California Dreaming: Another Bonkers Road Trip - The Scented Bit: Part 1

I realise it is not ideal to report on olfactory memories five weeks after the event, but when you are endowed with a nose as rudimentary and prone to abrupt volte-faces as mine (or volte-nez, perhaps, since we are speaking of a single facial feature), it may make less difference than you might imagine. I still have the usual clutch of fragrance blotters (all smelling identically of "Eau de Card At The Bottom Of The Handbag"), which may serve as useful reminders of what I smelt, if not of what what I smelt smelt of.

So back in early December, on my outward journey to the States, I made a beeline for the duty free at Birmingham airport. It must be said though that my M.O. in duty frees has changed markedly since the early days of "sudden onset perfume mania", when I vividly remember spraying up to 10 perfumes on all available limb space in my febrile eagerness to try a whole clutch of things that were new or unfamiliar to me. Fast forward two years or so, and I might test just one scent on skin, if that. This is mainly because I have sampled the "back catalogue" of most designer houses now, and while I am open to trying the latest releases, it is on a much more selective basis than before. Just as doughnuts are "not worth the calories" in my book, by the same token I consider many designer scents with a high potential to disappoint not worth a slot on the precious runway of my forearm.

But one scent made the cut that day, Vivienne Westwood's Naughty Alice. I had more or less tuned out to the Vivienne Westwood range ever since an offputting trial of Boudoir in June 2008. In the notebook I kept at the time, documenting my early sniffing experiences, I described Boudoir as "a huge, peppery, spicy, sweet, pyrotechnic powderfest, that catches you offguard with a shocking blast of civet as you stand there open-mouthed, watching the fireworks." I gave it a dismissive two stars out of a possible five. But that was then, and my taste has changed so much in the past two and a half years that I decided to give Naughty Alice a prime site spritz, and am glad I did.

My first thought was that it reminded me of Flower By Kenzo Oriental, but without the robust woody base. My second thought was that Naughty Alice smelt exactly as I had hoped YSL Parisienne would smell, rather than the "disgruntled purple talc" it actually smells of. And it also reminded me slightly of a rosier and more biddable version of Balenciaga Paris, Parisienne's brainy and standoffish older sister. It was only when I got home a fortnight later, and scurried to the Interweb to locate note listings for the scents in question, that I realised there was a common theme of rose + violet + musk in the Kenzo, Parisienne and Naughty Alice - and violet and musk in Paris. I didn't detect the ylang ylang in Naughty Alice, but as a card-carrying "ylangoholic" I may have been reeled in by the fragrance equivalent of those high pitched whistles audible only to Alsatians and knots of disaffected teenagers loitering outside supermarkets.

NAUGHTY ALICE

Notes: Rose, Violet, Ylang Ylang, Powdery Notes, Musk, Oriental Notes

Following this fairly low key testing session at the airport, the next perfume event of note was just two days into the trip, when I hooked up with Katie Puckrik at a shopping mall north of San Diego on 8th December. I was in between appointments in the area, while Katie had come straight from recording two TV interviews on Fox San Diego on the subject of scents to wear to holiday parties or to give as gifts. It was plucky of her to agree to meet, I thought, for she knows I have been stalking her hairdo (with very mixed results) for some time now: with hindsight, my recent post on the subject here seems imbued with a certain dramatic irony...

So anyway, I arrived at the perfume counter in Nordstrom's - a failsafe rendez-vous spot, we figured! - with a few minutes to spare, time enough to recce the fixture and take a few photos. As soon as Katie arrived, we headed out into the brilliant sunshine. It was warm enough to sit outside at a pavement cafe, and the butternut squash soup we both ordered came positively bejewelled with dried cranberries as well as pumpkin seeds and little bits of nuts, a novel touch serving as yet another example of Californian fusion cuisine!

I sniffed the vestiges of the new FM Portrait of a Lady on Katie's pashmina and handed over a small decant of Floris Snow Rose for her to try later. For now though, Katie proceeded to sniff Belle D'Opium on my wrist and we puzzled over how "Belle Dope" could have lost the "significant incense and resinous mystery" I had enjoyed on first discovering it in Germany in September, and morphed into this juvenile, sub-Chinatown fruitchouli number we were undeniably smelling on my arm now. At the time, I concluded that Climate Change was at the bottom of this discrepancy, and that the incense note must only emerge in cold weather, but I have since worn Belle Dope in bitter conditions back home, and the resinous mystery continues to elude me...

I did wonder whether my respect for Katie's critical opinion could possibly have had some kind of effect on my nasal receptors, a bit like the time I ordered lime ice cream on holiday as a child and was given pistachio by mistake. To avoid waste or the embarrassment of sending the dish back, my father persuaded me that the ice cream was lime after all, and I ate it all up with relish, only to have him tell me afterwards that it had been pistachio all along, incorrigible Svengali-esque hoaxster that he was! Now I say "a bit like", because obviously Katie was not trying to pull the wool over my nose - the similarity lies in the fact that the perfume smelled as I believed it should smell, and probably does do to most people. Anyway, these are deep psychological waters, and we might need the combined skills of Luca Turin, David Blane and Paul McKenna to determine exactly what is going on here.

After lunch, we wandered in a happily aimless fashion around the mall, pausing in The Body Shop to sample Love Etc, a Dominique Ropion creation aimed at the teen market, along with Moroccan Rose, Neroli Jasmine and that old stalwart, White Musk! And I stepped for the very first time inside a branch of Bath & Body Works, but before the sales assistant could intercept us to give us her spiel about the special offers on scented candles, we had stepped outside again sharpish, as the sickly stench was overpowering. And soon, after browsing in a few more stores, and shooting the breeze on topics as diverse as the Hampton Inn hotel chain, windmills and my brother's eyebrows, it was time for us to go out separate ways.

And while I didn't get the hookah accord this time in Belle Dope - and have failed to register the merest wisp of incense ever since - there was something about the incongruously glorious weather (as Mr Bonkers shivered back home in temperatures of -10 C), and the parallel strangeness of meeting Katie in the middle of my working day, which combined to produce a feeling of pleasant discombobulation. The sort of pleasant discombobulation that usually comes from smoking - and smoking something a little less innocuous than tobacco at that...

Coming up in Parts 2 & 3: visits to Strange Invisible Perfumes, The Scent Bar and Ajne...


Photo of San Diego from foreclosurerepohomes.com, photo of Naughty Alice from echemist.co.uk, photos of Nordstrom, Westfield UTC mall and Katie Puckrik my own, photo of woman relaxing with a hookah from shoponline2011.com

Report Writing Rabbit Hole...

I am just coming up for air following a very strenuous - or, as Mr Bonkers would call it - an "exhaustifying" four day stint analysing the findings from my recent US work project. The last, perfume-themed(!) instalment in the California Dreaming series follows shortly.

And meanwhile here is a fine display of empathy on the part of one of my cacti - or "pathetic fallacy" as I believe it is correctly known. But there again, I've been so busy and distracted lately...it may just need a drink.

California Dreaming: Another Bonkers Road Trip - The Travel Bit: Part 3

I am thinking it is a good job I have been using different photos for each of these travel posts, because the titles are starting to look a bit samey. And should anyone be wondering why I called the series "California Dreaming", the answer is twofold. Firstly, the nature of the project was quite surreal - the companies I visited ranged from wind farm operators as featured in Part 2, to municipal waste water treatment plants, to an array of manufacturers of all manner of weird and wonderful things. One of them even made "arrays"(!), fashioned out of "epitaxially grown wafers", very possibly involving silicon, given the shiny-looking facade of the plant. Something tells me that I will remember these wafers for many years to come, even though I wouldn't recognise one if it fell on my head - or my tongue?

Then the other reason the trip felt surreal is because it was December, yet the weather was mostly hot and sunny, with blue skies and wraparound vistas of palm trees. I had the sensation of being on a film set a lot of the time, indeed I just learnt last night, whilst watching the first episode of America's Next Top Model (Cycle 15), that I WAS on a film set. The models' communal house was right on Venice Beach, a couple of doors down from the hotel where I holed up for the first weekend. So, you know, I came this close to being in America's Top Model! Well, maybe not - I am not nearly bitchy enough to win... ; - ) But on to the matter in hand.

The food and drink

The dearth of indigenous tea-brewing skills in the state - or indeed, the country as a whole(!) - has already been documented and discussed in Part 1.

Moving on to the local food, Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary of Californian cuisine:

"..a style of cuisine marked by an interest in 'fusion' – integrating disparate cooking styles and ingredients – and in the use of freshly prepared local ingredients. The food is typically prepared with strong attention to presentation."

I think of California and I think of jumbo shrimp, mango salad, sprouts, blueberry muffins, seared tuna, jalapeno peppers, tofu, wild rice, sushi, avocado, bell peppers, all that type of thing. It is pretty healthy food on the whole, and Californians have a healthy attitude to it and an "Eat Responsibly" bumper sticker to match.

However, I ended up eating in a branch of Denny's most nights, a chain of diners offering pretty homogeneous menus across the US. My hotels were invariably on out of town retail parks, and if you didn't fancy driving somewhere to eat, Denny's was often the only option. One night in the greater LA area, fancying a change from the chain's homely fare, I nearly stumbled into a steakhouse right across the road from my hotel, called "Tony's Spunky Steer". Then I noticed the blackout blinds in every window... So, worrying that there might be quite a different type of meat on offer, I high-tailed it back to the nearest Denny's. I just thought to check on Tripadvisor, and it was a regular steakhouse after all! Boo!

Now Denny's is best known for its All-American breakfasts, and my "gut feel" told me that to eat there in the evening would have a bit of a loser feel about it. The interior is too plain and plasticky, the lighting too bright. In short, too much of a cafeteria ambience. And since when did red go particularly well with yellow, (current colour blocking trend notwithstanding)? A cursory trawl of the Internet only serves to confirm my impression - take the title of this thread from epinions.com:

"Denny's - Great for breakfast, OK for lunch, Avoid for dinner."

But beggars can't be choosers, so I persisted in going there for dinner, and was (in fairness) quite pleasantly surprised. The sizzling barbecued chicken and the spicy tilapia in a skillet were both winners, and I had them more than once. You can sort of tell from the illustrations which dishes might be a bit sad and school dinnerish, and there were a few...

But as well as the recurring hot tea issue, I had other drinks problems at Denny's. Note the careful use of the plural. Firstly, what's with the iced water? Or more correctly, giant tumblers of ice, with a dash of water. If I want to bump my nose continuously on large frozen objects, I'll come back in the next life as a seal. At least the ice tumblers are free, as the Weights and Measures people would have a field day with them otherwise!

And there is another thing you need to know about Denny's: some of them are "dry" - as in not serving alcohol - while others are not. Then some of them are not dry, but think they are, like the branch in Fresno, where they said they didn't serve alcohol. I pointed to the Budweiser decal on the window. "Well we have beer and wine?" to which I replied: "Beer and wine will do nicely, thank you."

And there again you can be in a branch of Denny's, which knows it is licensed to serve alcohol, and still encounter problems, like the one which asked me for photo-ID when I tried to order a bottle of Corona. "Photo-ID?" I queried incredulously, "Why on earth do you need to see my photo-ID?" "Ah well" explained the waitress in a sombre tone, "we've had trouble with the authorities to do with the Protection of Minors legislation and we have to follow the rules." "Protection of Minors?" I answered, my voice quavering with exasperation. "Do you see this menu here for Seniors? Smaller portions for the 55 and overs? A few years and I'll be eligible for that menu - and you want to see my ID???"

This prompted the waitress to summon the Manager, who reiterated the rules, before inquiring: "So how many are you planning to drink?" I thought of coming out with some smart alec reply like: "Oh, just a dozen or so, enough to get totally rat arsed, before running amok and smashing the joint up", but instead replied meekly: "How about one?" I am pleased to report that the Manager waived the rules and I got my beer.

But my finest stunt in a Denny's was picking up a 20-something airforce mechanic in a remote village in the desert. No, I will rephrase that - I did nothing of the sort - he merely struck up conversation with me from the next booth, and after we had both finished our meals, cordially invited me to accompany him to find a bar (this was a dry Denny's, to go with the local terrain).

Reader, I declined, pleading paperwork, but thinking that that would be too much excitement on a school night, while my inner Health & Safety Representative said I shouldn't be getting into any strange men's cars whom I had only known long enough for them to eat a customised French Toast grand slam. My heart, on the other hand, said he was a perfectly decent young man and a credit to his country, and the innocent invitation had been prompted by the inevitable loneliness that comes with chronic solo dining.

When I told Mr Bonkers about this encounter, he seemed quite proud of me for showing that I can still pull someone young enough to be my son. A feat even more impressive when you factor in the American Eagle Outfitters cable knit sweater and 9 yr old boot leg jeans - an ensemble strictly confined to in-home comfort wear (which of course Denny's had more or less become by that point : - ) ). And the non-deterrent effect of the outfit reminds me in turn of the time I was mistaken for a hooker down by the Hudson River while wearing a full length camel coat and aran bobble hat.

Not that I did "pull", you understand. Oh, perhaps I should have gone after all...

What else is there to report on on the food front? Oh yes, the breakfasts, which were sometimes but not always included in the room rate. The more I sampled, the less I minded their absence. A traditional nasty is scrambled egg that has been slumped under its steel dome since 6.30am. By the time you come down to breakfast it is stone cold and leaching a colourless fluid – you suddenly remember the word “albumen” from Third Form biology lessons, and wish you hadn’t. Up there with the cold egg is cold, blackened - and oddly frilly - streaky bacon, along with the concrete Frisbees that pass for bagels, runny grape jelly and garish Froot Loops, which cascade out of Perspex towers in a sugary avalanche.

It wasn't till week two that I dared interact with a waffle iron: you dispense the batter into a cup, pour it into the iron, close it and turn it to a strange angle - imagine the hands on a clock showing 10 past 7 and you will get the general idea. My first and only attempt at waffle making produced a limp circle still molten in one quadrant, which rather put me off the rest.

In total contrast to all of the above, I did manage to sample true Californian cuisine in the 36 hours I spent in Venice Beach: I had breakfast twice at the Rose Cafe, a favourite haunt of real Venetians, who bound in as early as 8am, gleaming with sweat from their morning run - or less gleaming, but with a rolled up yoga mat tucked under one arm. At the Rose cafe they serve a variety of snacks and salads along the lines I mentioned above, with a mind boggling "array" of permutations.

I also ate out one night at a vegan restaurant, where the waiters hug you on the way out, and come and sit next to you to help you make your selection. Even with the limited menu on offer, it was just as well they did, as the restaurant was in near total darkness. This may have been to save energy or to create a tranquil, womb-like ambience - it was hard to tell. In the end I plumped for the special - a cashew nut korma with pitta and salad, washed down with pomegranate juice. (I thought I would go a bit wild - it was a Friday night, after all.) The waiter pressed me to a complimentary boule of rose petal ice cream. I demurred, then crumbled - and it was delicious. He was from Poland, as it turned out, and I told him I knew a few Polish words, including the one for a specific road deformity. He said he didn't get many clients in like me.

There were only two other sets of diners in that night: at the next table were two women and a man, in so far as I could determine gender in the gloom. Suddenly the man jolted in his chair, and asked his companions: "Hey, are either of you guys working on me, because I swear I just felt something!" I carried on munching my korma, thinking to myself that to hear the word "working" used in that context makes a change from that familiar inquiry from wait staff, sometimes when you are only three bites into your meal: "Did you want to get a box for that or you still working on it?"

And finally, a special award goes to a coffee house in Venice which took the art of tea making to a whole new level. It provided not just boiling hot water, a high calibre tea bag and a small jug of cold milk on the side, but a trio of egg timers to ensure you got the perfect brew - light, medium or strong. Only in LA, I thought. Yes, my experience of eating out in California lurched from the plain and homely to the elaborate and chichi via the oddball and worthy. I don't doubt that there is a middle ground - and the Italian my friends in NorCal took me to was the closest I came to it - but mostly this was a trip of extremes. So yes, on balance, the food was a bit surreal too.

And meanwhile, back home and left to fend for himself, the two week period while I was away was a bleaker time for Mr Bonkers on the catering front...




Photo of epitaxially grown wafers from au.alibaba.com, photo of ANTM house from yovenice.com, photo of Denny's my own, photo of seal from alaska-in-pictures.com, photo of Denny's menu from virtualtourist.com, photo of French toast from Denny's website, photos of Venice Beach, cup of tea and Starving Musician shop all my own.

11.1.11: Ça Fleure Bon Looks Forward To A Fragrant Year With An 11-Piece Prize Draw...

By way of a scented "sorbet course" to clear the palate between helpings of the ongoing Californian road trip report (just one more category to go before the perfume...er....travelogue!), you might like to check out today's post on Ça Fleure Bon here. The spooky date of 11.1.11 (or 1.11.11 if you prefer) prompted nine of us to address the question of fragrant developments we are looking forward to in 2011 - or would welcome, say. For some are definitely in the pipeline, some are a possibility, while others are more like wishful thinking... And there are a fair few personal aspirations chucked in there for good measure, along with the odd leftover item from people's Christmas lists. Well, mine, certainly.

Not forgetting an 11-piece prize draw, featuring a selection of niche scents and soap courtesy of Xerjoff, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, Anya's Garden, Geza Schoen and Atelier Cologne. I've got my eye on the Atelier soap in particular, but am doubtless not eligible to enter!


Photo from The Perfume Diaries exhibition my own

California Dreaming: Another Bonkers Road Trip - The Travel Bit: Part 2

I fully intend to write a separate post about the perfume-related aspects of my recent US trip - no, really, I do - but meanwhile there are still a couple of categories to go in the "travelogue"...

The roads

In Part 1 I described the idiosyncrasies of my hire car, notably the random and arcane positioning of essential controls. Readers may be surprised to learn that I found the roads themselves in California endlessly fascinating. First there is the road surface. I speak as something of a connoisseur of road surfaces throughout Europe and North America, and earlier this year I was moved to write about the unexpectedly poor state of Swiss roads here.

The correct term for the surface of many (though by no means all) American roads is - I believe - asphalt. It is a light coloured material that makes a pleasantly thunderous noise beneath your tyres. But my attention was frequently distracted by an extraordinary variety of road surface deformities. Just as the Eskimos are reputed to have some 20 words for snow, the Californians could do with...oh...at least 5-10 to characterise the diversity of their asphalt imperfections.

I encountered a few potholes - but not so many as to constitute a worrying phenomenon. Perhaps the main type of surface deformation were the long sections of longitudinal striations (says she, frantically rummaging for terminology from O-Level geography lessons on glacial landforms). The striations exactly resembled the surface of a vinyl record, and even whined faintly under my tyres. On road sections that had been prepared for repaving, a rougher and more troublesome version of this "ribbing" lay in wait, and I juddered nervously for miles up the I-5 towards Bakersfield, imagining lacerations to my tyres comparable to the terminal damage inflicted by those spikes at rental car lots, should you be foolish enough to disobey the sign telling you not to back up...

A further variation on the striations involved chunkier, interlocking grooves in a sort of herring bone formation like a zip. And here and there I encountered those shallow trenches running parallel with the hard shoulder into which your tyre can lurch unexpectedly if you drift too close to the verge. The Poles (another nation with an impressive range of misshapen roads) have a specific word for these: "koleiny".

Elsewhere I saw what looked like straggly cracks in the road, resembling earthquake damage or a parched delta. While some of these cracks were unfilled, others had been tarmac-ed over rather generously, giving rise to a feature known as "tar snakes".

Perhaps the most aesthetic-looking imperfection of all were the stretches of highway with swirly patterns of what looked like congealed snail trails. It was as if a snail had supped at a beer glass all night and proceeded to spin in mad balletic pirouettes all over the carriageway, leaving an avant-garde artwork of glistening squiggles behind. Or if a human hand with violent DTs had twizzled Superglue from a honey drizzler, perhaps. Now with hindsight these may have been a translucent species of tar snake for all I know, but I cannot be sure.

As well as being alert to the condition of the road, I also kept an eye out for obstructions. Germany is the most dangerous country I have visited in this regard, as detailed here. By comparison, California is relatively tame in terms of carriageway detritus: the odd spinning wheel rim, intermittent slaloms of HGV tyre shreddings, though Florida takes the biscuit for that. (Or it did in 2001.)

Roadside hoardings can also be quite distracting in the US - in urban areas the main roads are positively bristling with them. On a previous trip I nearly swerved into the verge when I glimpsed a billboard advertising a vasectomy clinic with the punchy slogan: DIAL-1-800-SNIP. This time around I was forever spotting hoardings in similar vein: DIAL-1-800-GET-THIN, accompanied by a photograph of a man or woman standing on scales or measuring their waistlines with a tape measure, looking rather smug. This was an ad for something called a LAP-BAND, over which I puzzled for at least a week.

Were people paying good money for some kind of a belt that restrained your stomach, like an airline seat belt, perhaps? But we all own belts already, and could easily just tighten them a notch or two to achieve a similar effect. Or is it significant that the lap-band encircles your abdomen, while a belt designed to hold up your trousers is generally positioned lower, on the hips? I mused over all possible design options of the lap-band for hundreds of miles until I chanced on a TV news feature about lap-band surgery and realised that this was in fact the latest term for "gastric band surgery". And what struck me about the ad campaign was that it seemed to be marketing this rather drastic procedure to the public at large - anyone with a bit of a weight problem, basically - rather than those who are morbidly obese.

Finally, no catalogue of road surfaces would be complete without a description of my intrepid trip up a mountain (taller than Ben Nevis!) in the Mojave Desert. I had an appointment with an executive at a wind farm operating company, and his prefabricated office was conveniently located on the summit. When we arranged the meeting, he strongly recommended that I rent a 4 x 4, warning me of the dangers that could befall the hapless motorist if it had recently rained. The 5 mile dirt track to his office would have been transformed in a matter of hours into a river of mud, and a regular compact car risked becoming mired in the sludge, wheels spinning uselessly, if they spun at all.

I mulled over my respondent's advice long and hard, but in the end my phobia of large clumpy vehicles far outweighed my fear of mudslides, and I rented the sub-compact Chevy mentioned in my previous post. I decided that if it did rain the night before my meeting, there was nothing for it but to get up in the small hours, borrow a Miner's headlamp and a pair of Wellingtons - from where I hadn't quite figured out - and attempt the climb on foot.

As luck would have it, the day dawned bright and sunny - and windy. The 5000 turbines on this, the second largest collection of wind generators in the world, were earning their keep that day, like demented, oversized daisies. I made steady progress up the mountainside in second gear - or what I imagined would have been second gear if I wasn't driving an automatic. 40 minutes later I reached the summit, and when I got out of the car the wind nearly blew the door off. As for my hair...well, suffice to say that a single 80mph gust instantly transformed my slightly blowsy style into the most convincing faux-Puckrik ever! On balance, a blob of gloop probably remains a more practical everyday option...



Coming up in Part 3...the food! And after that? Perfume....


Photo of Kern County from aaroads.com, photo of records from tic-howstuffworks.com, photo of tar snakes from picasaweb.google.com, photo of lap-band hoarding from tollfreenumbers.com, photo of snail from photos-animals.com, photos of wind turbines my own.

California Dreaming: Another Bonkers Road Trip - The Travel Bit: Part 1

Back in December, having emerged from the rabbit hole in which I had been grappling with the alternate reality of a large and wildly inaccurate database, I did eventually go to the USA on my work project. This post got repeatedly bumped by a procession of Wise Men and Foolish Bathers, but here it is now. Or the first instalment of the "travelogue" bit at least. My various scented escapades, including another meeting with Katie Puckrik(!), will follow in due course.

So, America... May I state quite clearly at the outset that I LOVE AMERICA. Have done since I first set foot in Cleveland in May 1984, even though it was a chilly 50F and I had brought all the wrong clothes. In the intervening years I have visited 30 states and would love to visit the rest some day. Okay, so I might skip one or two, like Iowa or one of the Dakotas, but my wanderlust is far from sated.

The planes

I flew from Birmingham on 6th December, and America began at the end of the jetway...You know immediately that you are on a US air carrier when the flight attendants are middle aged "and higher" (to borrow a row calling term of theirs), with attractive, lived-in faces normally considered to look better on men. But these cabin crew of a certain age wore them just fine.

The other way you know you are already in America is the terminology. The plane will be leaving "momentarily", and all hand luggage must be carefully "stowed" "at this time", in the hope that "items" will not "shift" during the flight. Drinks are always "beverages", and the plastic cups the drinks come in are known as "service items". Those derisorily small complimentary bags of Pretzels that come with the drinks would also be an example of service items, if they were still served. Sadly, mini-pretzels or indeed any other 3-mouthful snack item were conspicuous by their absence on the six hour flight from Newark down to LA, and I was forced to break into my emergency bar of Lidl chocolate somewhere over Kansas.

Another thing that concerned me on the flight was the sheer number of adverts for cosmetic dental clinics in the in-flight magazine. It may only be a matter of time before your teeth are submitted for inspection to Homeland Security as you enter the country, right after they have fingerprinted you and taken a photo of your iris. You will additionally have to declare anything less than a Hollywood smile on those landing card thingys, along with your secret stash of snails, assorted vegetable matter, and moral turpitude.

Speaking of security, the search procedures are as rigorous as the last time I flew to the States: there was the usual mass rummage at the X-Ray machine to extricate laptops from cases, and the semi-striptease of coat, jacket, scarf, hat, belt and shoe removal. I did hear a great story of someone who snapped recently at an airport, shaking an imperious finger at ground staff and shouting: "If you touch my junk, I'm going to have you arrested!"

The hire car

Once at your destination, there are a number of challenges when renting a hire car in the US: the first two are 1) adequately conveying the concept of "small" to the Avis representative, and 2) avoiding being upsold all sorts of features, ranging from snow chains to personal accident insurance to...a much bigger car.

These hurdles successfully negotiated - I set off from LA airport in a relatively minuscule Chevy Aveo - I reached my hotel an hour later, whereupon it took me a further hour and and a half and the combined wisdom of five passing strangers to figure out how to open the boot. (The answer? A catch cunningly located to the far right of the tailgate, not bang in the centre by the actual lock, as any reasonable person might assume.) But in the course of my fingertip search of the car's interior looking for concealed mechanisms, I did at least manage to find the fuel cap release lever, the bonnet catch, the seat adjustment rail, 10 cents and a discarded map of the greater LA area.

The hotels

It would be a fair summary to say that "on this trip I have mostly been staying in Best Westerns." Best Westerns, a couple of Holiday Inn Expresses, a Ramada, a Quality Inn, a Comfort Inn and a Dynasty Suites. The exception being the Art Deco Cadillac Hotel where I spent the first weekend in LA, and which I booked myself. But don't get me wrong - I have nothing against chain hotels. Like Starbuck's, they are reassuringly familiar: when you walk into the room, it will always be in darkness, even in the middle of the afternoon, the closed curtains fluttering slightly in the vicious updraught of the air con. This appliance must be disabled within minutes of arrival to ensure a comfortable stay.

Then the en suite will invariably have a sunken boxy bathtub, with a clunky mixer tap that swivels 340 degrees in an anti-clockwise direction, never seeming to pass through an angle that loosely corresponds to "hot". That'll be down to the whole safety-conscious mentality, I'll bet. For the fear in hoteliers' minds of being sued by scalded guests greatly outweighs that of lost custom from their shivering unwashed ones. The litigious climate in America also explains why it is so difficult to find "hot tea" in the USA. Okay, there is partly a cultural element to this, because iced tea is the default variant over there, but even if you are careful to specify "hot tea", the catering staff often err on the side of tepid. Having registered this fundamental flaw with your beverage, you stop caring about the fact that the waitress overlooked your request for a "little bit of cold milk on the side, please."

Another distinctive feature of American hotel rooms are the beds. The size of the beds, like the cars, is more than generous - four pillows in a row is not uncommon - and the norm seems to be to put two giant beds in each room. I have long puzzled over the nature of the relationship between the 4 - or possibly 6 - occupants of this ample accommodation. A family with small children, perhaps? Migrant workers, keen to reduce their per head lodging costs? Swinging couples, even? But based on the average occupancy of cars on the road, most travellers are either alone or comprise a single couple at best. Or... perhaps the provision of two beds is to enable hormonal 50-something women like me to hop across to Bed No 2 in the middle of the night when Bed No 1 gets overheated - or intolerably rumpled by my involuntary limb-thrashing. Yes, that'll be it, then. How thoughtful!

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that the Best Western chain, typically costing between $80 and $120 a night, would attract a certain calibre of clientele: sales reps, retired couples on road trips and the odd maverick market researcher. Imagine my surprise over breakfast on that first morning, when I overheard fragments of a conversation that sounded more like something out of the TV show Deadwood, an altogether different type of "Western"...

A young Hispanic man in his late 20s was discussing a number of potential "lodgers" whom the two middle-aged women sitting at the table opposite him were considering housing - all expenses paid by the sound of things. The estimated accommodation costs for one of the girls ran to some $5000 a month - she expected a whole house to herself, apparently, not just a bedsit, which I initially found puzzling. The penny finally dropped when the man referred to this girl as "Ball Buster". I could see even on Day One that this was going to be an interesting trip...



...to be continued


Photo of plane from Wikimedia Commons, photo of in-flight snack from mealsonplanes.com, photo of a Chevy Aveo from latestpriceindia.com, photos of my hotel in Fresno from Tripadvisor, photo of a Deadwood prostitute from calpernia.com

The Dutch Go Bonkers!

I am back from Holland (I use the term broadly - The Netherlands always seems a bit of a mouthful to my mind), and am pleased to report that I found Mr Bonkers much improved on my return - particularly on the health front. I should perhaps abandon him more often when he is feeling under the weather, as it may accelerate the recovery process. Though my money's on the curative effects of the two bottles of Ribena he consumed in my absence.

The Californian Road Trip post remains imminent, but meanwhile I feel moved to comment on a couple of Dutch cultural oddities which struck me while I was over there.

Firstly, the Dutch appear to be a nation of pyromaniacs. The setting off of fireworks in Holland is confined to New Year, so this compressed time frame seems to create a tinderbox mentality - or might I mean a hothouse mentality? Either way, to say the Dutch go overboard when it comes to seeing in the New Year with fireworks is putting it mildly: an estimated 65 million euros' worth of the things go up in smoke over the festive period - including several hundred thousands of euros' worth in my friends' street, at a conservative guess - some of them directly over my head. Yes, this is the first time I have ever felt as though I was literally inside a firework display, and I could liken the effect to a cross between the opening credits of Star Trek and 3D TV. And on New Year's Day, there's the inevitable thick carpet of confetti and spent cases to scuffle through - like autumn leaves, but with a telltale note of sulphur.

As one travel site puts it: "(The Dutch) stay at home and celebrate quietly with the family until midnight, then dash out on the streets and indulge in a freestyle orgy of pyrotechnics."

I should also point out that there are two types of firework: the traditional rocket and Roman candle variety, which burst into showers of colourful sparks, and the other kind, so-called "duizend klappers" - which are the mother of all bangers, basically - acoustically akin to heavy artillery, rocket launchers, machine gun fire and the occasional 200 lb car bomb. The loud and startling reports from these incendiary devices reverberated round the neighbourhood from early morning till the small hours. Several of our party remarked that it felt like being in a war zone - images of Flanders Field, Beirut and Baghdad flashed before our eyes as we hunkered down in our friends' living room, reaching for the lids of tins of Quality Street and shortbread by way of improvised body armour. I probably left the country just hours before the shock and awe mutated into full blown Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And then the second cultural oddity of the weekend was the annual New Year's Dive or "Duik" at Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague. On New Year's Day, somewhat the worse for wear after the drink, merriment and fire-raising excesses of the night before, around 10,000 Dutch people of all ages - and clad in outfits of varying degrees of scantiness and/or whimsy - rush into the sea on the dot of 12.00pm, briefly get wet and rush out again, before changing en masse (and with barely a shred of inhibition amongst them) in a communal tent erected for this purpose on the sand.

Although I just happened to have bought a swimsuit the day before, I was not so foolhardy as to go in myself, though about half the 15-strong contingent from my friend's village braved the waters, including my fellow countrywoman and owner of Meg, the pipped pageant pooch), though she may have been ever so slightly cheating by wearing a wetsuit... Everybody - "divers" and spectators alike - received a carrier bag from the sausage company sponsoring the event, containing a dayglo orange bobble hat, dayglo orange gloves, a tin of pea soup bearing the legent "dive hero", and a commemorative bookmark/medal, rather optimistically stating that the water was "scrummy", if my rudimentary grasp of Dutch serves me.

And there was one more surprise to come that weekend...In Spakenburg, a sleepy and picturesque fishing port to which we made an excursion on the last day, my friend pointed out a perfumery shop in an alleyway called La Ruelle. The staff were visible inside merchandising the shelves, but the sign on the door clearly stated that the store was "gesloten", so I contented myself with peering through the window.

Imagine my surprise when, nestling amongst the Amouages, Serge Lutenses and Etros - remarkable enough but not completely unprecedented in a small village on the continent - I spied a full shelf of Parfumerie Generales. At 30% off no less! I only know of one retail outlet in the UK for PG (Les Senteurs) and 1-2 at most in Paris. So how come a little shop in Spakenburg in Holland had managed to acquire the line? Does Pierre Guillaume have business connections with Holland? Maybe there is some kind of reciprocal trade agreement in place: perfume for gerookte paling perhaps (smoked eel, a Spakenburg speciality)? Or aged Gouda, cheese graters, Delft tableware, or maybe even the dreaded "duizendklappers"....though for the sake of those poor citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, I do hope not.



And finally, a big thank you is due to our hosts in Hoevelaken for their unstinting hospitality, bottomless wine cellar and banger-free bolthole.


Photos of fireworks from Wikimedia Commons and panoramio.com, photos of New Year's Dive from Wikimedia Commons and Clare Chick, photo of Spakenburg from toeristeninformatie.nl, photo of La Ruelle from the shop's website.