Day 7: Memphis TN -> Jackson MO

So I opened the blind this morning - yesterday the afternoon sun was shining full on the window so it was closed on arrival - and found this:

BRIDGE!!1!

Moreover, whenever the lift in the hotel arrived at the ground floor it made a noise like a puppy having its tail trodden on.  This is all you need to know about the Best Western Plus Gen X Inn in Memphis, TN.

So what else is Memphis known for?  Well, it seems that a Mr E.A. Presley used to live here.  Some sort of front man for a Popular Beat Combo, I'm told.  His former residence is open to the vulgar gaze of the public so 'tis off we go to Graceland.

This, you understand, is not actually Graceland because that's on the opposite side of the main road.  No, this is the reset of the complex containing numerous halls devoted to all aspects of Elvis' life, also restaurants, gift shops and the parking lot, and to get to Chez Elvis you must board a shuttle bus and Lo!

It's nowhere near as big as I thought it might be and frankly nowhere near as kitsch either.  I mean, we Larringtons had one of these wine dispenser gadgets:

although ours was only the single-barrelled version.  This munkeh though:

Don't have nightmares, kids...

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

because it's apparently for smoking cigars through.  Weirdo.

Elvis has indeed left the building

Once you're done with the house it's back across the road for the ancillaries.  Cars:

Oh Lord, won't you buy me...

Motorcycles:

I think this Honda Dream is the same model as that ridden by Robert
Pirsig on the road trip in "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance"

Tractors^[1]:

Aircraft:

Convair 880 "Lisa Marie"

And footbridges:

There's also a hall dedicated to people who have cited Elvis as an influence.  Kiss?  Joe Perry out off of Aerosmith?  Def Leppard's Joe Elliott?  A bunch of presumed country singers I've never heard of.  And Dolly:

Next to Dolly are The Judds and the only thing I know about The Judds is that they figure prominently in the Puscifer song Cuntry Boner.  Yes, it was co-written by RATM's Tom Morello.  No, you can look the lyrics up yourself.  Graceland: worth a visit?  Yes.  Value for money?  No.  The Delta Blues Museum wins that one hands-down.  Clicky here for MOAR Graceland photos.

Gracelanded-out by lunchtime, I instructed Emily to take me to the bridge where the rivers collide.  According to one Andrew "Pokey LaFarge" Heissler anyway.  This required about three hours northbound up I-55, where the continued high temperatures and heavy truck traffic provided good hunting for the Goodyear's southern buzzard, a large raptor that lives off the carcasses of exploded lorry tyres^[2].  The rivers in question are the Ohio and the Mississippi, and they collide just south of Cairo IL.  Where, it must be said, the Ohio carries considerably more water than the Mississippi.  Thus according to the geographers the Ohio ought to be considered the main stem.  With that and the most distant source being the headwaters of the Missouri on the Montana/Idaho border, the actual Mississippi starts to look like a bit of a fraud.  Also, there isn't a bridge where the rivers collide:

To the left, the Ohio; to the right the Mississippi

There are bridges over both rivers not far upstream but...  The song in question is called Cairo Illinois, Cairo being the nearest thing to a ghost town I've ever seen without actually being one.  I've seen livelier cemeteries.  So it's not inconceivable that if you did fetch up in Cairo on a Saturday night jumping in the river might be the closest thing to entertainment on offer.  The far bank of the Ohio is Kentucky, so I popped over there to notch up five states in a day before returning to Missouri and heading north again.

1. Just the one tractor, actually
2. May contain traces of Lie

Day 6: Clarksdale MS -> Memphis TN

Firstly, what kind of quality control do they exert at Plastic-Cutlery-Я-Us LLC that they allow a fork out into the wild with mutant tines that make spearing a sausage a hit-and-miss affair?  I shall write to my MP as soon as I return to London's Famous London…

And so to here:

which is housed in an old railway depot, part-owes its existence to Billy Gibbons out off of ZZ Top and is well worth fifteen of your Earth dollars.  If you like your blues from Chicago, or Texas, or California, or Eel Pie Island this is not the place for you.  This is the Delta and they brook no substitute.  With the advent of mechanised farming in the Delta many locals upped sticks and moved to the industrial cities of the north and natch the musicians followed, most notably to Chicago where Muddy Waters subsequently invented electricity^[1], but this is where it all started.  Sadly they don't permit photography inside so you'll have to take my word for it, but when, Constant Reader, have I ever lied to you?

Nice lady Mary-Jane at the museum asked me whether I was a musician, a misapprehension possibly brought about by long hair, band^[2] T-shaped shirt and bass-player-inna-stoner-rock-band sunglasses.  I allowed as how I wasn't, whereupon she gave me a free plectrum:

I shall stick it on the kitchen wall next to the one Alonso
out off of Flor De Loto gave me last week…

and opined that this might encourage me to buy a guitar.  I think it will take a little more than that so I drove down the road a bit, to here:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees…

but the Devil utterly failed to turn up like he allegedly did for Robert Johnson, Tommy "No Relation" Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw, there to take possession of their souls in return for mastery of the blues.  The bastard. So I revisited Highway 61 yet again.

Highway 61 goes straight to Memphis from Clarksdale but it was only 11:30 and check-in time here wasn't until 15:00.  Plus while I hadn't

Stayed in Mississippi a day too long^[3]

it was time to try a new state and I didn't want Arkansas to feel left out so I took US-49 back across the river to Helena, where they have a nice park by the river, containing this:

Use your Junior Pocket Microscope (model 3a) to spot
Rocky Raccoon to the right of the tree

To kill more time I went north through the Arkansas Delta which is very much like the Mississippi version but contains evidence of actual cultivation of cotton.  And so to I-40 and back across the river to Tennessee.

I-40 bridge, Memphis

Still no getting away from those bluesmen though:

B.B. King mural, Tennessee Welcome Center, Memphis

1. On the other hand, Lou Reed claimed that electricity comes from other planets, but I don't think that's true either.
2. The Zac Schulze Gang.  It seemed appropriate.
3. His Bobness, Mississippi, from "Love And Theft", 2001.

Day 5: Natchez MS -> Clarksdale MS

 Back on the road again, though the first port of call was only a couple of miles down the road; the Forks Of The Road:

At one time the Forks of the Road was the second-largest slave market in the United States, trailing only New Orleans - Wikinaccurate

Natch this ended pretty sharpish when the place surrendered to the Union.

After having a mosey around the site it was Highway 61 Revisited, northbound to Vicksburg.  As you've probably guessed, Vicksburg have a v. interesting history ect etc.  Being situated on a bluff a hundred-odd metres above the Mississippi and thus sometimes compared with Gibraltar, it was kind of important, but fell to the Union after a 47-day siege in 1863.  The site is now maintained by the very splendid and worthwhile National Park Service, with a circular tour road which takes in far more detail than anyone except the buffest of Civil War buffs could ever absorb at one sitting.

Cannons (various)

Obelisk commemorating the US Navy's role in the proceedings

USS Cairo^[1]

The Cairo was sunk without loss of life by a mine in the Yazoo River in 1862 and was subsequently raised in 1964.  And clearly gave Space Karen the inspiration for the "styling" of the Tesla Cybertruck.

This was the only sighting of the Mississippi today:

if indeed it is the Mississippi and not the Yazoo or some other upstart waterway.

Back onto Highway 61 for a while before the official Great River Road has you take Mississippi Highway 1 through the Delta^[2].  Why this chunk of alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers is so named is a hard one to fathom. It's pan-flat, mostly agricultural and, in these days of mechanised farming, pretty empty.  But Thee Playlist ov Doom rose to the occasion by playing Please Read The Letter from the Jimmy Page/Robert Plant album "Walking Into Clarksdale".  Tomorrow: MOAR culture...

1. Usually pronounced "Kay-ro" coz it's named for the place where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi, not that one in Egypt.
2. The region where the Mississippi hits the Gulf of America Mexico is generally referred to as the "Mississippi River Delta" and plays little part in the history of the blues.

Day 4: Natchez MS

Today is a non-travelling day.  Hurrah!  Originally the first destination was to be the Old River Control Structure (see below) but while looking for it on the map I noticed this:

was only a couple of miles further on.  There's apparently 200-odd of these markers dotted around the south - mostly in Mississippi but some not. Shortly afterwards Thee Playlist ov Doom fired Honeydripper by Mr Guy and frequent harmonica-bothering collaborator Junior Wells at me.  Yay!

The Mississippi has historically been wont to change its course, leaving odd bits of some states on the opposite side of the river from the majority, because the state line runs down the centre of the river where it was in 18-mumble, not where it is now.  And if left to its own devices, it would likely forsake its current course and turn sharp right down the Old and Atchafalaya Rivers, because that's the shortest route to the sea.  A good deal of time, effort, and money has gone into the creation of the ports of Baton Rouge, South Louisiana and New Orleans so having the main flow of the river go somewhere else would definitely not enhance shareholder value.  Hence the US Army Corps of Engineers built the Old River Control Structure to keep the Mississippi on track and only letting a small proportion of its water take the scenic route.  Plus when the main river floods - which it is somewhat prone to doing - the excess can be diverted.

Lock allows boat traffic to pass between the Old River and the Mississippi

Main sluices

All the above is own the Louisiana side of the river; Natchez is connected to Vidalia LA by this rather fine pair of bridges:

In the shade at the Vidalia end

From the bluffs in Natchez

Time for a saunter around bits of Natchez.  The place was originally founded by the French, got rich on cotton^[1] and quickly surrendered to the Union during the Civil War, thus avoiding being blown to bits and leaving an extraordinary number of intact antebellum houses, such as this imposing pile:

Rosalie, used for a while as Ulysses S. Grant's HQ

Also intact is the area on the river bank itself:

Formerly a wretched hive of scum and villainy, now a wretched hive of bars, restaurants, B&B's and gift shops.

The place is also the setting of a Several of thrillers by lawyer-turned-novelist Greg Iles, mostly featuring lawyer-turned-novelist Penn Cage righting wrongs and overcoming a selection of deeply unpleasant baddies.  Mr Cage lived here:

Swiss-stylee architecture, it sez 'ere

In reality it's an AirBnB and is up for sale.  Roughly 1.75 million of your Earth dollars.  This vvvv:

The Turning Angel

also features in some, or more, of Mr Iles' books.  It supposedly appears to turn if you drive past it at night but I was unable to test this theory because I was there at lunchtime.

Last port of call before collapsing in a heap was "The Grand Village of the Natchez Indians".  Unlike for e.g. that place in North Dakota I visited three years ago there's not a lot to see save two and a half mounds, of which this is the most impressive:

Mound, Natchez, Saturday

Unsurprisingly, the French settlers behaved like utter bastards to the locals who ultimately had enough and killed a couple of hundred settlers utterly to DETH. This did not, in the long term, help very much as Wikinaccurate can tell you.

1. Before the Civil War Natchez reportedly contained more millionaires than any other town in USAnia save New York

Day 3: LaPlace LA -> Natchez MS

The story so far: You have learned from bitter experience that some motor-cars understand the concept of a .m3u playlist file while others do not.  Yes, Chrysler Corporation, I surely do mean you, with your making me spend an entire evening in Calgary renaming files because of that Shitbox Dodge.  Thus preparing one's holibobs listening has already involved:

• generating a playlist of the Stuffs I want to listen to, in the order I want them presented
• using this to copy the music files to a temporary location, where
• SCIENCE can be applied to rename each one with a four-digit prefix to its file name, such that the correct playing order is preserved, before
• copying them to a USB wossname

Which, as we have already seen, does not play nicely with the POB's stereo.  Reformatting the USB wossname and repopulating it didn't work either.  So the next task is this:

• copy all the music files to one's portable telephone; fortunately I had a copy on my laptop
• discover that Android apparently doesn't have a music player built in
• install VLC

VLC finds the music files and helpfully lists them in alphabetical order.  By song title, not by file name.  This is not what I want, but I know that VLC does understand playlists, ergo:

• use mp3tag to generate a playlist with all the tracks in the right order
• copy the playlist to the phone
• persuade the POB to register the presence of the VLC-equipped phone and the associated playlist, and actually start playing the damn' tunes
• but Soft!  Why does the playlist only show 17 songs instead of 1976?
• open the playlist file in notepad++ on the laptop, observe that the 18th song is Ljubav Se Ne Trži by Croatian purveyors of post-rock excellence Daliborovo Granje. Could it be that VLC doesn't like that beastly FOREIGN "ž"?
• move offending title to the end of the playlist
• save it
• copy it to the phone
• poke "refresh" until it shows the revised playlist, which now has 76 tracks
• repeat the above exercise removing:
• another "ž" (Laibach)
• … ellipses (Red Sparowes, Biffy Clyro)
• Japanese characters (Ningen Isu)
• Anything with "#" in the file name (Michael Nyman, Herbal Mixture, The Handsome Family, The Bevis Frond, Iggy & The Stooges)
• Creedence Clearwater Revival's version of Ninety-Nine And A Half.  No idea why this one causes indigestion
• until the phone finally concedes that the playlist contains 1957 songs

This takes many hours and put me in a bad mood, but…

This morning, success!  Bangin' choons ooze from the POB's Harman Kardons as intended.  No more being earwormed by John Fogerty banging on about having been born on the bayou which, as any fule know, he wasn't.  No bayous in Berkeley.  Let us away!

Back onto I-10 eastbound, there to get caught in the tail end of the New Orleans rush hour.  Escape onto LA-23, the Road to Nowhere, which runs parallel to the Mississippi some seventy miles south from Noo Awlins to almost, but not quite, the Gulf of America Mexico.  Not the most exciting road in the world - a mixture of petrochemical plant, trailer homes and RV parks catering to fishing types - but just beyond Venice we find:

A billboard plastered with stickers, Louisiana, Friday

That's the POB in the background, BTW.  It's the southernmost point in Louisiana that can be reached by road and, if you look around, you will not see the Mississippi, because they keep it hidden behind a levee.  In order to see it you must drive your Chevy^[1] to the levee, get out and walk.

Oh look! There it is!

They have to keep it there, y'see, because the area is flatter than a flat thing that's been recently ironed and thus prone to flooding.  Smart locals build their houses on stilts:

Even some of the trailer homes are twenty feet above ground level.  What it was like in these parts when Katrina came to call doesn't bear thinking about.

Because this is a dead end, there's no option but to retrace back to I-10 in New Orleans, and because the river is totally invisible, even from the bridge across it, retrace on I-10 back to Baton Rouge.  I-10 west of New Orleans is also on stilts, which makes the traveller ponder the logic of building a city on a patch of dirt mostly below sea level between an inlet of the Gulf of America Mexico and the continent's largest river.

I left I-10 at Baton Rouge and after some inconsequential other roads reached the Blues Highway.  US-61.  No sign of God, Abraham or Louis the King, but because it runs all the way to Duluth MN^[2], maybe they're up that end.  Down here it's a very quiet dual carriageway through the woods and after the summer we BRITONS have had all this greenery is a bit unexpected.

And so to Natchez, which rhymes with "matches" so as not to be mistaken for a Mexican or something.  It hav a very interesting history if you ae interested in hist. wich few boys are, but we shall go into that tomorrow because I'm here two nights and I'm tired.

1. Other vehicles are available
2. His Bobness was born there; back then Highway 61 went all the way to the Canadian border

Day 2: Fort Worth TX -> LaPlace LA

 Mr Larrington done have a genius in the middle of the night and, after some prodding of Teh Intarwebs, discovers that yes, it *is* possible to download the errant North America maps from Garmin and overwrite the Europe map currently installed in Emily's little head-branez.  It's probably no cheaper than buying a whole new gadget but it does avoid having to find my way to Walmart and persuading them to allow me to purchase the thing, since click'n'collect in these parts requires a credit card with a USAnian billing address which in my case I have not got.  Clicky, clicky, hand over money, downloading, installing...  This had better work...

Power on device, poke "Favourites", tell Emily to take me to the Battle Mountain Super 8. She calculates the route.  Hurrah!

So the next task for the POB's little elektronik brane is to play the tunes which I have lovingly copied to a USB stick.  This is not rocket surgery.  Even Transit vans can do it these days.  Snag.  Everything is USB-C these days and that includes the USB 'oles in the POB.  Is my USB stick USB-C?  Why, no!  No, it is not.  But I have anna dapter.  Plug stick into one end and other end into car.  Result?  Nothing.  Which meant driving the thick end of five hundred miles with no music, because USAnian radio is too ghastly to contemplate.  Bah!

Little to report today.  The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is enormous and even with the aid of freeways takes an age to escape but eventually I-20 and I found each other and east I did go.  Almost, but not quite as far as Shreveport LA, because you can bypass Shreveport and get to I-49 southbound with little fuss or bother.  Following I-49 to its logical conclusion would have you emerge on I-10 but Emily decided to take a shortcut across the Louisiana equivalent of The Fens, which differ from the East Anglian version in that the principle crops are (I think) sugar cane and billboards for personal injury lawyers instead of turnips.

This carries US-190 over the Atchafalaya River at Krotz Springs LA

The bridge that carries I-10 over the Mighty Mississippi is better than this one but I had to go over it.  At 4 mph.  Happily the stau cleared for the last 50 miles to here.  This evening's tasks include copying the music files onto my phone, that it can send them to the POB's stereo via the medium of the Devil's Lesser Radio ^[1] and, as suggested by Teh Intarwebs, reformatting the offending USB stick as NTFS instead of FAT32 and copying the music files over again.  Which takes ages.  Still, at least I have Tea.

1. Bluetooth, obv.

Day 1: Larrington Towers -> Fort Worth TX

As you can probably deduce from the post heading I have successfully infiltrated USAnia.  And as you can probably deduce from the date of this post I am here well ahead of the WHPSC in Battle Mountain.  Putting two and two together: road trip.  This year the intention is to follow the Great River Road, which tracks the Mighty Mississippi, and a swift glance at the Mappe will shew that the middle of Texas is bloody miles away from the aforementioned river.  However, BRITISH Airways' direct flight to New Orleans is scheduled to arrive at eleven o'clock at night.  This is sub-optimal.  Houston is nearer, but there are good climate-related reasons why my chum Danny Guthrie chooses to absent himself from Houston every summer.  Not that this bit of TX is much better.  So...

My usual method of getting to LHR, viz. bus to 'stow Central, Queen Vic line, change at Finsbury Park and twiddle my thumbs for a million stops on the Piccallili Line out to Thiefrow was banjaxed this year by Transport for London closing the latter for three days this week as part of their scheme to introduce the long-overdue new rolling stock.  But soft!  The Weaver Line - part of the Overground of London's famous London, also goes from 'stow Central to Liverpool Street, where one can get that Elizabeth Line, that they have now, to Heathrow instead.  And with low cunning I timed things to get on the Lizzy Line after 9 am so could use my Old Git Oyster Card.  Not all Heathrow trains go to T5 but you can bail out at T2/3 and hop the Heathrow Express the rest of the way.  Which is nice.

Uneventful check-in, security, little clockwork train and sitting around at Gate C64 until The Man permits me to board the Shiny Metal Birb, another of those double-decker A380 contraptions.  World Traveller Plus cabin half-empty, but I CBA to move one row forward because there's quite enough legroom as it is.  Went to sleep somewhere west of Ireland and woke up crossing the Canada/US border above Sault St Marie.

Did the MPC app thing as recommended by my grate frend Arnold Ligtvoet last year only to discover that the lane, MPC users for the use of, was closed so had to queue with the uninitiated and other riff-raff.  Relative painless compared with SFO in 2022 thobut.  Bus to the Rental Car Center, pick up shiny motorcar, hereinafter referred to as The Pikey Old Beemer or POB for short, plug in Emily the TwatNav, exit the car park and got told in no uncertain terms that route calculation was not on the agenda.  Subsequent faffage indicates that she's lost interest in reading the expensive North America map on the SD card that plugs into her tummy, so I had to persuade my phone to shake hands with the POB's internal electronic wizardry and direct me here.  Doing this for the rest of the trip is not an option because data roaming costs an assortment of marketable limbs so the first item on tomorrow's agenda is to pop down to the Walmart a mile or so away and buy a replacement TwatNav chiz.

Day The Rest Of It: SFO -> Larrington Towers

For completeness sake: foul dinner, fitful sleep, missed breakfast.  First recognisable landmark on final approach the London Eye, followed by Buck House, the Albert Hall, Hammersmith Odeon and Brentford Community Stadium.

But soft! what is this writ upon a TfL noticeboard at the entrance to the tube station?  "Victoria Line: severe delays".  Changing at Finsbury Park the first three or four trains on the Queen Vic Line to 'stow Central were so rammed that I didn't even try to board.  And on arriving at 'stow Central it very much appeared that the useless workshy twats employed by Thames Water to dig up Selborne Road did not finish the job by September 5th as promised, no, there is still a big 'ole in the road and consequently no access for buses.  Traipse round the corner and praise be! A W15 empty and waiting because driver change.  Hurrah.

Larrington Towers was exactly where and how I left it save that Big Spiders have moved mob-handed into the front yard.  Swift foray up the road for emergency milk and Indian takeaway, that I might blast the cold germs with chicken tikka mirchi wala and garlic fried pilau rice while watching the Italian Grand Prix highlights.

Except that the berks at Channel 4 have 1. b0rked Series Link on the F1 Stuffs so the Magic Memory Boxes didn't record it and c) highlights aren't available on their poxy webshite either.  Ten minutes of YouTube video is a piss-poor substitute sort it out u muppets 😠

Day 15: Paso Robles CA -> SFO

 Paso Robles lies on US-101.  San Francisco International Airport also lies on US-101, a tad under two hundred miles to the north.  Ergo navigation is not an issue.  However, thee Nissan ov Doom told me I had two hundred miles of petril to empty and, because I didn’t wish to fanny about hunting for a petril station not operated by robdogs anywhere near the airport I did that “pay upfront to bring it back empty” thing.  Eight miles-worth of petril seemed a bit of a small margin.

US-101 is a multi-lane highway, thobut, and rarely came to a complete standstill and because I was not in any great hurry I deposited thee Nissan ov Doom back with Mr Hertz with 48 miles to empty.  Said vehicle also has a feature whereby you can save the petril consumption figure from the last bit of driving you did.  The saved one reads 99.9 mpg, this being the descent from Whitney Portal back to Lone Pine yesterday 🤣

With US-101 suffering a dearth of rest areas at which to waste time I got back to SFO two hours before thee Nissan ov Doom was due to be returned to its owner of record.  And seven hours before Mr Branson’s Shiny Plastic Birb is due to waft me back over the Stormy North Atlantic to the land where roundabouts live in fear of Gam-gams with tins of paint.  Though I know from experience that there's a bench under the little clockwork train station at the Rental Car Center (sic) where you can sit in the sun all afternoon if need be.

So that’s what I did.  Now sitting at Gate A2 where there is, as yet, no æroplane parked.  Hopefully the driver will keep his foot down again because changing at Finsbury Park will not be fun if the Queen Vic is jammed to the rafters…

Day 14: Lone Pine CA -> Paso Robles CA

 One of these Lofty Peaks is Mount Whitney.  Most likely the highest one.

Thee Nissan ov Doom is the one on the right

If you drive back into Lone Pine a bit and then turn right you will find yourself on Whitney Portal Road which - unsurprisingly - goes to Whitney Portal.  This being the trailhead for going to the summit of - yep - Mount Whitney.  The road climbs approximately four and a half thousand feet in ten miles and would make a wik summit finish for a bike race if there was room at the top for all the Stuffs that traditionally accompany such events.  Which there isn't.  Instead there's all this lot:

This 'ere is the Los Angeles Aqueduct, of which we spoke yesterday

On descending I returned to US-395, intending to feed the motor-car with petril at the Chevron on the way out of town, but it didn't like my cards so sod 'em.  So I decided that the Mobil in Olancha would get my custom.  The problem here being that Caltrans has bypassed Olancha with a new bit of the 395 which the satnav doesn't know about and on which the aforementioned Caltrans has utterly failed to put any signs point to, well, Olancha.  Just DETH Valley, which is a hundred miles away.  Anyway, I found it.

On down 395 until there's a fork in the road.  395 wanders off into the desert towards San Bernardino while CA-14 heads right towards LA.  I do not wish to go to LA, but fortunately CA-178 saves me from such a fate and heads over Walker Pass, past loads of Joshua trees and the odd coyote, into the valley of the Kern River towards Bakersfield, past Lake Isabella.

Oh, wait!  Wrong Isabella.  That one is Toby Lee's grilf Isabella Coulstock.

Unfortunately The Man had closed the 178 about 13 miles past the end of said lake, requiring a U-turn and a diversion onto CA-155.  Now CA-155 west of Wofford Heights has more twists and turns than a twisty-turny thing, as well as some steep climbs and equally steep descents.  Which confused thee Nissan ov Doom no end, because instead of a regular automatic gearbox it has a continuously-variable transmission programmed by the pencil-necked desk jockeys at Nissan to imitate regular automatic gearbox.  Which works OK on city streets and motorways but is spectacularly hopeless on a road like CA-155.  Sort it out u muppets!

Finally I got directed onto a different and less twisty-turny road which eventually turned into CA-46, leading straight across the flatlands of California's Central Valley.  This is mostly devoted to agribiz, albeit that large chunks of it seem to be devoted to raising healthy crops of dirt, with a side order of oil.

Nodding donkeys in the Central Valley

And it was stinking hot - like 38 Celsius - and thee Nissan ov Doom unilaterally decided that the speed limit was 85 mph.  Which it isn't.  Nowhere in USAnia save one toll road in Texas has a speed limit that high.  Anyway, I am now in Paso Robles, which is at the centre of a wine-making region and consequently has no milk for sale in containers of less that four pints.  Bah!

Day 13: Battle Mountain NV -> Lone Pine CA

Most of the holdouts at the Super 8 had departed by the time I emerged yawning and blinking from my pit this morning: Larry, Peter & John J, Bill and Niklas.  Jun and Danny then interrupted my meagre breakfast as they too departed, which left just me and Joyce.  She had event busines to attend to in town; I did not and took off southwards in the general direction of south.  NV-305, US-50, NV-361, US-95, NV-360 and US-6 with scarcely any traffic and passing handful of settlements that make Battle Mountain look like New York City: Cold Springs, Middlegate, Gabbs, Luning, Mina, Benton and Chalfant.  Through scenery identical to that around Battle Mountain, viz. mountains and valleys.  With added stroopwafels, for I had been hoarding the packet given to me by the estimable Ligtvoets for just this occasion; my biscuity needs in Battle Mountain having been largely filled by the cookies that are a near 24/7 feature of the Super 8 lobby.

Breakfast Elevenses of Champions, Nevada, Monday

Entering California nothing very much changes except being waved through the Agricultural Inspection Station on the state line.

Crossing into California on US-6

Until, that is, I reached US-395 at Bishop.  Dual carriageway.  Traffic lights and - gasp - traffic.  US-395 in this part of the world runs down the Owens Valley between the White Mountains to the east and the lofty, though not SNO-capped, peaks of the Sierra Nevada to the west.

Lofty peaks of the Sierra Nevada

Rare bit of Owens Valley water that hasn't been diverted to LA

The Owens Valley hav a very interesting history if you are interested in hist. which few boys are.  The white man moved in and displaced the locals around 1870 and turned the place into a prosperous agricultural region thanks to the Owens River.  Until the opening overs of the twentieth century, that is, when the burgeoning city of Los Angeles decided that the Owens River would make a perfect water supply, the facts of a 200 mile separation and a GBFO mountain range notwithstanding.  Thus was built the Los Angeles Aqueduct and by divers more or less snidey means LA collared the water rights in the valley and turned the endorheic Owens Lake into

the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States, and has been known since at least the 1990s as a pervasive source of fine alkaline dust containing harmful levels of particulates and chemicals

This, and much more, is covered in Marc Reisner's book Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water which this Unit commends to anyone interested in why much of the western USA looks the way it does.

Lone Pine lies sixty-odd miles south of Bishop and is at the foot of Mount Whitney, which is the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.  Not much else to add really, except that

1. there are small bats doing Bat Stuffs above the motel car park, and
2. my four-port USB hub inexplicably stopped working when I unplugged the camera from it this afternoon, and
3. the local horriblemarket charges $2.79 for a 12 fl. oz. bottle of milk, the next size up is 4 US pints and I didn't bring my vacuum flask this year because:

• I wasn't doing much travelling, and
• I couldn't find the lid