Magic

Having secured some essentials in Palm Springs (to be precise; a hat to protect me from the sun, a spare pair of sleeping pants to protect me from nudity, and a retro spaceship-shaped cocktail shaker to protect me from sobriety), we drove the forty miles or so to Joshua Tree, the sleepy little hick town that serves as a launch pad for tourists to access the Joshua Tree National Park.

Even if you’ve never been to the town of Joshua Tree, you’ve seen it before. If you’ve ever watched a movie in which patronising urban protagonists smugly head out into the desert and end up being hunted and murdered by inbred rednecks, it was either shot in Joshua Tree or somewhere nearby. It’s the sort of place with coyote skulls hanging over doors, dead pickup trucks rusting on blocks in front yards, almost dead pickup trucks shedding rust as they rattle down the streets, and retro modernist signage from the 1960s that isn’t employed ironically… it’s just still there because no one could be bothered taking it down after the business closed decades ago.

In fact, all you need to know to get an accurate picture of Joshua Tree is that it has a manicure salon called ‘Sassy Nails’. You just know it’s owned by a dusty bottle-blonde chain smoker named Sholene who knows every speck of gossip in the entire county.

After checking into a hotel distinctly more down-at-heel than the glamorous one in Palm Springs, we headed into the national park.

Joshua Tree National Park is about a lot more than the distinctive eponymous tree. The tree itself has a stark and alien beauty, but it’s just the centre of a vast, evocative environment of mountains, boulder fields and cacti. Photos only capture a hint of the landscape’s grandeur, with aircraft carrier-sized boulders jutting out of the desert floor, split and tumbled and weathered by the eons of wind and rain.

We visited Barker Dam, an area where local ranchers trapped precious water in the years before the site became a national park. After that, we drove along to Hidden Valley, a mile-wide natural amphitheatre of fallen stone – a classical concert there would be absolutely magical.

Then finally we drove up to Key’s View, a lookout on top of one of the western mountains from which one could see Palm Springs, the San Andreas fault, and glimpses of the Mojave desert.

In the evening we adjourned to a bar that the manager at the hotel had recommended called The Tiny Pony. It was a dive bar, but judging by the flair of the menu and the number of forthright women in the place, I gleaned that it was probably an ironic hipster lesbian dive bar, so we were probably safe from being murdered by rednecks. Of course there was always a chance we could be murdered by hipster lesbians, but they can generally be won over with a verse or two from Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’.

I ordered a fried chicken burger and the Big-Ass Gin and Tonic (no snark - that’s what it actually said on the menu). When it arrived, I realised I had found my hipster lesbian brethren.

Full

It was necessary, on arriving in Los Angeles, to immediately unarrive in it. Due to the work schedule of the friend I am visiting, we only had one opportunity to undertake the uber-American activity of the road trip, and we had to take it immediately. And so we hit the freeways in a bright orange Nissan Versa to drive the couple of hours out to Palm Springs.

Palm Springs is a desert resort city on the fringes of the Mojave, known for its beautiful mid-century modernist architecture and spectacular mountains that loom over valley in which it’s sited.

Our hotel wasn’t one of the modernist ones – they’re too expensive – but rather a lovely sprawling Spanish hacienda style building with terracotta tiled floors and stucco walls, wreathed in red bougainvilleas and dotted with bubbling fountains. It’s the sort of place where you anticipate seeing the ghost of a Hollywood starlet murdered by her lover on a dirty weekend in 1953.

For the most part, we spent the remainder of the day simply wandering about, absorbing the charming buildings, the cute little design shops and art galleries, the neatly xeriscaped gardens (including several paperbark trees a long way from their Australian home) and the stunning mountain vistas that constantly demand one’s attention.

Later, we had dinner at a local bistro, where an overenthusiastic barmaid earned my admiration by pouring the most brimming dirty martini I’ve ever seen.

The Nerd is only doing what I would have done, given the requisite scaling.

Wordless

For my last meal in Colorado, my friend took me to breakfast at the Denver Biscuit Company, where we had classic American biscuits (or scones, as the rest of the world calls them) with, in my case, fried chicken, bacon, cheese and sausage gravy. And a side of grits, since I didn’t know what that was and wanted to find out. Verdict: wallpaper paste that benefits from mass additions of salt and cheese.

The biscuit concoctions were tasty but overwhelming. On the plus side, there was bottomless filter coffee, which you served yourself in a collection of charity shop mugs. I chose the one that most spoke to me.

After breakfast I headed out to the airport, still feeling a little anxious about my flights back to Los Angeles. Maybe it was fear of flying and the unknown, but more likely it was just jitters caused by bottomless coffee.

As it turned out, the only thing that disturbed me on my flights was a couple with a small baby sitting a couple of rows in front of me. The baby wasn’t a problem; it was what they were wearing. Both of the adults wore identical shapeless, featureless green tracksuits. I couldn’t shake the impression that they were either coming from a mass cult wedding or going to a mass cult christening.

Rich

After spending much of the week immersed in a culture of pickup trucks, snow boots and plaid, it was time to smarten things up and experience Old Money Colorado Springs. While most of the city is basically Perth with a strident American accent, there remain a few streets of the original city from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: large Victorian and Edwardian mansions with cute little Spanish and Craftsman bungalows for the servants. They centre around The Broadmoor, a grand luxury hotel built in 1918. It has a private artificial lake, a multi-million dollar art collection, and a Christmas fairy light budget larger than some countries’ GDPs.

It also had one of the most expensive cocktails I’ve ever consumed; around $33AU. But it was spectacularly good; a mix of bitters, mezcal, reposado tequila and cherry liqueur.

Snow

My host and I decided to get in some male bonding time and go up into the Rockies for a hearty mountain breakfast and a chance to get out into nature.

We stopped at a classic mountain inn and subjected ourselves to the full glory of American gastronomic overabundance: eggs, sausage, hash, toast, french toast with whipped butter and maple syrup, grapefruit juice and bottomless coffee out of chunky mugs.

It was the perfect time to be up in the mountains, as the heavy snow from two days prior had melted off the roads but still frosted the trees and outlined the contours of the rocks. We stopped to allow The Nerd to do some photogenic exploring and rock climbing.

An hour later and a few thousand feet higher up, we found this place, the inspiration for a certain Colorado-based TV show you might have seen.

Wilkerson Pass provides stunning views across hundreds of kilometres of land, mostly national park, to the Collegiate Peaks in the far distance. It’s wild and empty and, with its blanket of snow, looks like Narnia before the White Witch was deposed.

Wings

Today was another milestone in my American culinary journey, as I had an opportunity to encounter Buffalo Wings. It turns out that the buffalo part of buffalo wings – the sauce - is pretty mediocre, compared to blue cheese sauce or BBQ sauce, so I steered my wings clear of it and enjoyed them all the more as a result. I also had a glass of local beer to wash it down, largely because I don’t trust the martini prowess of the bartenders in a pit barbecue and wings place.

Following a beery lunch, it seemed appropriate to drink and drive at one of Colorado's premier go-carting tracks. Usually I go-cart like an elderly woman... and not a cool elderly woman like Dolly Parton or Pam Grier. One of those irritating old women who makes inedible shortbread at Christmas and scolds the neighbourhood children for skateboarding too loudly. However, this time I was full of caffeine and beer, so I closed the gap with Dolly and Pam and threw my go-cart around the track a little more rigorously, and ended up coming in third.

Go-cart racing, subtly sponsored by the Pepsi corporation.

Afterwards, I went up to a Sheel’s megastore, which is what Australian chains like BCF would be if they swallowed all of the nearby stores in your local shopping centre. It’s primarily a sporting, hunting and camping store… where you can also buy Lego sets, cardamom scented candles, artisanal candy, and Mariah Carey Christmas socks. They also have an indoor ferris wheel and a two storey tropical fish tank. None of it made any particular sense, except for the fact that it would allow the average Colorado man to go shopping for ammunition or a new ghilli suit without being bothered by his wife (shopping for throw pillows in Homewares) or the kids (shopping for Barbies and Pixar merchandise in Toys).

Whiteout

I woke on the day after Thanksgiving to a landscape carpeted in white, as flurries of snow swirled down from the leaden skies. It was -10 degrees outside and everyone in the house was still dopey with food bloat from the previous night.

Genius that I am, I decided that because I couldn’t really do much outside, this would be a great opportunity to do some shopping. Thanksgiving itself might be blessedly free of commercialism, but once midnight strikes it’s Black Friday, which is to Thanksgiving what gastroenteritis is to good gut health.

So I went down to the nearest shopping centre and indulged myself in a bargain hunt. With limited space in my luggage I couldn’t buy anything large (or anything electrical, given the differences in Australian and American plugs and voltages). But I did find a new jacket, some Lego, a jumper and a couple of T-shirts in Target, as well as a nice box of champagne coupes to give to my hosts as a thank you gift.

As I wandered over to another shopping area, I did what I inevitably must have done under the climactic circumstances. While crossing a major road, I stepped on a piece of slick ice and fell flat on my back. Fortunately I was on a pedestrian crossing so I wasn’t immediately run over by a gigantic Ford Overkill. Also my shopping bags landed in such a way that the contents weren’t broken. The only damage was to my glasses case, which was squashed nearly flat, but did its duty in protecting my glasses.

Sore, slightly stunned, and increasingly frostbitten, I staggered on, pausing only for a restorative cheese dog at Five Guys burgers. I finished up my shopping with a half-price plum velvet smoking jacket from JC Penney, because one can never have too many plum velvet smoking jackets.

Thanks

Today was the culinary cornucopia of Thanksgiving, when Americans become very serious about the correct way to roast a comically oversized turkey, burying green beans under a mound of cheese and breading, and mistrusting perfectly respectable fruits like cranberries and pumpkins unless they come out of a can.

Thanksgiving is the most admirable of the US holidays, being focused not on gifts or consumerism but on being grateful for what you have – frankly it’s surprising that they haven’t outlawed it as a crime against capitalism.

However, the other major cultural aspect of Thanksgiving is the practice of tolerating your difficult relatives, and being tolerated by them. I discovered that, as an individual sitting outside this family paradigm, I was considered fresh meat by everybody. I alternated between hearing the latest Facebook conspiracy theories from the Trump-loving father-in-law of my host, and hearing about the evils of organised religion from his militant atheist brother. Then I had to attempt to tactfully explain that just because Australia has socialised healthcare doesn’t mean that we have free access to reiki and aura-cleansing to someone’s science-averse sister-in-law.

It all became a lot easier once I decided that walking half a mile to the liquor store through the darkness and freezing wind blowing down from the mountains would a) get me out of the house for at least half an hour and b) allow me to acquire multiple bottles of fine Australian wine which I could then share, thus appearing generous while also boosting my ability to mindlessly smile and nod.

Struggle

Today I went up into the mountains to go cross-country cycling through the pine forests and burn off the legacy of too much tequila and heavily processed carbs. It was beautiful and wild but, once again, I’d forgotten that the thinner air at 2000m above sea level makes strenuous exercise much more strenuous. I had to stop quite frequently to try and haul more oxygen into my ragged lungs, feeling like I was Lizzo trying to climb a flight of stairs without her personal trainer.

The little scraps of snow still lying in some patches of shade made an ideal backdrop to an epic face-off between The Nerd and Kai, invigilated by Master Wu. Given that they both fell over simultaneously as the snow melted around them, I think we can class it as a draw.

Hammered

Today I decided that going for a walk around the suburb would be a good way to see ordinary life in middle America. But before I was even out of the cul de sac, I was breathing heavily. I was wondering if I’m more out of shape than I thought, but apparently since Colorado Springs is nearly 2000 metres above sea level, there’s a noticeably lower concentration of oxygen in the air, which, if you’re not acclimatised to it, can make you struggle to breathe even under mild exertion.

Either that, or these giant donuts and loaded fries are taking their toll.

I walked about half an hour up the main road, only encountering two or three other pedestrians, either jogging or walking a dog. Americans don’t walk for the purposes of getting from one place to another. They have ocean liner-sized pickup trucks for that. There were pedestrian crossings at major intersections but the buttons to activate them were as pristine as the day they’d been installed.

I eventually made it to a local diner, where I had a cup of coffee and a giant cinnamon scroll. The coffee was good but the scroll was obviously evil… and I don’t just mean because of its calorie content.

In the evening, I was taken to an upmarket Mexican restaurant for their Taco Twosday – two gourmet tacos and a 16oz margarita for $15. I hadn’t quite registered how much 16 ounces is – turns out, it’s nearly half a litre. Even allowing for a commercial margarita mix being largely sugar and non-citrus ‘lemonique’ flavouring, there’s always going to be a liberal amount of tequila in it.

And I had two, since I discovered that they had a frozen slushie one, and how am I supposed to say no to that?

As a result, I staggered out of the restaurant absolutely hammered. I was at that level of drunkenness when it takes all of your concentration to walk in a straight line, and respond to others without slurring. Unfortunately I was still rational enough that I could tell I wasn’t being particularly successful, but hey, I’m on holiday.

Tasty

Now that I’m settled in the United States and have eaten a few meals, I’m remembering little things about American food. Almost everything edible here is manufactured. Delicious, but manufactured. Trying to find a vegetable that isn’t drenched in cream, or sugar, or cheese, or pastry is not just impossible, but probably a sign of communism. I almost wept in gratitude when someone gave me an actual, unsullied strawberry.

One can see why the trope of vanishing into the toilet for an hour is such a thing here. Most dishes have less fibre than a tin of condensed milk, and are far more likely to actually contain condensed milk. Sweetened, of course.

The exciting news is that booze is one of the few things that’s noticeably cheaper in the United States. I have invested heavily in mezcal futures, which is kind of the opposite of my liver’s future.

Gods

The Garden of the Gods is the premier tourist attraction of Colorado Springs, looming up from the edge of the suburbs like a portal to an alien planet… with easy access to a Walmart. It features massive, flat, gently rounded monoliths that tilt up out of the earth as if thrown down by a mile-tall toddler. If the makers of Star Trek could have been bothered driving all of the way out to Colorado, they would have had great sets for various landing party adventures.

There are even great vantage points for filming moments of Great Peril!

It was in the Garden of the Gods that The Nerd encountered a mysterious figure of vaguely Far Eastern cast. Everyone needs a sensei.

The Nerd tried to consult with him, but he had an annoying habit of always appearing on higher ground. Points for inscrutable style, but not ideal for deep discussions on life and death.

Long

While waiting for my departure from Melbourne airport for Los Angeles International, I spied a 20-something person in a streaked mullet, hot pink patterned T-shirt, baggy jeans, statement sneakers and an oversized white vinyl belt. Hey, buddy, the 80s called and… actually, they don’t want their look back; you’re quite welcome to keep it. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

There followed more than 14 hours in the 47^th row of a Boeing 787, a far bigger and more comfortable plane than the previous one – I had an infotainment screen and a USB port! I also didn’t have a despondent Irishman looming out of the seat next to me. In fact the seat next to me was empty, so I got to share it the delicious boon of extra space with the man in the window seat.

I won’t say that 14+ hours just went by in a snap, but there was a good range of movies I wanted to see, and that took up more than 10 hours alone.

- Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Verdict: Fun and funny)

- Us (Verdict: Cool concept with amazing performances, but clumsily executed)

- Renfield (Verdict: Nicholas Cage camping it up as Dracula – need I say more?)

- No Hard Feelings (Verdict: Strangely dark rom com with refreshingly flawed and unusual characters)

- Asteroid City (Verdict: Meh - I may be reaching Wes Anderson Whimsy Saturation Point)

Coming into Los Angeles, we flew over a skyscape of cliched fluffy white clouds and a richly coloured sunrise. Then as we descended, we were enveloped in a fog of unbroken cold grey nothingness, so dense and uniform that everyone was startled when we touched down – we thought we’d still been hundreds of metres higher in the air.

At the break of dawn after a 14+ hour flight, we were in no mood to be messed around by LA customs and security. But LA customs and security couldn’t care less about our mood, so it was straight into a snaking, sour queue, to eventually be photographed, fingerprinted and otherwise biometrically molested.

It’s ironic that LAX, the western gateway of the Land of Freedom and Liberty, looks like a soviet-era Brutalist Russian government building circa 1974, with hard terrazzo floors, dull plywood ceilings and harsh fluorescent lighting. It had the wifi connectivity of a Russian building in 1974 as well. The good news is that for all the oppressive sense of inefficient bureaucracy, they actually processed me pretty quickly, and I found that I had nothing to do before my next flight in six hours’ time except watch homeless people surreptitiously sneak into the bathrooms to wash up. I killed some time in the only Starbucks in LA without wifi (d’oh!) and surprisingly expensive and surprisingly terrible coffee. I mean, I was expecting it to be expensive and terrible, but they really upped the ante here.

One unique thing about LAX is that it plays a public address recording the announces that LAX is closed to the public 24 hours a day, 7 days a week… except for people catching flights, dropping passengers off or picking them up, or airport staff actively on their shifts. So presumably all of those homeless people I saw dragging around bags of empty cans, fouling the bathrooms and blathering at pretty girls were here legitimately, just waiting to catch the 1247 to Albuquerque.

After three hours I could finally check my bag at Southwest airlines, the Ryanair of America. It was simple enough getting the label from a kiosk, but as I put it in the bag drop, the attendant demanded to know my TSA pre-approval number. When I told him I didn’t have one, he directed me to a different Southwest queue.

After 45 minutes of standing in that queue, I finally got to speak to another Southwest employee, and explained the situation to her, stating that apparently I needed a TSA pre-approval number, whatever that was. She looked at me and asked, “Do you want a TSA pre-approval number?”

“Not particularly,” I replied. “But do I need one?”

“Not particularly,” she said. “Next!”

So off I went. Upstairs, security screening was strict (Take your laptop out of your bag! Remove your shoes! Remove your belt! Empty your pockets! Stand in this booth with your hands up while we bombard your body with unspecified radiation!) but fast and impersonal. I got patted down because the zipper on my jeans is made of some sort of dangerous super metal, but the agents were professionally disinterested and the whole thing was over in three minutes.

By that stage it was midday, so I unwound with some chips and guacamole and a margarita in an overpriced airport bar, listening to the live announcements of gate changes and boarding calls, which were mildly amusing – the staff have clearly learnt that the best way to deal with exasperating idiot passengers is with an attitude of gently mocking humour. I was herded onto a short commuter flight of barely an hour from LA up to Las Vegas, then had a couple of hours in the Vegas departure concourse to wait for my next flight and have a very American snack of unappetising french fries loaded with unnatural cheese sauce and sad bacon dregs.

My final flight, another drab little Boeing 737-800 running from Nevada to Colorado, had a moment of Peak America as we were about to taxi out. The flight attendant revealed over the PA that one of the passengers had been accepted into the US Marines. She had him raise his hand to identify himself, thanked him for his (upcoming) service, and lead the entire plane in a round of applause. I clapped along because, sure, good for him, but I was thinking “Congratulations on getting a job you want, I guess, but how is this any of our business?” I couldn’t decide if it was noble but sort of creepy, or creepy but sort of noble.

The local man sitting next to me muttered, “Don’t get dead,” so clearly I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t waving a little flag and saluting.

After another 90 minutes of flight, we touched down in Colorado Springs around mid-evening, and I ran into the only significant problem I’d encountered since leaving Western Australia – I couldn’t see my ride amongst the gargantuan vans and pickup trucks in the pick-up/drop-off lane outside, and this little provincial airport didn’t seem to have wifi so there was no way to call or text. I stood in the late autumn chill for nearly an hour, turning over my options. Eventually, after ducking back inside to make sure I couldn’t see my friend, I discovered that there was one specific point on the concourse when I could get a faint wifi signal, and we could finally text each other. After that, we quickly met up, drove to his place where I’m staying, and after 3 airlines, 5 airports and 37 hours of travel I could finally stop.

Misery

I spent the evening hurtling through the night sky in a rather decrepit Boeing 737-800, the Shannon Noll of passenger aircraft; hard working, actively disliked by many, but functional enough to get the job done at an uninspiring level. It’s a long, uninterrupted tube, with a narrow central aisle with rows of three seats on either side of it. These seats are so tightly packed together that anyone taller than a leprechaun has their knees jammed into the spine of the person sitting in front of them. It’s uncivilised and shameful… again, like Shannon Noll.

Despite it being a red-eye flight, the plane is packed, and as far as I can see every single seat is occupied. I heard in the airport that a previous flight had been cancelled, so we probably picked up some strays from that. Fortunately I’d already selected my customary aisle seat, so I can stand up whenever I want, or just stretch my legs into the aisle and waggle them about in the precious empty space.

The poor man sitting next to me – a lanky Irish youth who is no more built for middle seats than I am for classical ballet – is trying his best to sleep, but with his knees pressed against the hinge of his tray table and his shoulders squeezed together to keep his upper body confined to the available space, he’s just sort of wafting in and out of consciousness and radiating misery.

Reinvention

I’m about to embark on another international holiday, thanks to fairly limited spending during the pandemic and my long service leave becoming due. After Italy and Bali, I’m now going to the United States, to spend Thanksgiving with old friends in Colorado Springs, and then to pursue more urban amusements in Los Angeles.


I’ve had the usual issues trying to find just the right Lego companion to join me as my selfie proxy. I wondered some sort of American cowboy might be appropriate, given the places I’m visiting, but the only one currently available is Sheriff Woody from Toy Story, and I don’t have one of those.


Instead, I embraced the fact that the USA is the home of personal reinvention, and took a minifig that I put together out of disparate body parts from the Build Your Own Minifig bins at my local Lego Store. I don’t have a name for him, so I just call him The Nerd. He doesn’t seem to mind.