, pausing for a photo or two as the sunlight turned back on, lighting up a landscape straight out of Cars, with huge rock formations poking into the valley like the bonnets of old automobiles. We even found a close approximation of the “Wheel Well” cavern just over the Arizona line.

The “Welcome to…” state signs were another collection. We were ticking them off against the list, and sometimes our visit to a state would be just a quick duck over the border, grab a snap, and turn around. We went through three states in five minutes sometimes.

Into Arizona, and there was one place I was determined to stop. That famous corner from the Eagles song, with a flatbed Ford and “a girl, my Lord!”. Another tourist trap, but very sweetly done. Unfortunately the souvenir shop alongside was closed for the Sunday night, but after a bit of hunting we found a diner that was happy to serve us supper. I got a large serve of roast beef, apparently made of cardboard, chips that had seen service in the Korean War, and green beans that had been pickled last week for re-use next week.

It was well and truly dark by the time we hit Winona. Going by the song, I’d imagined it to be west of Flagstaff, but no, the sign appeared suddenly and I pulled over to get a shot, stopping awkwardly in a deserted intersection, the headlights positioned to illuminate it. Take a flash shot of a road sign, and all you get is a brilliant reflection, mostly. A deserted intersection to begin with, but as I fiddled with the camera, pickup trucks appeared from everywhere, politely weaving around the van parked fair in the middle.

I was hoping for better, actually, and I followed the road into town. After about ten minutes of desolation, Discoverylover began prodding me. “Sure we’re going the right way? Maybe we should stop and look at the map?”

I turned around and discovered that there was no town of Winona. Just a Shell service station and a few houses. No big welcoming sign for the tourists. As usual, Discoverylover needed the bathroom, and we pulled in. Not even a big roadhouse, this one. I poked around, looking for something I could buy, just to be polite. To tell the truth, there wasn’t a real lot I wanted. Flagstaff wasn’t too far off, and I knew I could likely find a late night Starbucks for an actual espresso coffee. A few souvenirs, but I had a van full of souvenirs after stopping at Clines Corner that morning.

I chatted distractedly with the chap behind the counter, who seemed at perfect home in this deserted servo.

“Ah, you’ve lived here all your life?”

“Nope,” he replied. “Not yet.”

Discoverylover appeared and got down to business. “We need a ‘Winona’ sign,” she demanded.

“Here yuh go.”

He hauled out a bumper sticker and posed for us. “The sweetest little place you’ll find on Route 66,” he said.

And then he handed the bumper sticker to Discoverylover, who smiled happily. “No charge!” he said.

We had discovered the sweetest bloke along Route 66.

You can’t drive Route 66 any more. Anybody who says they’ve done it, Lake Michigan to Santa Monica Pier is lying.

Historic Route 66 is out there, sure enough, and there are any number of websites and guidebooks offering turn by turn instructions. But every now and then they direct you onto I-40 or some other road. The simple fact is that in many places Route 66 no longer exists. It’s buried under the Interstate, it has been overgrown by trees, it runs across private land. For miles and miles you can see where the old road used to be, and still is, the Portland cement surface easily identifiable. But it’s broken up into short stretches, it’s fenced off, it goes nowhere, or it’s just plain unsafe to drive on.

In fact, a lot of the old highway alignment is a dirt track, where it exists at all. I’d estimate that if you drove the whole way, religiously following every possible chance to follow the old road, maybe 30% of it would be the original surface and much of that very difficult going.

And, to be honest, this is a good thing. The old prewar road was narrow, full of blind corners and difficult grades, few overtaking opportunities, running through towns and crossing rivers on skinny bridges, the trusses just a few inches away. When it was full of traffic, it must have been a struggle to survive, every approaching truck a challenge, every curve and crest a surprise.

Driving a family of bored kids through a summer holiday can’t have been fun when cars had no airconditioning, sweaty vinyl seats, manual gearshifts and scratchy AM radios. No cruise control, no power windows, no seatbelts or airbags.

Driver fatigue would have been a big killer, and it’s no wonder they closed the old Chain of Rocks bridge that carried Route 66 across the Mississippi just east of St Louis. With a bend in the middle, driver after weary driver must have clipped the side or run into the oncoming lane.

The long desert stretches presented their own challenges. The heat and the lack of water must have challenged both car and driver. Running out of gas on one of these desolate flats would have been a disaster, with refuelling opportunities sparse.

Many times the modern Route 66 driver is faced with a choice of alignments. Do you follow the 1920s dirt, the 40s cement, or the 60s fourlane blackop? And just how much history is there when you’re driving along (say) State Highway 66 through Oklahoma, with only the sketchiest geographical kinship to the Mother Road?

So we didn’t feel too much guilt whenever we bypassed the old road. If darkness or bad weather overtook us, we switched to the Interstate. We wanted to arrive safe, not poke our way along a treacherous road in dark and snow. And if all we saw was what was under our headlights, then how much fun was that?

And often we had to make up time to meet a friend or to get to booked accommodation at a reasonable hour. If all Route 66 was was a frontage road for I-40, and we could see it just a few metres away, then why spend time poking along the old road when we could engage cruise control for an extra twenty or thirty miles per hour on the Interstate?

But we spent a lot of time on the old road, and it was a lot of fun. The little cafes and gift shops were far more fascinating than a clutch of burger chains. Roadside ruins, corny tourist traps, a few ancient motels struggling on – the colour might be faded, but the thrill is just as real.

And towards the end, crossing the Arizona and California desert sections, traffic was very light indeed. We drove by ourselves for mile after mile, alone from horizon to horizon.

I remember one car we passed. For a long time it was visible ahead travelling just a few miles per hour below our cruise control setting, first a dot, then a shape in the haze, then finally an old Mercury, the grey-haired driver leaning way back in their seat.

I pulled out to overtake – no oncoming traffic for at least ten miles ahead – and glanced to my right as I passed. I could hardly believe my eyes. Alone in the car, an old lady was passing the time by knitting. She must have been steering with her knees.

Appalled, I slowed, wound down the window and bellowed at her, “You bloody idiot! Get your hands on the wheel!”

She looked at me and I yelled at her at the top of my lungs, “Pull over, yer mug galah!”

She cranked down her window and shouted back, her expression full of scorn, “You damn fool, it’s a scarf!”

New Orleans was perfect. We’d planned our visit for Saturday night after another long day of driving when we could use a little relaxation. Halfway through our eastbound crossing of America, New Orleans was our chance to let our hair down, sample the fabled delights of the South, get wild and hungover.

The one black mark was that I couldn’t find a hotel that was within walking distance of Bourbon Street, reasonably rated, and remotely affordable. We ended up near the airport in a chain motel of which I now have zero memory.

Seems that there was some festival going on that night and people had flocked in to enjoy the evening. The best accommodation had long since been snapped up. But we followed the GPS voice into the central area. Parking wasn’t too difficult once I’d swallowed the cost, and we found Bourbon Street easily enough – just follow the noise and the crowds!

It was everything I’d hoped for and more. I could have spent the whole night just leaning on any Bourbon Street corner watching the people. Folk of every age, colour, shape and origin flowed past, all happy and excited, smiling and talking, snatches of song and dance animating their progress.

Bourbon Street itself was a lane lined with bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and entertainment venues, brightly lit under verandahs filled with partying people. Music came from out of the air, and pretty women magically scored chains of beads, generously supplied by the folk leaning over the balconies above.

I loved it. Every odd detail. The couple walking a miniature horse. The guy on a mobile phone, bent double with a finger jammed in his free ear against the noise. The street church, praying for the souls of the sinners. The line of mounted police, the horses suffering their noses to be stroked by the tipsy and curious. A diner named Desire where we sat down for some Cajun cooking and stood up for enveloping hugs from the hostess. Gumbo, crawfish, local beer, dishes we couldn’t pronounce but licked clean.

We had a bourbon on Bourbon Street. They came in a rack of five test tubes and we conducted our own experiments, snorting them down and stamping our feet. Alcohol was cheap and plentiful, but really just the atmosphere was enough to intoxicate.

We straggled along, looking and photographing and enjoying the night. Amazingly we all kept together and eventually found ourselves in an open air jazz bar, where we listened to the band pumping out golden notes, consumed the local sweet pastries called beignets, and immersed ourselves in New Orleans.

I sat down beside a young lady at the bar, about my age. She smiled at me and I offered to buy her a drink. Hearing my faint Australian accent she asked, in a delightful Southern music, who I was and how was I here.

“I’m a taxidriver in Canberra,” I said. “I drive politicians to Parliament, public servants to the airport, veterans to the War Memorial, drunks home from the pub. I keep my limousine shining, I play jazz for the passengers, I offer them Minties, I laugh at their jokes. And as I drive around the parks and avenues of the national capital, I dream of travelling to exotic places full of fascinating people. Like yourself, right here.”

I subtly waggled my eyebrows at her, and she smiled.

“You know what I dream of?” she replied. “Women. All night and all day. I wake up in the morning and I think of women. I get up and go to work and I look at the women on the bus and the street. I dream of women all day long. I go out at night and look for women. I’m a lesbian, honey.”

She raised her glass at me and sauntered off. Two more ladies sat down as I thoughtfully sipped my Sam Adams. They were low-cleavaged under strings of beads, and they twinkled at me in a charming manner.

“G’day!” I smiled. What a night!

“Ooooh, listen to him! Where you from, big boy? What you doing here all alone?”

“I’m Peter, from Australia.” I mimed a kangaroo bounding through the bush. “You know? I’m a lesbian.”

It’s not the first time I’ve driven on the other side of the road. The first time was in Caen, in Normandy, in 2006, in a little grey Opel. A manual car, and I hadn’t driven a manual transmission for about thirty years.

I not only had a new car to learn, but a new country, a new town, a new side of the road and a new method of changing gears. Which I did frequently, usually when I was puzzling out how to negotiate an intersection full of locals whipping through it, while a queue of their compatriots built up behind me, keen for some whipping. I swore and sweated a lot, and when an opening arrived, planted my foot on the gas and stalled out.

So driving in America after a few more European and US roadtrips was no hassle. I put on a spritz of antiperspirant and got loaded up on coffee.

What was a hassle was getting the phones to work.

Far too often, I’ve set my phone to international roaming and come home to a phone bill that approximates my grocery spending for a year. A bit of email, a few peeks at BookCrossing.com, an emergency use of Google Maps. And the odd phone call.

A friend of mine who works in telecommunications suggested buying throwaway phones that could be easily reloaded. Just buy ‘em from a supermarket.

So this time, when I wandered down to the Marina Safeway for my fix of the best supermarket in the universe, I scooped up five cellphones. Futurecat suggested the sort with lots of buttons on the front, hoping to be able to use it back home in New Zealand. They were like twenty dollars each, and I got five twenty dollar credit refills for them, so it was a bit of a hit in the hip pocket, but I figured that we’d be able to communicate with each other and call the locals.

I had this dread of one or two of us getting separated and all the trouble and delay it would cause before we were all linked up again. Having a phone each would fix this, and I wouldn’t worry too much. Peace of mind is worth a lot.

Taking the phones through the checkout along with the root beer and candy turned out to be the wrong approach. It worked, but only after the manager had been summoned, and the line of angry customers behind us had built up to an alarming, grumbling, fidgeting degree.

It’s still the best supermarket ever. Armistead Maupin rated it highly in his Tales of the City series, and I’ve loved it ever since. I joined the loyalty club then and there.

And then. Oh boy! Back at the hostel I sat down to activate the phones and load them up. Talk about a fiddly procedure, especially when doing it for the first time! I dragged out my laptop and got onto the network’s website and created an account and gradually got everything hooked up. But there was a lot of navigating through menus via tiny buttons and entering codes on tiny buttons, and squinting at the screen through rapidly-aging eyes.

It was a struggle and it took some time, and our precious evening was wasting away. In hindsight, I should just have given the stack of boxes to K-J-H, who is good with technology, and told him that I’d buy him dinner if he could get these things going.

Anyway, the phones worked, more or less. Sparkles discovered that if you get a friend in Australia to phone you so you aren’t paying for the call, Net-10 charges you for receiving an international call and your credit is drained anyway.

And my phone decided it wasn’t going to play ball after a few days. For two weeks I waited for it to come good, and then I tried switching it off and on again – or maybe the battery drained out, I can’t remember. Anyway, that worked.

But for the time being, we had working phones, and we used them to good effect the next day, when we split up to explore San Francisco. Had a fantastic day and night, and the next morning we left early to get on the freeway south.

A friend had suggested that we drop in at San Jose on the way through, and this turned out not to be possible, so I rang her at the last moment to let her know that the GPS had sent us another way, and maybe we’d catch her on the way back in a month’s time, and possibly the cake she’d baked could be wrapped up and frozen?

“Or eaten by the dog,” she huffily replied. She asked which roads we were taking, and I told her the name of the highway. Or rather the number. American highways are all numbered, apart from Missouri, where they have letters. Very confusing, and it’s all too easy to take the wrong ramp if you mix (say) the speed limit with the highway number. We were driving along Route 65 a lot of the time.

“Be careful there,” she warned. “The radio says there’s some nut driving the wrong way.”

“Hell,” I replied, “There’s hundreds of them!”