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Published: March 13th 2007
Golden Gate Bridge
That's a 45 minute walk each way. Refreshed after a few days in Christchurch I headed back to Auckland for my lovely night flight to LA. I caught a break with the seat next to me on the plane being empty and loaded up with my trusty diazepam, I drifted off and awoke to the sunshine of a crisp Los Angeles morning. The Grammy's were in town, so it was pretty busy on the roads as I made my way to the lovely USA Hostels in Hollywood. The hostel was around the corner from the Walk of Fame, which is surely a misnomer. I'd never heard of about seventy percent of the names on stars, but there were a few which amused me.
Settled in, I proceeded to sign up for as many hostel tours as I could fit in and noticed immediately the overwhelming amount of Aussies staying in the hostel. Undeterred by this, I embarked upon the usual sightseeing tours, Hollywood Hills, Bel-Air, Rodeo Drive etc and during these tours I was lucky enough to meet a young au pair from Perth who was spending a while in the US. Sufficient is it to say my few days in LA were rather enjoyable.
The
city itself is huge and so spread out that it's impossible to get around without a car and it takes forever to get anywhere. I took a bus to Venice and Santa Monica Beaches and that took three hours from Hollywood and back. I didn't have the confidence in my driving ability on the wrong side of the road to hire a car in LA and the complexity of the road system and sheer volume of traffic didn't help, so I postponed that until San Francisco and relied on the buses, which of course were full of nutters.
My attempts to instigate an impromptu visit to the Viper Rooms were dashed when the two English guys I was with in a Sunset Strip bar just down the road decided rather unwisely to take on the biggest cocktail I've ever seen and the results were predictable. Two blokes from Fleet, Hampshire on the way home in a taxi and me marooned in the bar with an Australian au pair under 21 years old and as such without the required i.d. to enter the Viper Rooms. Another time perhaps. My dreams of swapping hair shaving tips with Britney Spears gone -
probably forever.
Moving on to San Francisco by bus on Valentine's Day, squashed up next to a bloke from Edinburgh for seven hours, I disembarked at a very central hostel and made my first port of call the Valentine's Day party downstairs. The theme of the party was "dress to get laid", so I didn't bother getting changed from my bus clothes and was soon surrounded by semi-naked revellers. Sadly the majority were blokes and most of the women were shocking so I called it a night in preparation for a trip to Alcatraz Island in the morning.
Alcatraz was a very intersting trip and it's only a mile from the mainland, which I wasn't aware of. I did bump into a young lady (Australian again, what are the chances?) from the previous night's party in the mess hall at Alcatraz Prison and we arranged to go on the hostel pub crawl that night. I spent a few enjoyable hours on the island beofer heading back to explore the city some more.
The pub crawl in reality only took in about four bars and I ended up having dinner with the Aussie lass, her mate and an
English fella from Reading. No real incidents to speak of that night, but we arranged to meet the next day to go to the Golden Gate Bridge. Needless to say I missed the 9 am meet and ended up randomly meeting a Chinese girl at the bridge instead. She was on vacation from Ottowa and we ended up going for a meal in Chinatown that evening after walking the Golden Gate and back. After much scrutiny, she finally chose a restaurant that met with her approval and it turned out to be a very pleasant evening. Chinese New Year was the next day and my fortune cookie said that I was about to come into some money and gave me a set of lottery numbers, so I played and lost. I also found out the meaning of my name in Chinese amongst many other snippets of information now sadly lost to my memory.
After a quick detour to San Jose for Andy Murray v Andy Roddick on a Greyhound bus full of interesting weirdo's and a day or two more of sightseeing, I picked up my rental car and drove (very slowly to start with) to Yosemite National Park.
There I spent a day exploring the park and the scenery there is incredible. With it still being winter, the park was relatively quiet and the weather was perfect for a days walking. I didn't run into any bears or mountain lions, but I did meet a very nice young lady from Kent on one of the trails and I ended up giving her a lift down to Fresno a couple of days later. She was meeting an old friend who works at a fat camp/boarding school (yes they are real and very funny) just outside of Fresno and as I was headed to Sequoia National Park I dropped her off there.
The fat camp girl happened to mention that The Who were playing in Fresno that weekend, so after getting booted out of Sequoia for not having snow chains on the Saturn Ion, I fixed myself up with some tickets and came back to Fresno for the concert. Pete Townsend can still play a mean guitar, even though he must be knocking on sixty by now.
After getting pulled for jaywalking on the way out of the venue and lectured for a few minutes by one of
Freddie's place
Apparently the former residence of Freddie Mercury in Bel-Air Fresno's doughnut eating fraternity, I was in a hurry to leave the city and drove to Death Valley en route to Vegas.
It was fairly hot in the valley, even in February and no life whatsoever other than some sort of desert mouse thing that stores up water for months and a lizard. It's a pretty bleak drive, but the scenery is worth it.
Next up was Vegas, which is basically a (slightly) warmer, bigger version of Blackpool with casinos. I stayed in the ridiculous Circus Circus on the strip because it was really cheap during the week, but the collection of polyester wearing peasants pouring their cash into slot machines held little interest for me, so I decided to indulge in lots of the free alcohol on offer and hit the clubs. This was very amusing. At Caeser's Palace they were auditioning for a new member for the Pussycat Dolls, but I decided against that in case I bumped into Celine Dion and headed instead for Treasure Island's club where actor and general nut Michael Madsen was hawking his new poetry book around unenthusiastically. After a few more rum and cokes's I ended the evening with a
22 year old Cuban/American girl in her suite after an altercation with her boss. That was a fun night.
Driving the 337 miles to San Diego the next day with a hangover wasn't much fun, so I went to the movies to see the laughable Number 23 and crashed out. Next day I headed over the border to Tijuana, Mexico to look at endless cut-price pharmacies, dodgy authentic Mexican food and iffy looking hookers. I stayed for about two hours before joining the huge queue to get back into the US.
I had bought tickets for the Red Hot Chili Peppers gig in San Antonio, Texas and only had three days to drive the 1300 miles from San Diego to get there, so I floored the Ion and somewhat exhausted arrived in time. The AT&T Centre was packed and after fatty Gnarls Barkley had knocked out some tunes that no-one recognised, he belted out Crazy and then the Chili's were on and I became deaf in my left ear due to constant screaming from a red thong wearing sort behind me.
The band gave a decent performance, but I was distracted by the woman on my right,
Venice Beach
Not even tree trunks are safe.. who spent a large proportion of the gig attempting to organise what I can politely describe as a date with me for later on in the week. To be fair she did look a lot like Jennifer Lopez (facially that is) but it remained unmentioned whether her seventeen year old daughter was to be involved in the proposed assignation! A few more Shiner Bock's and I may have got involved, but I decided against it and headed home.
The plan was to spend a few days in Austin to sample the historic musical district and take in a few live performances, but upon rocking up at the Super 8 motel downtown I was told of a big basketball tournament in town and there was no room at the inn. Obviously I didn't take too kindly to this rebuke and informed the motel manager of my opinion of basketball, which is on about the same level as that of rugby.
Texas is noteworthy for a number of things. Roadkill for one and bible bashing for another. I've never seen as many indeterminate types of dead animal as on the side of Texas roads. Deer, skunk, racoon, dog, cat (lots
Sequoia
as close as I got to it anyway I'm afraid, sorry Lou) and armadillo were the ones that I could identify but there were also quite a few weird monkey-like things.This concerned me almost as much as the anti-abortion and Jesus posters roadside and indeed all over Texas towns. I've never seen so many churches in my life or children with strange religous acronyms on their t-shirts, so I stopped off in Waco, home of the infamous cult deaths in 1993 to check it out.
The Waco marketing department flyer mentions every tiny event that's occurred in the town in the last hundred years or so, but the siege gets one line and considerably less than the paragraph dedicated to the fact that George W Bush bought some land outside Waco in 1999. I got the feeling that the locals didn't want to talk, so frightened by the God botherers I headed out towards Dallas for a Snow Patrol gig in Grand Prairie.
I have a couple of weeks left in the Ion, which has served me well, until I drop it off in New Orleans where Myra is due to join me for a couple of weeks for the South-East leg of the trip. Can't
see any incidents developing during that fortnight!
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