Canyons, ditches, deserts and tea

Blimey. It seems an age since Reno. We left town as soon as we were able, and put The Car through a big test right away - up and over three mighty passes over the Sierra Nevada, past Lake Tahoe, and back into California for the Yosemite National Park. Despite stopping to gawk at an amazing wild fire near Walker, CA., we got to Lee Vining, the gateway town for Yosemite, a little earlier than expected, so we took a detour to Bodie. Bodie is a former gold rush town, long since abandoned, and now left as a ghost town and state park. The last three miles of the road up there were unpaved, and, I suspect, driven a little too fast. When we returned to the car, we only made it over the first hill before the engine cut out. We couldn't see anything obvious, so I jogged back to fetch a park ranger. He had no better idea, so we called the AAA for our second tow in 24 hours. We had an hour or so to kill, but the eerie scrub lands of a ghost town at sundown proved a far more pleasant place to be stuck than Reno - by the time Shelly from Lee Vining had shown up only the mossies had disturbed our peace.

It was too late for a hotel - Lee Vining gets full pretty fast - so we camped out in the car, feasting from the fridge at the local Chevron garage. We hadn't been too concerned about the car this time - it was probably something very simple - and sure enough, by morning, the mechanic was able to get us on the road simply by finding the fuel cut-off switch (buried deep in the boot under bags and carpet) which the vibrating road had triggered. We skirted Lake Mono and made for Yosemite. The park is awe-inspiring, particularly the valley, which features kilometer-tall granite cliffs, a 200 metre waterfall, and about as much verdant beauty as two tired Englishmen could stand. We pressed on, lunching at the Mammoth Falls ski resort before taking on the trip we'd been dreading making in The Car - down out of the mountains, back towards the Nevada border, across Death Valley, and up to Vegas.

We had agreed to cross Death Valley at night, so no pictures, I'm afraid, but it made for a far more memorable trip. For starters, there was no-one else there - we saw a few bikers crossing the other way as the sun went down, but the sky was darkening as we made the main valley floor and we were undisturbed until we made the other side. At midnight it was 45 degrees C, an absurd temperature on a cloudless night, and we walked out across the salt pan to the lowest point in the 'States (and the Western Hemisphere), Badwater, at -85 metres. In the sky was Saturn, so bright that it cast our shadows on the hexagonal salt crystals, which with the immense, echoing valley walls and the utter dryness of the air, helped complete this surreal of moments.

A long drive out of the other side (via the always-amusing Parhump, NV) and all of a sudden, Las Vegas was on the horizon, glowing, blazing into the desert night. I popped Elvis on the CD player (thanks for the CD, Jenn!) and cruised onto the strip. I was in my element - and yes, shitheap though it is, The Car gets a LOT of female attention - but it was 4.30am, and Ed was too knackered to enjoy it, so we headed downtown to the budget motels of Fremont street and our first bed since Reno.

Daylight and Vegas really don't mix. For one, it's absurdly hot, but mostly it just doesn't have the crazed, wild-eyed explosion of neon, drunkenness and stupidity that sells it so strongly as a city. I took a laundry and internet day, and returned to find Ed waking up just before sundown. We hit the town, drove, walked, fluttered, but for some reason failed to engage with the Vegas vibe. Perhaps it was sobriety, but for some reason the place never really clicked. We popped into a dozen or so big casinos and a handful of the smaller ones, but by the time we wanted a game of poker, most of the poker rooms had closed. Yes, it was 4am on a Monday morning, but still, this is supposed to be Vegas, right? Still, my main reason for even going to the city was the cruise down the strip, and however many times we did that, it just did not get old.

Bright and early, then, out of town, for a meandering cruise North around Lake Mead, being tourists for the day. The Grand Canyon was the eventual target, but we had to spend the night in Kanab first, where we ate astonishingly well after a long day in the sun. We made the Canyon by 10am the following day, our longer route to the North Rim being rewarded by the relative solitude of the experience and views unfamiliar from photos that tend to be from the more developed South side. It took me a while - conditioned, perhaps by overfamiliarity and expectation - but by the third drive and trek to the rim, I finally got it, and it was quite overwhelming. It was the wind, I think, that did it - whipping along the 130 mile canyon, hot, then up into our faces as we perched dizzyingly on the edge.

The Zion National Park was our next stop - and was somehow even more inspirational. A tight gorge carved out of sandstone, but unlike the Grand Canyon, this was covered in trees, far more varied in colour and erosion style, and had a road cut right into the side, making for an incredible drive. We scrambled up a cliff on Checkerboard Mesa to watch the sun go down before kicking on again into the Navajo nation and our next adventure.

The Car, by the way, was handling all of this magnificently. We are putting in two or three 150+ mile trips a day, and since Lee Vining, we haven't had a whimper out of her - which made what happened next all the more amusing. We'd hit a Navajo town called Kayente over the Utah border, 20-odd miles from Monument Valley, which I wanted to see at dawn. We'd done a lot of driving that day, were knackered, and realised that we hadn't eaten. No restaurants, so we only had fast food to choose from. I'm still not completely sure how it happened, but one second we were pulling into a drive-thru, and the next, Ed (on his thirtieth birthday, no less) had spun the wheel left and we were sliding off the road, nose and driver's side first, into a six-foot, sandy ditch. We were lurched up at a sickening angle, and with no chance of shifting The Car. It was just bizarre. I clambered out and jumped the four feet down to the ground, checked that we weren't spewing fuel, and started laughing immediately. After snapping a few photos I walked into the Burger King.

"Can I help you?"
"Yes," I replied, "do you have a truck?"

The Navajo Nation PD showed up. Ed was on edge - he had possibly, after all, just totalled The Car - but I just could not stop laughing, taking photos, horsing around with the policewoman, and generally having the time of my life. If this were to be how the trip ended, at least it would make for a good story - not to mention a hell of a journey back to the nearest city. I wandered off for some food to stop the police from searching me for drugs, and by the time I'd got back, a passing motorist had rigged us up for a tow. A heave and a yank and a tug and a press and a push and we were out. Incredibly, only the frame had been scratched - out precious fluids were intact, and if anything it seemed to have straightened out the alignment of the front axle.

Ed was now laughing as hysterically as I, so, far too late for accommodation, we trundled up the road with our Sonic double cheeseburgers to find a quiet spot near Monument Valley to lay up in the car. It was warm, so we left the roof open and dozed under a million stars. A mistake, as it turned out - a dust storm in the night coated us, The Car, and crucially, its CD player in a gritty film of sand.

So, the current list of things that have gone wrong with the car stands at:

• Radiator (needed replacing at purchase)
• Tie Rod (ditto)
• Battery cable (ditto)
• Brake booster (ditto)
• Oil filter (ditto)
• Three new tyres (ditto)
• Power steering hose (fixed roadside by passing mechanic)
• Leaky transmission (fixed in Reno)
• Torque converter (broken by above - replaced in Reno)
• U-joints on rear driveshaft (powdered - replaced in Reno)
• Starter motor (knackered - replaced in Reno)
• Dead engine (false alarm - fixed with a button press)
• Driven into ditch (no damage)
• Failed hydraulic cable on roof (heat- and dryness-damaged cable; conversion now manual)
• CD player (died in a sandstorm)

And still I love it more...

Oh, and a quick note on food. On the whole, we've eaten fairly well. On the most part we eat one American-sized meal per day, and snack on fruit and cereal bar the rest of the time. It is the land of calorific plenty. Breakfast tends to be the immovable feast, and this morning I decided that I'd been too long without a cup of tea. The problem with tea in the US is that they bring you hot water and some teabags - clearly useless, if you're drinking black tea. I gently pointed this out as I gave my order, and got back... a cup of very recently boiled water and a very happy-looking waitress. I apologised, but politely suggested, and then insisted, they just let me make it myself in the kitchen. I gave a short tutorial to the clearly uninterested kiitchen staff - boiling water onto the bag, folks! - and sure enough, came away with the best tea I've had since Heathrow. My adventures with waiting staff continue. I keep asking for smaller portions, and they keep staring at me as if I had leprosy.

Back to the trip; Monument Valley is the classic Western backdrop - wide open scrub land punctured by colossal wind-eroded mesas, buttes, and chimney stacks of rock. Roasted red by dawn, nothing blows the cobwebs away like it. A few dozen miles further, we saw yet more iconic geology - the Mexican Hat balancing rock and the stunning Goosenecks.

Colorado was upon us, but, with most of a day to kill we took a 200-mile detour up to the eye-popping valleys of Telluride and Silverton, over four sizable passes which took us well up to the snowline - The Car reaching the highest point of its journey at 11,075ft before the coast back down to Durango, the hip student and snowboarding town that serves as the centre of civilisation in this corner of the world, and from where I write this diary.

The drive, once again was stunning - almost all of it has been, from ocean to forests to rivers to gorges to mountains to high plains to badlands to lakes to deserts - but to run from sandstorm to flurries of snow in one day felt quite magical. I'm concerned that we've seen all the really interesting landscape we're going to - after Santa Fe we'll be crossing the great plains into Northern Texas - and we face almost a thousand miles in a straight line of flat, wide farms and oilfields; but at least it's going to be downhill.