Road Tripping USA

Fifteen thousand, one hundred and seventy miles. Thirty five states. Two cars. Six hundred and ninety six gallons of fossilized plant matter and whale spooge then a fifteen hour flight over the Pacific and where the fuck was I? Home? Fuck no. Instead I was standing next to a disappointingly small statue of a bronze dog warming its balls on something apparently called a tuckerbox in the middle of rural New South Wales, still some five hundred klicks from my front door. Fuck. Due to various nefarious deals and a couple of handjobs our flights to the Land of Liberty and back had been stupidly cheap. The flipside being however that we would get bumped off the flight if the unthinkable happened and the airline sold more seats than actually existed. Arriving early in order to convert our last American dollars into alcohol we quickly discovered that not only was our flight to Melbourne overbooked by fifteen seats but twenty three people were ahead of us in the standby queue. As an extra slice of fuck you, we were Group Two, the lowest standby rank which meant that we ceded priority position to anyone who was either Group One (such as staff), had a better rack than Saf (difficult, but in LA not impossible) or more willing than I was to do a bit of ‘baggage handling’ to Barry the Flight Supervisor (I was pretty willing but my hands were rough and calloused from driving). Several standbys had been there for three days; one guy, Rob, was ticking off his seventh. The stranded standies were at various stages of emotional fragility depending on how long they’d been stuck. Rob had gone beyond rage, passed through frustration and entered a Zen like state of acceptance that gives you inner calm and an ability to watch back to back episodes of The Hills. (He was however, no longer laughing at references to Steven Spielberg movies – note to self). As the hours passed, the waiting standies bonded; a happy fraternal connection underlined by the delightfully uncomfortable knowledge that we would screw all of our newfound friends over in a heartbeat in order to get on a plane.
A flight to Sydney went by and somehow despite five standies getting seats our queue position dropped back another three spots. Now normally we’d have been happy to kick back in the California sunshine, smoke up the Mastercard and wait for the next flying boat out. However, our extended jaunt on the continent had left us with only two days left on our visa. Getting deported would have at least guaranteed us a flight home but since I wanted to be able to return to this country some day soon without having to be stuffed into the dashboard of a Tijuana taxi, that wasn’t going to be an option. Buying a legitimate ticket was also out of the question. Word of the overflow had spread quickly through the aviation industry and rival carriers thoughtfully jacked up their prices between two thousand and four thousand percent. For nearly three grand each we considered a thirty six hour Air Fiji flight to Sydney via most of the rest of the world. Our parlous financial state however dictated that the most we could afford was to climb into our suitcases and go in the hold as unaccompanied baggage. Unfortunately all the fat arse food we had ingested in America had gone straight to our fat arses, meaning not only would we have to pay a few grand in excess baggage charges but those disability scooters at Walmart were looking good. (Curse you In and Out Burger, and your delicious carbohydrated evil.)
With no more flights for twenty four hours, we called game over and went with the rest of the standies to ‘La Hacienda’, a Mexican themed airport hotel. Despite the name, the decor remained defiantly Holiday Inn, the theme seemingly referring mainly to the cleaning staff and most of the bell boys. We spent the next day lying in bed and watching back to back episodes of The Hills. Occasionally we called the help line of V Australia to plead our case. They were very understanding but it is the first time I’ve heard the phrase ‘shit out of luck’ said to a customer by someone other than myself. Respect.
Heading back to LAX that night to wait hopefully for any flight heading to the Antipodes, we watched with spite and hateful malice the carefree joy of those travelers who had had the temerity and gall to book a full fare ticket. More standbys joined the list bumping us further down the pecking order. Friendly bonding gave way to resent and suspicion, or at least the resent and suspicion just became more overt. With a Sydney bound jet about to depart, word came through that a connecting Delta Airlines flight had gone missing with all aboard presumed dead. We whooped and cheered in immediate delight as all the standies quickly realised that this freed up seats and our chances of getting home had suddenly markedly improved. With minutes to go before departure, Saf and I were abruptly given the official nod and we raced towards the gate clambering over small children, the elderly and the infirm. I don’t know how she did it and I’m not prepared to ask but somehow Safka’s mixture of patient ministrations and blatant lies had enabled us to leapfrog thirty odd people in the standby queue including Rob. We waved cheerily at his disbelieving and forlorn features, promising to lobby his cause and send help from home, before getting on the plane, settling into our seats and completely and utterly forgetting him.
Maybe it was a touch of Karma, maybe the fates deemed it just fitting but fifteen hours, four movies and three episodes of Family Guy later, we touched down in Emerald City to discover a connecting one hour flight to Melbourne was going to cost us the financial equivalent of a left nad and two right tits. Considering that was already what we were paying in credit card interest, ninety bucks for a Hyundai Getz and a fuck load of coffee seemed a reasonable deal. What was another nine hundred kilometres anyway? We signed up, got into our light blue sewing machine with wheels and hit the fucking highway.
Five hundred k later, four hundred still to go, I started to lose my shit.
‘What the Fuck?!? Why am I still driving?!? WHY AM I STILL DRIVING!!!!’ Goulburn, Wagga Wagga, Echuca. Names I knew well now took on a surreal quality as I experienced reverse culture shock. Like being brought out of the Matrix too fast everything seemed strange, reversed and above all not green enough. Why the fuck didn’t McDonald’s have fucking decaf? Or griddle cakes? Or a four gallon bucket of coca cola? Why couldn’t I get a pancake with blueberries and bacon? It wasn’t right! What kind of messed up Bizarro world had I come back to? Streams of consciousness burbled from me as Safka stroked my arm and murmured soothing words to calm me. But what the fuck was she doing on the wrong side of the car? Why was I looking at a dog on a fucking lunchbox when I should be lying in my own bed scratching my balls and wondering what the tenants did to the washing machine? Why is he sitting on a fucking sandwich container anyway? Is he keeping it warm? Is that what they did in ages past to judge whether their Four and Twenties were at acceptable canine anus temperature? Fuck my life! Holbrook. There’s a World War II submarine in Holbrook. Why? How? Did it wash up here? The nearest significant body of water is three states away so why the fuck is there a WWII submarine planted four hundred miles inland? Is this how far the Japs really got? FAAAAAARRRRRRK!!! I knew I was losing my shit. I knew it, but it didn’t stop me. Just drive. Just drive. Snort another packet of service station sugar off the dashboard if you must but just fucking drive. On the correct side of the highway would be a plus but as long as you’re heading on a southerly course it’s all good.
My inner monologue had become my outer one as borders passed, license plates changed and the sun dropped from the skies out of sheer exhaustion. The familiar homogenous bland of Melbourne’s outer fringe began to appear like the mold on the rim of the toilet bowl. Traffic lights. Street signs. Victoria was apparently either the place to be or on the move depending on which way you were going. Suddenly, through the blur of tears and manic laughter, signs began to indicate that Coburg was within seven kilometres. After all this, it came down to seven klicks of metric goodness. Landmarks leaped into my vision like old friends, welcoming me with a nod and a smile. But instead of a sense of joy at returning home, the déjà vu tasted bitter and sour. I was like a junkie relapsing into a reality I’d been clean of for three months. The familiar buildings appeared smug and knowing, as if they knew I’d always be back, knew I would never really be able to kick this habit of normality. An overwhelming wave of depression crashed over me as I realised that the only thing altered was us. We had mooned the Grand Canyon, climbed mountains screaming to the skies, crossed vast open plains and seen trees the size of entire Ikea catalogues. We’d gone through the looking glass and returned. After three months and so many amazing and incredible experiences, people and sights, things should be different. There should be aliens walking the streets. Flying cars! Crowds lining the footpaths of Sydney Road, clapping and cheering our triumphant arrival as if we were marathon runners entering the stadium, finishing first in the race to win absolutely everything.
As we pulled into the driveway and I saw the same green door opening onto the same overgrown backyard of the same house, I realised we were exactly where we had started way back in April. Except it was colder and everything seemed a just a little smaller. Ahhh fuck. There’s nothing like coming home.

Say goodbye to Hollywood

WHAT! THE! FUCK?!?

AAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAAAA!!!

Jesus buys a lot of highway signage.
The American word for gift shop is Cultural Centre
Fish Taco will never be unfunny.
Fresh food is expensive – For the price of four apples you can get a six pack of Miller Lite, some onion rings and a Slanket™.
Do not take the piss out of the Armed Forces.
Do not take the piss out of the Jesus.
If Jesus was in the Armed Forces, he would be a Marine.
A moustache is better than cash south of the Mason Dixon line
The song Take a ride on my Big Green Tractor is not a metaphor in many states.
Alice’s Country Diner in South Carolina is not open Sundays as that is the Lord’s day.
Louisiana is the best state in the Union.
Bears are cool.
American beer is 4.2% alcohol.
The speed limit is seen as more of a suggestion.
Someone in this country invented the Duvet Suit.
The Civil War is merely on hiatus.
A man with a shotgun always has a valid point.
If there is an Afterlife, it will be New Orleans.
Actors actually get paid for what they do.
There is such a thing as a Cowboy Church.
Pizza really is that good in New York.
Using a hands free attachment on a cell phone is an indication of communist leanings and must be avoided at all costs.
Fuck ice hockey.
Truck stops rock.
Truck stops in Texas rock most.
Drink driving is part of the First Amendment and random breath tests are a socialist plot.
Four percent of America’s GDP is made up of mullets.
Mechanical Bulls and bars that house them really exist.
Drive thru Daquiri bars are the greatest invention in the world.
Walmart is both a store and a theme park for fat people.
Seafood Gumbo needs to be on the World Heritage list.
It is illegal to pump your own petrol in Oregon
Trucks are red, tractors are green. End of story.

Spangled AND starry

The mouth of madness had long since closed over us. It had chewed, swallowed, flossed and brushed its teeth. We had passed through the gullet of insanity, traversed the aesophogus of dementia and now floated inexorably towards the small colon of mania and psychosis. Carter’s hysterical sobs had degenerated into mewling whimpers, his spirit broken, his mind a shattered wreck. Safka embraced the rictus grin and fixed stare of the true catatonic, while I bellowed wordlessly towards the heavens, my fractured howls rendered inaudible by the deafening roar of Beelzebub’s minions. Ahh Disneyland. Finally I was here. A childhood dream held since I was old enough to sit too close to the telly had become manifest and my rabid excitement took the form of hyperventilating and squealing like Helen Keller reading a cheese grater.
The day had begun in high spirits; we had laughed at the twisting thrills of Space Mountain, giggled through the bouncy animatronics of Indiana Jones but now the total mindmelt that is It’s a Small World had hate-fucked our souls into a cursed parody of humanity.
A ride dubbed by Jeffrey Dahmer as ‘fucking twisted’, if you’ve never had the experience, It’s a Small World is the Myer Christmas Windows as designed by Willy Wonka on crack. Small figures wheel and track on their mechanical paths, their smiling painted faces displaying the demonic visage of true evil while the saccharine lyrics of the impossibly happy theme song thunder from diabolical speakers on eternal loop. The ride itself seems to run continuously, indeed it is said that if it ever stops, the mechanical peons will escape their imprisonment and Walt Disney will rise from his Westinghouse to feed on the blood of Pixar employees. Ironically it was the longest ride we’d been on but involved the shortest amount of queue time being as it was that we’d somehow walked down the disabled/fat person line and got straight on a boat. An epic win, or so we thought, but as our raft moved slowly away from the fat person shaking his wobbly fist at our queue jumping brilliance, we glimpsed the tear streaked faces and involuntary twitching of those emerging from this floating tour of Purgatory.
The Mouse House was in fact the second theme park we’d attended in as many days, with Universal Studios easing us into the concept of hour long queuing. Luck had smiled on us however, and we seemed to fly through the lines, packing in visits to the awesome KrustyLand experience, King Kong 360º and the Water World™ Live Action Spectacular, which was arguably far superior to the film, making much more sense and with nary a neck vagina in sight. (It was rumoured Costner had actually auditioned for the show but was told they needed a bigger name.)
Our queuing providence continued at Disneyland as we discovered the concept of the ‘Single Rider’ line, were randomly granted free Fast Track passes and realised fortune favours the rude if you want head of the line privileges. Carter’s experience with the aptly named Splash Mountain left him going commando in a children’s theme park for the rest of the afternoon, an adrenaline rush all of its own. The most thrill inducing ride of all however proved to be on the way home late that evening as we rode the White Middle Class Fear ride through the leafy suburb of Compton situated in delightful South Central LA. In a way, it’s just another type of theme park where the palpable threat of being car jacked while wearing oversize mouse ears provides a charge of adrenaline that Space Mountain just can’t match. Best of all, there was no queue.

The horror...The horror.

When will someone stop the madness?

Living and socialising in Melbourne as I am generally wont to do, the opportunity to meet honest to goodness porn icons does not present itself quite as often as one would either expect or hope. So it was with much awe and wonder that I found myself standing in a West Hollywood bar sharing talk space with legendary woodsman Herschel Savage. Safka and myself, along with our LA based actor type friend Carter, had turned up to support the Los Angeles leg of the ‘International Sexy Film Festival’. Curated by fellow Antipodean and filmmaker Jason Turley, the festival offers a variety of boundary and censorship pushing shorts and features that are unafraid to say ‘vagina’ and show titties. Jason had managed to pull off (euphemism intended) quite a coup by getting Herschel as guest of honour by enticing him with the promise of fifty bucks and a free sandwich.
For those who have neither a monthly membership to Spankwire.com nor take the time to read the credits while reaching for the tissues/old t-shirt/curtains/cat may not know Herschel by name, but be assured he is the veteran of some eleven hundred skin flicks with titles such as Ally McFeal, The Sopornos, Ass Good Ass it Gets, and the classic spooge noir The Postman Always Comes Twice. Throughout the course of his lengthy (euphemism still intended) career, Herschel has crossed swords (boom!) with many towering figures from the Golden Age of Filmic Fucking including the inventor of gonzo porn Jamie Gillis, pre-lawsuit (and thus pre-legal) Traci Lords and the mighty hedgehog himself Ron Jeremy. One of his early appearances was in 1978’s Debbie Does Dallas, which, if Deep Throat is the porn industry’s equivalent to Jaws (on several levels obviously), then DDD must be Star Wars. (Assuming that is that the only way Luke could raise the money to get off Tatooine was by boning all the Jawas as well as Chewie, Han and Greedo, thus providing a rather different interpretation of the phrase ‘Greedo shot first.’)
Herc (aka Harvy Wood, Herschel Steed and the oddly named for a porn actor Jack Soft) turned out to be as amusing a conversationalist as he was a skilled bonemeister. Having starred alongside (as well as on top of and inside) many beautiful ladies who had earned storage space in my personal wankbank vault, I knew much of his work and there had always been one thing that bothered me: why, in almost every film I’d seen him in, did he leave his socks on?
Herschel: ‘My feet get cold, I have bad circulation’.
Me: ‘I’ve seen your films. I beg to differ.’

Respect

Magic! Mystery! Prestidigitation and misdirection with nary a broomstick nor a golden snitch in sight. We were at ‘The Magic Castle’ in LA, the world headquarters of the Magician’s Guild, and already well loaded up on enchanted vodka and expensively bespelled vino. A quite honestly phenomenal meal that magically emptied my wallet had been garnished with entry into the Castle’s ‘Palace of Mystery’ where the world famous duo of Yonkany and his assistant Annabel produced various sorts of poultry and flying vermin seemingly from his crotch. In terms of magic acts, watching a couple of Mexicans pull live geese out of their underpants doesn’t quite rate up there with David Copperfield but still shits all over Cris Angel’s Cirque du Soleil. The duo were dressed for Eurovision and seemed to have stolen their act from the 1984 ‘Good Friday Telethon’ as they flicked cards and produced pigeons through plastered smiles and frozen eyeballs. His most astonishing trick of all was producing a valid work visa.
Despite the hallowed air of the ‘members only’ venue I felt that somewhere I had passed through a wrong door and entered the audition room of America’s Got Talent. The host had a variety of jokes and tricks ranging from the very old to the clinically dead, the sad thing being that I have told almost all of them myself at one time or other in my career. The warm up act consisted of masks and more gags seemingly plucked from assisted living accommodation while the frenzied panic of the geese produced by Yonkany would have had a PETA advocate choking on their tofu margarita.
Spilling out into the venue’s multitude of maze like passages and stairways, we discovered the real attractions of the Castle lie in the close up magic being performed by various of the Guild’s members. Small crowds clustered around poker tables watching card magic, geek magic, mind magic, coin magic and billiard magic, which is more commonly known as ‘pool hustling’. (I giggled drunkenly when I spied two girls watching some cup magic, but no one else got the reference.)
Los Angeles had already proved itself full of brilliant Good Times™, kicking off with a personal tour of The Jim Henson Studios by my friend of puppeteering coolness Julianne. The studio itself was originally built by Charlie Chaplin in 1918 and I concentrated hard not to hyperventilate as I played on animatronic puppet control units, got up close and personal with Skeksis and gently fondled muppet memorabilia and movie props. Standing in Charlie Chaplin’s original office, which is now Brian Henson’s and thus decorated with awards, sketches and other bits of imagination, was just a bit too much for me and I may or may not have weed a little bit. (Sorry about the rug Brian. It really tied the room together.)
Just to confirm the studio as being the location from which much of the awesomeness of the twentieth century did spring, it also houses a recording studio once home to A&M Records where many people who have either had a album go platinum, choked on their own vomit in a drug induced coma or done both, have recorded. We Are the World was also recorded there, so I went inside and punched the engineer, just cos.
We finished that evening in an appropriate manner by watching an improvised zombie musical set at an Elvis concert then onto twelve dollar bottomless margaritas at Waffle which really put the sealer on this being one of my favourite places in the States. Ahh LA. I don’t care what everyone else says about you baby, you’re still all right by me.

My years of ambidextrous masturbation finally pay off

Fred eventually had enough of Dino's misbehaviour

Death Valley had really taken it's toll on me

How green was my valley? Not at all considering it receives an average of two inches of rain a year and tends to summertime temperatures on par with the sun. It was 9:00am in quaintly named Death Valley and already kicking 100˚F (the F standing for ‘It’s too hot I can’t be arsed’). According to the brochure (which immediately caught fire in my hands), ‘Death Valley’ is a misnomer as it is apparently full of life, though most of it seemed to be touring around in air conditioned minivans and taking photos. Listed as a National Monument in 1933 specifically so douchebags could stand around saying ‘Hot enough for ya?’, by eleven o’clock I was sloshing warmly around the salt lakes and canyons in a bath of my own ball sweat and running for the shade faster than the local albino. Despite seeming as barren as the plot of Sex and the City 2, people do actually live here, making money off tourists and films requiring post-apocalyptic locations (I believe one of the Police Academy’s was shot here). We visited the lowest point in America, which bizarrely is not Nebraska, and elected to leave the water back in the car and walk three hundred metres out into the scorching desert, which was a really awesome decision by Safka. Just awesome. Returning to the car we thought it best to leave before the tyres melted and in the famous words of those early American pioneers the Village People, elected to ‘Go West’ towards fame, fortune and cheaper petrol. We passed through the town of Trauma (which may technically appear on maps as Trona but the sentiment is the same) which is only called a town as ‘blasted hell burnt living place of the cursed, destitute and the damned’ doesn’t read as well in the guide books. Eventually making our way to a place equally as hot but with more beer and a pool, we experienced what was to be our last night of camping, making it a slightly melancholy occasion. We donated our remaining firewood to some nearby Europeans who thanked us by looking at us suspiciously, grunting and wearing inappropriate budgie smugglers.

Safka, moments before bursting into flame.

Somewhere behind these dunes, Lawrence of Arabia is being buggered

No water = Best. Decision. Ever.

When visiting Wilderness areas there are essentially two simple rules to live by: don’t burn it down and don’t fuck it up. These of course are broken down into more detailed guidelines but generally everything boils down to the above two fairly obvious tenets. One of the major sub clauses in the second one is ‘Do not feed the animals’, so it was with some chagrin as we toured the carved peaks of Yosemite National Park that we stumbled upon a marmot being fed a frigging Hero sandwich by a bunch of brain challenged tourists. A small child took happy snaps while a diminutive grinning Japanese man held out the offending ham on rye. The child’s father, an immense pudge monkey of a man with eyes like a blind shrimp and an arse like Idaho (large and smelling of cowshit), stood back and guffawed encouragement while he considered eating the Japanese bloke.
Safka led the charge, gently kicking the smiling Japanese midget in the nutsack while I followed up with a rational ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing you fucktards!?’. Tattoo quickly dropped the sandwich and leapt back apologetically while the marmot flashed me a pissed off look and bailed. We were prepared to leave it at that and move on, but Pudgemonkey piped up with a whining ‘But it was the only way we could get photos.’ A vein twitched in my forehead and an emotional bubbling in my gut began as if I’d swallowed a rage burrito made of cheese, beans and righteousness. What then followed was a rant epic in its proportions; part Shakespeare, part Jack Black as I pointed out with equal parts eloquence, sarcasm and profanity, the myriad signs indicating not to feed the wildlife, that said signs were written in four languages including stupid, and the short and long term effects of human food and stupidity on the lifespan of the now much mentioned wildlife.
His response was to ask his son ‘Did ya get some good photo’s Randy?’. Randy (Seriously WTF? Randy?) nodded awkwardly. Not to be put off, I turned to the child and said ‘I hope so Randy. I hope those photo’s are real good because that marmot is dead, and you’ve killed it.’ Randy began to cry. His dad started to lead him back to the car. ‘That’s one dead fucking marmot!’ I screamed at their departing backs and over Randy’s heaving sobs. ‘Fucking dead! You might as well fuck it, eat it and wear it for a hat! A dead fucking marmot hat! Murderer! MURDERER!!!!’ I then punched the Japanese guy just once for the Ady Gil and threw a rock at the marmot cos he’d started the whole thing in the first place. I may have got a little carried away, but people really shouldn’t feed the animals.

This is an ex-Marmot, but a warm hat.

Frisco was cool. Way cool. More than that, it was freezing. With a wind as frigid as the anal passage of a Mormon polar bear it’s the only place I know that hipsters wear thermal berets and smoke woolen cigarettes. A city seemingly giving the perpetual finger to Global Warming™; the famous bridge was shrouded in mist while icebergs floated past complete with paint scrapings from the Titanic. We’d arrived to find that tours to Alcatraz were so popular they needed to be booked when Manson was an inmate, so we stood on the shore, peered at the island through the fog and then helter skeltered back to the car and its heating system. It was strange to be amongst buildings and concrete as the last few days had be spent wandering through mighty redwood forests with trees the size of big and more than very tall in height. Camping amongst these huge potential Ikea products was like backpacking through the moon of Endor, the families in vans and tents making it a little more Caravan of Courage than I would have liked. (That said, if I blurred my eyes, the RV of Japanese tourists did look for all the world like an AT-ST full of Ewoks.)
We wound our way down the coast road towards the City by the Bay, enjoying the spectacular views and perpetual roadworks. Crossing the fabled Golden Gate Bridge was a breathtaking experience, not unlike driving on a road totally obscured by deep fog then paying at a tollbooth at the end. Attempting to follow in the tyre tracks of Steve McQueen by gunning our white Toyota minivan down the steep hairpin bends of Lombard Street, we were thwarted by the five mile an hour speed limit and a plague of English tourists who turned up to whinge professionally and take photos.

Doctor Who budget cuts had begun to bite

When the Beach Boys wished they all could be California girls, I’m sure there was a disclaimer on the album notes indicating that didn’t include those resident in the northern part of the sunny state. We had landed in the coastal town of Crescent City, my first impression indicating it had been named after the overhanging curve of an arse cheek, but could also have easily been named ‘Bad Eighties Permopolis’ or ‘Bogan Redneck Pridesville’. This was a town that had been stuck in 1985 since 1953 and seemed like the source for every ‘People of Walmart’ photo ever. Ever. A town where Three Dog Night wasn’t a band but a tally of sexual conquests and people talked about ‘New Revolution’ as if it were happening on Thursday.
It was the Fourth of July and we were standing in shining sun and biting wind watching a parade of be-tinseled tractors and a semi-trailer do laps of downtown in the lamest parade since Port Adelaide won the Grand Final. (At least I assume it was a parade, it could easily have just been what happens on a Sunday in this redneck of the woods.)
That being said, this beachside town does have a roller derby team, which is always a plus. They skated manfully around the horse poo and threw lollies to the watching children who ran excitedly into the path of the oncoming trucks and tractors to collect it. The kiddies weaved recklessly through the parading fire engines and twelve foot tractors, heartily encouraged to do so by their parents in what was obviously a form of belated birth control. The crowd watching were enthusiastically cheering and flag waving, heedless to either chilling wind or fashion sense. (It is an age-old maxim that if your nipples touch your belly button you should really wear a bra. It may not be in Emily Post but surely someone should have had the foresight to write it in the constitution.) The crowd was happy and festive, with the only negative vibes coming from a flag wearing fat guy who’d taken a wrong turn on the way down and been registered as a float.
The evening saw us letting off fireworks on the beach, adhering to California’s strict ‘If it flies it’s illegal’ law. Our paltry roman candles however were put to shame as many local participants had exercised their constitutional right to drink alcohol and do whatever the fuck you want, bringing enough airborne fire power to take down Air Force One, which may have been the idea. We stood as if in a magical war zone; the rockets’ red glare lighting the skies a thousand times over like it was, well, the Fourth of July. The sounds of happy drunken revelry and burning children floated on the breeze while the scattered cries of ‘1776!’ and ‘Fuck Obama!’ brought the festivities to a heartwarming close.

'Give me liberty or give me donuts!'

Flute Ninja: If you hear the woodwind, you're already dead.

The Bitch is dead. At some indeterminate point in the journey she had been stripped of the noble moniker ‘Sir Ian’ and labeled The Whinging Bitch due to her propensity to ring alarms any time a door was opened, a light turned on or a left nad scratched. Now, after thirteen thousand miles, two thousand odd litres of petrol and fourteen million farts, she finally had enough and shat herself royally in an outer suburb of Fuck Knows Where. (I’m not being rude, that was the name of it. I think it’s American Indian.) It was pissing rain in a fashion that would have had Noah calling the pet shop, night was falling and we were late for a rodeo. Finally, just to really give the ovaries a good flicking, the rental company refused to give us a new car as our credit card had been blocked due to our bank invoking the ‘Fuck You’ clause in our terms and conditions. What followed were several hours of yelling at worthless peons on two continents who seemed to be afflicted with chronic retardation of the soul. Eventually, after threatening to tea bag the first born of every phone jockey in the call centre, we got a new car and a new card but not before I made three people cry, (one of them being me) and totally missed out on bull riding action and other mindless animal cruelty. Not happy Jan. They have this thing at rodeos called Mutton Busting, which, rather than being a humourously named cougar porn dvd, is actually where a five year old is tied to the back of a sheep and told to hang on if they want ice cream. Brilliant! I can’t believe this is not a UFC sanctioned event. Child abuse this blatant is usually confined to Dickens novels and the Sacristy so I was most bummed out not to be able to witness it. Furthermore, no rodeo meant my rhinestone cowboy fantasy of mechanical bull riding took a second setback for the trip, leaving me both despondent and with three working testicles. The first opportunity was foiled in Denver when Colin’s local country bar (Yes he’s the kind of man that has a local country bar) ‘The Stampede’ had lent out their bull to a lesbian rodeo. I didn’t make that up. Lesbian rodeos actually exist outside of the mind of myself and Larry Flynt and while the concept of a couple gash guzzling snatch hounds riding and roping horned males into submission is deeply Freudian, it is also deeply hot and deserves it’s own spot on The Playboy Channel.
Keen to get the hell out of Oregon we high tailed it to the coast, passing briefly through a collection of mullets known by their highway signage as ‘Lincoln City: A place to try new things’. I suggested anal. Saf suggested I stop talking.
We began to pass through delightful coastal towns such as Skamokawa, named after traditional Native American Pokémon characters. At Sprinreel, we abandoned our bleeding heart whale hugging liberal sensibilities and rented a dune buggy for an hour of petrol headed awesomeness. Our necks shone a patriotic red white and blue, (though mainly red) as we smoked up some valuable fossil fuels fanging our motorized beastie off seventy foot sand dunes and saying ‘Hot Dang!’ a lot. We screamed, we laughed, we hurled and had one of the best times on the trip so far.
A wrong turn near Coos Bay resulted in an awesome seafood feast of oysters and prawns straight off the boat and clam chowder superior to anything in New England (In your face Massachusetts!) This same detour delivered us to an overlook where we could view an orgy of sea lions lolling and barking on the rocks. Amidst these huge beasties was an even huger one in the form of an elephant bull seal. He lolled lazily in his own patch of sand like a meth addicted Snuffaluffagus, bitch slapping anything within rolling distance and whining for his dealer. Weighing in at four thousand pounds and with a nose like Karl Malden I’m surprised I hadn’t seen him in Walmart on a disability scooter.

And then I ate a dolphin THIS big

Some things you think you will never see. Some things you cannot unsee. And some things are so unbelievably awesome you can neither believe you have seen them or that you didn’t have some kind of recording device with you at the time. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would witness pubescent Twihards punching on with Fundamentalist Christians in a down and dirty street fight. Like a donut at a gay orgy it had seemingly come out of nowhere, but here it was in front of me, and I with nothing on hand to record it for posterity/YouTube.
How it started is unclear. We were in Port Angeles, Washington State waiting in a long line to see the latest installment of the cinematic behemoth that is Twilight. Pubescent teen hormones had been stirred and thickened all day, slowly brought to a gelatinous boiling point of leaking pimples and sticky panties. Safka had joined the steadily growing queue for the midnight premiere of Eclipse some time in the morning while I had entertained myself by drinking coffee and ogling teenagers in a way designed to cause maximum discomfort to their chaperones. At one point in the afternoon, I went to talk to/deride the group at the front of the line that had been camped there for the past five days. My interview technique was a two pronged approach involving a simple ‘Seriously, what the fuck?!’ then telling them that this one time I sold R-Patz heroin. A young boy of fourteen told me of the hardships they had suffered: hassled by drunks, trucks thundering past in the middle of the night and the biting cold of the North Western summer evenings. ‘But you know what the worst thing about camping out for a Twilight movie is?’ he asked in a fractured voice. ‘Telling your parents you’re gay?’ I ventured, then left before his tears mutated into choking sobs. The excitement grew exponentially as the hours passed until the air was thick with chunks of estrogen and naïve sexuality. Into this heady cocktail strode one of the Lord’s Warriors: a Champion of the Light armed with a speaker system and a mid Nineties station wagon. On a night when he should have been hard at work putting up anti-abortion billboards (those things don’t just bigot themselves you know) or surfing the interwebs for a Justin Beiber sex tape (oh it’s out there) he’d been doing laps round the cinema since late afternoon. With the help of Divine Inspiration and a microphone from Radio Shack he informed the assembled crowd of four hundred tweens and seven pubic hairs of their imminent damnation and forthcoming immolation on the burning shores of the Lake of Fire. (Full RV hookups, lakeside campsites extra. Discounts for AAA and Good Sam members). A few of the Twihards returned fire, asking where he got his cardigan and what time his mum wanted the car back.
Eventually unable to turn the other cheek to a few of the more choice insults directed his way, he stepped from his Godmobile to better demonstrate the power of his faith and the spiritual armour it provideth. It is interesting to note that history has shown spiritual armour to be of limited effectiveness against non-spiritual swords and bullets and as such, it didn’t fare much better against the half eaten pizza and hotdogs that the seething hormonal mob began to throw. In true Christian fashion he felt the most effective way to preach God’s message of love and forgiveness was to start punching fifteen year olds and before you could say ‘you fucktard’ it was on. The sheer awesomeness of what was happening in front of me left me paralysed, unsure whether to laugh, applaud or kickback and get some popcorn as that vamp baiting sucker went down like an Irish choirboy. The closest thing to Divine Intervention came when the cops arrived and broke it up, thus saving him from being the first prophet in history to be martyred by a training bra. The fact that there was no discernible action by the Almighty saving him from a humiliating arse kicking proves that God is definitely Team Twilight and has no time for douchebags.
Unfortunately for me, my derisory laughter at Twihards scored me a definite Karmic turkey slap as I then went to see Jonah Hex, a film which makes Twilight look like Citizen Kane, albeit if Orson Welles had fangs and a predisposition to not having sex.

Pictured: Edward, as portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix

Not Pictured: Dignity

We were not dead. This was true though things had admittedly become a little awkward. The lookout platform above Hidden Lake, high in the mountains in Glacier National Park, had been reached after a two mile trek through ten foot of snow. Normally this would have been deemed a success except for the fact that we were now huddled beneath the aforementioned platform sheltering from a sudden and savage weather change trying to remember if standing underneath a tree during a lightning storm was a good or a bad thing. It may or may not have been my idea to continue our trek all the way to the top despite the threat of inclement weather leading to possible fatality and even death. Safka claims it was entirely my fault whereas I think it silly to argue about minor details such as this. The fact was that despite being caught in a sub-arctic blizzard at an elevation of eight thousand feet, we were together and that’s all that should matter. My years of not training as a survivalist came to the fore and I elected we should try and walk back through the blinding snow and hail. Feeling confident we could make it, thoroughly prepared as we were what with Safka wearing her ‘Maid of the Mists’ plastic poncho from Niagara Falls and me leaving my fake North Face rain jacket from Nepal back in the car, we set off with nine foot of visibility and a Darwin Award in the offing.
Glacier National Park in northern Montana had so far been a big win. Bears had been seen, moose photographed and mountain goats that resembled something from Dante’s Petting Zoo of the Damned had frolicked on the hillsides. The jagged snowcapped peaks, carved and teased to sharp erect points by the glacial hands of nature, were magnificent and we’d driven through them via a precipitous route aptly titled ‘Going to the Sun Road’. The road was built in the 1930’s by dwarves on hiatus from Disney’s Snow White ^{[citation needed]} and named in the late ‘60’s either by someone on a really heavy Doors trip or Carlos Castaneda. If you don’t know who Carlos Castaneda is, then good.
The scenery was spectacular, the sun shining and the atmosphere serene, the only sound being the constant squeaking of my sphincter clenching and unclenching as we drove along the sheer rocky dropoffs. This bright clear weather had been the inspiration for our hike but had turned faster than Ricky Martin, leaving us as possible statistics for next week’s Ranger Report. Lost, cold, snowblind and hungrier than a Uruguayan soccer team, the blizzard miraculously and suddenly cleared. In utter joy I purloined Safka’s plastic poncho from her and belly tobogganed down the slope, my only brakes being my partially frozen fingers and a half chub. Returning to the Logan’s Pass visitors centre, we discovered it was in dire need of a Schnapps Bar. Annoyed at their inconsiderate lack of alcohol we changed into the last of our dry clothes and went in search of a mountain goat with a liquor license.

The seven day forecast is 'you're fucked.'

Safka enjoys the Great Outdoors

Totally not dead. FTW!

The clothing situation had become desperate

Yellowstone! The world’s first National Park! A mighty sprawling wilderness area larger than Pluto and twice as cold. Far from being populated by smart-talking bears stealing pic-a-nic baskets and wearing hats, the main wildlife crawling through Yellowstone National Park are tourists. Every summer the park fills to capacity with thousands of grey nomads in their mighty road whales, desperately intent on moving faster than Death; parental units determined to spend quality time with their barely remembered sprogs who themselves sit sullenly in the back seat fingering their PSP’s; and fauna groupies wishing to take that Das Animal Farmen experience one step further and live out their 3D bear bukkake fantasies. They load up with satellite tv’s, stereos, Wii’s, iPads and dirt bikes, each group making a concerted effort to get away from it all by bringing all of it with them.
The sheer volume of visitors makes getting a camp site at one of the ‘first come first served’ grounds scattered about the three hundred thousand hectares a rather desperate affair, often only settled by knife fights and dueling RV’s. Frustration levels can peak when stuck in a ‘Bison Jam’ as said tourists excitedly block the road to ogle hairy cows taking a shit as if they’d never seen Lygon Street on a Saturday night before. Buffalo are so prevalent in Yellowstone I kept looking around for Kevin Costner’s career, but all I could see was Kevin Costner doing the same thing. The real prize is sighting a Grizzly or a Brown Bear, preferably from a distance as they tend to favour disemboweling you over trading wisecracks and witty catchphrases. However, the approximately two billion visitors gunning their road whales through the peaceful serenity of the park guarantees this will never happen and the most bears you will see are providing a comfortable floor covering in many of the luxury lodges available in the park.
Heated as it is by the fires of Hades, Yellowstone constantly steams and seethes. The prevailing smell of sulphur is a constant as noxious mist rises from boiling spa pools and bubbling pits of Earth jism spit and gobble, reminiscent of the bathrooms in Taco Bell. The geyser area around ‘Old Faithful’ is several acres of post-apocalyptic moonscape bordered by perambulating zombies wearing socks and sandals.
Old Faithful herself has a Ron Jeremy-like reliability, going off in a spectacular gushing stream within a ten minute window of the predicted time. In readiness for nature’s money shot, I had secured a good seat only to be cock blocked by a wobbling continental mass with more chins than a Chinese phonebook and an arse like iMax, as in you had to turn your head to take it all in. Worried I’d get caught in its gravitational pull I proceeded to cough loudly and make subtle vocal noises such as ‘For fuck’s sake, have you got a building permit for that?’ much to Safka’s dismay and the amusement of the crowd around me. Fortunately within moments a ranger had sedated and tagged her, releasing her either back into the wild or the nearest lesbian rodeo. Seconds later Old Faithful shot its load, punctuated by the chittering of six hundred Canon Cybershots™ taking a lesser picture than could be bought on a thirty five cent postcard. We did the same, but with a better camera.

Even Nature has a Ron Jeremy

'That Costner bitch still owes me money'

Colorado is my new favourite place. Already we have seen a bear playing chicken on the Interstate, a child run full pelt into a glass cabinet and a woman catch a baseball with her face. We have ranged high into the Rockies where I frolicked in the snow until a small child abruptly taunted me with cries of ‘Haha you’re all wet!’ Realising he was only ten and that if it came down to it I could probably take him, I hit back with the juvenile yet effective ‘Your mum’s all wet.’ He may not have understood the reference but it seemed to shut him up. The Rockies are an amazing collection of snow-capped peaks creating the Continental Divide and the Trail Ridge road along them is an awe inspiring journey through the passes at twelve thousand feet. The cross winds at this height are murderous and can make it difficult to stand on a ledge and take your pants off. I took a photo for a passing motorcyclist who was also making the crossing, the only thing keeping him anchored to the road being the weight of his enormous balls. Respect.
But as awesome as these events have been, as fabulously entertaining and hospitable as our hosts Missy and Nanna Col have been, the one thing that tips the scales over into home baked good times is the fact that weed is legal here. You heard me. Mary Jane has woven her herbal spell on the mountain town of Denver and it’s enough to make Peter Tosh sign up for ski lessons. One hundred percent Boston legal. Well legalish. Sort of. They call it medical marijuana and you have to be diagnosed as being in chronic pain to qualify but as there’s people standing outside clinics charging ten bucks for a kick in the nuts that’s not usually much of a problem. It also helps that ‘Playstation Thumb’ is now a recognised medical condition in this part of the country.
The state law is very clear that this legislation is based around medicinal usage and to this end giggleweed is sold from ‘dispensaries’ rather than Head shops. These all have medical sounding names like ‘Hindu Kush’, ‘Red Eyed Buddha’, ‘Herban Legend’, and ‘Fuck Me I’m so Fucking High Get Me a Cookie Or I’ll Eat Your Face Off’. Additionally, medical terminology must be strictly adhered to so purchasing a water pipe to smoke your medicine will get you sympathetic clucking about how long you’ve got to live, whereas asking for a bong will buy you a year in the big house with Tommy Chong as a cellmate. On top of being able to purchase a variety of blends and breeds of the holy herb (as well as dope lollypops, cookies and sugar straws etc), you have the right to grow up to twenty plants for personal use. On top of that, if you collect the medical cards of other chronic pain sufferers/Xbox addicts, you can grow their plants as well. Collect enough cards and you now have a personal use crop somewhere between Pablo Escobar and Woody Harrelson. The cycle is completed as you sell your excess produce back to the dispensaries and contribute to a booming green economy. Everybody wins, especially Seven Eleven’s and the makers of Hershey chocolate bars.
With Colorado now being governed by at least two of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the side effect of this is that everyone is fucking high all the time. Anyone you see at any time of the day is high. The pedi-cab driver who took us the baseball was so high we paid him in donuts and corn chips.
Nanna Col had indulged us in that most traditional of American pastimes, Throwball Aircricket. Getting past the security check and into the stadium proved easier than expected, though still nerve racking due to the hip flask of JD nestled firmly against my ball sack. (Much like cricket, baseball only makes sense when you’re wasted and smuggling alcohol into sporting events to avoid paying for overpriced watered down beer is a time honoured American tradition. In fact, if you don’t do it, it’s like the terrorists have already won.)
Denver’s ball team is the Colorado Doobies and they play under contractual obligation to be baked the entire game. As they were playing the Milwaukee Brewers who have a similar obligation to an alcohol company it made for an even match up. The highlight of the game was the aforementioned face catch which made me laugh my drink out my nose. The woman in the next seat tried to scold me for finding humour in someone else’s pain but I was too busy snarfing my jack and coke onto the row in front of me to care. Some people just don’t know comedy.

That'll be three donuts and a Hersheys thanks

Pretty much covers it

What was needed was a game changer

Special moments should be shared with special friends

So unlike Springfield, Narnia and Brisbane, Deadwood is a real place. The rough and tumble history of this frontier town is apparent everywhere you look, most obviously with the withered husk staffing the info booth. With a look on her face like she’d been stood up by Death, she gave us little help and lots of attitude. Overall she appeared more interested in old person flirting with a grey nomad on his retirement Harley who was fondling the brochures with barely concealed Parkinson’s. My questions as to the whereabouts of Wild Bill Hickok’s grave were responded to with a tightening of the wrinkles and a brief sniff like dry sandpaper before she continued to croak coquettishly at Grandpa J Fox. Giving up, I slipped him two Viagra and a chimney brush and fucked off to find the cemetery.
We paid our respects to Wild Bill, Seth Bullock and Calamity Jane (who in real life was less Doris Day and more Roseanne Barr) and watched a re-enactment of Wild Bill’s assassination in the Number 10 Saloon that was awesome in the same way that rectal bleeding is. There may have been sawdust on the floor but I felt the authenticity somewhat lacking as the guy playing Wild Bill had been Colorado Charlie Utter three seconds earlier while the assassin Jack McCall came in, shot Wild Bill in the back of the head then went back to bussing tables. Mounted in pride of place above the door was a wooden chair, ostensibly the one Hickok had been sitting in when he got the Lincoln Special in the middle of his Texas Hold ‘em. Considering that the town burnt down twice between 1876 and now, it must have been made of fucking asbestos and was therefore an OHS risk to patrons and staff alike requiring immediate removal. In order to get here, a detour through the Badlands had been taken. This iconic landscape was full of bleak twisted formations of rock and small children urinating on them. Prairie dogs pouted like obese meerkats and some place magical called Wall Drug came ever closer. Despite billboards promising it to be a mix between a cure for cancer and free cocaine, it turned out to be a fucking gift shop selling bad coffee and a hatful of bullshit.
We moved on to Mount Rushmore, took some photos, picked Washington’s nose and left. If you want to know what it’s like, look at a postcard. That’s what it’s like.
Keen to reach Denver and our friend Colin, we hit the interstate hard and made it most of the way through Nebraska. Nebraska’s main exports seem to be corn and cowshit. The general smell of the place is fetid and sometimes so overpowering that if I closed my eyes it was like being back in Footscray. However, Nebraska had one saving grace of awesome that Footscray does not: Carhenge. Some say this mysterious construction of cars and car parts was built by ancient rednecks to predict their welfare cheques. Others believe it was a man by the name of Jim Reinders, driven mad by the stench of cow farts and the constant fear of having nothing to do. All that anyone knows for sure is that there really is nothing to do in Nebraska. We intended to sleep in the shadow of this great monument, but the likelihood of being date raped by local teenagers caused us to move to a nearby truckstop where there were toilets and the quality of date rape is much higher.

As seen in the new Ikea catalogue

The original cast of 'Herbie Goes Bananas'

We traveled through a haze of rain and boredom; a malaise inspired entirely by the flat dull blah of the Midwest. The flat plain farmlands of Illinois had blended seamlessly into the flat plain farmlands of Iowa, themselves a stark contrast to the flat plain farmlands of Nebraska. The most exciting thing about Iowa had been the highway signs promoting Jesus, anti-abortion and diesel fuel, sometimes all on the same billboard. ( There seems to be a propensity for anti-abortion signs in the Midwest to feature really ugly children, which to me seems a little self defeating. Makes me want to buy the diesel fuel though)
The day had already not gone well. Apart from brief stops to moon passing RV’s it had mostly been spent getting continually lost trying to locate the future birthplace of one Captain James Kirk. Although correctly identifying the location of this momentous future event as the town of Riverside in Iowa, Uncle Google had otherwise screwed us royally by directing us to a completely different Riverside in Iowa, hundreds of miles distant. Additionally we’d earlier taken a wrong turn and driven fifty miles towards Kansas, not realising what had happened as everything in this part of the country looks exactly the fucking same. Somehow we had ended up passing through Atlantic, a town with more churches than people and owned entirely by Coca Cola, then East Peru, a deceptively named settlement home of Apple Barons and absolutely no cocaine. Even more annoying was the late discovery that at one point we’d gone within twenty miles of the Riverside we wanted, but whatever geeks had proclaimed this corner of bumfuck-nowhere JTK’s hometown may have built a scale replica of the USS Enterprise but had neglected to include any fucking signage to it. The felching straw that really broke the camel’s back however was the moment of utter humiliation as a barely sentient gas station attendant told me that not only was I in completely the wrong fucking town but Captain Kirk was a fictional character. Fuck you Google. I just wanted to pay a bit of homage to a man who can seek out distant planets, discover new species and deliver a mighty intergalactic donkey punch to shagalicious alien babes but instead I got Dwayne at the ‘Kum and Go’ (it’s a real place) lecturing me on how Enterprise was a superior show. My riposte was to tell him to stick Scott Bakula up his arse and give me twenty gallons on pump three. I would have been harsher but I recognised him as the ugly kid off the abortion sign. If Kirk had been using Google, we’d all be speaking Klingon, not just a few geeks at Comicon and a friend of mine called Duncan.

Pick a Jesus. Any Jesus.

I would have asked for a refund

Possibly the future birthplace of Captain Kirk

Although America has often felt like a living movie set, the streets of Chicago have not been filled with soul drenched singing diners and fat guys in cheap suits and sunglasses snorting on set cocaine. Instead, the local ice hockey team winning their first cup in seven hundred years caused the Windy City to overflow with douchebags and wankers bussed in from the suburbs all jumped up on cheap bourbon and hollow victory. As the sun rose, this smegma scraped from the city’s foreskin and now smeared on its urban shaft was drunkenly rolling about the streets, spoiling for fights with unsuspecting Australian tourists rather than chicken dancing to Ray Charles with a side arm.
I had woken up with a blues inspired hangover courtesy of a big black wailing mamma named Shirley Johnson and a shitload of the aforementioned cheap bourbon, so was not really in the mood to sightsee. The band had been awesome, laying down smoking tunes and pushing their CD’s for three odd hours as they filled the tiny venue with howling blues straight from the soul. However as the crowd consisted entirely of white tourists saying ‘Hot Dang!’ I felt more Ross and Rachel than Jake and Elwood.
Despite our parlous state the following morning, travel guilt overcame us so we dragged our arses out of bed and into the mean streets of Chicago to have a look around. Within five minutes some native tosspot whose fashion accessories consisted of carrot chunks and a urine stain had tried to hassle me, shouting ‘What?! What?!’ as he stumbled in my direction. Fortunately his girlfriend dragged him away otherwise I would have had to have given him a very nasty look. It was obviously unusual to have this many people wandering about as not even the dogs walk in this town. Pugs in handbags, a spaniel in a baby frontpack, we were one step away from seeing a fatballed labradour on a disability scooter. The sight of two poodles in a pusher was enough to make us say fuck it and retreat to the safety of our hotel room to salve our heads with pretzels and crap reality TV. (‘Bridal Boot Camp’ = WTF?)
Later in the day, we damned our souls eating something called Chicago Deep Dish Pizza. This traditional dish is apparently a ‘must eat’ if you visit here and can best be described as Chuck E. Cheese taking a dump in a pie crust. It has approximately eleven billion calories and tastes not dissimilar to bloated arse.
We followed that up with a visit to Second City, the legendary improv/sketch troupe whose alumni include John Belushi, Ryan Stiles, Steve Carell and Tina Fey. Suffice to say it was awesome and I may have weed a little bit.

Not technically food

Epic Pizza Fail

We passed through a strange land where neck beards are stylin’ and your surrey might not have a fringe on top but it will have a number plate and rego papers. Like Sergeant Murtaugh hunting Han Solo, we were out of place yet fascinated by the prolific hat wearing and barn building happening around us. Mighty horses the size of large horses pulled ploughs in fields and for a time I felt I was caught in a strange hybrid of The Truman Show and The Waltons. We stopped at an Authentic Amish Farm™ run by people dressed as authentic Amish™ where the staff carpark seemed full of authentic Amish™ Fords and Toyotas. They tried successfully to sell me Amish cookbooks and postcards. In return I took their photographs in a blatant attempt to steal their souls but as most of them seemed to drive Buicks and have iPhones no one gave a shit.
To get to this Midwestern land of Mennonites, we skirted the Great Lakes of Ontario, Eire, and Michigan, entering that which is known in this grand land as the Mid-West™.
Even with the recent economic crisis there seems to have been no tightening of the Bible Belt, passing as we did a multitude of churches, several shrines to aborted children and so many billboards advertising abstinence I thought it was a department store.
Despite drawing near to the R&B mecca of Chicago, most of the local radio stations play a house blend of classic rock and bullshit so middle of the road it’s got tyre marks. (The definition of Classic Rock in this country seems to be anything by white people without slide guitars.) As it was either that or Jeebers riding a big green tractor, we elected to rock along with Mickey Bolton and the man who seems to own the aural tracts of middle America Phil fucking Collins. (Intense analysis Something in the Air Tonight reveals it is either about the electric yet ineffable feeling inherent in the sexual chemistry between a man and a drum machine, or someone doing a lingering fart in the studio.)
There’s only so many times a man can listen to the same four chords played on synthesizer so we switched over to ChristFM and heard some ‘PJ’ (Preach Jockey – I swear I didn’t make that up) declaring for what he called the ‘Ultimate Fighting Jesus’. While the concept of the Fisher of Men entering the Octagon for a few rounds with Brock Lesner intrigues me and is something I’d deem worthy of ecclesiastical investigation, whether I’d cough up for the Pay-per-View is another matter. (I am however very interested to see what kind of roundhouse can be delivered when you’re nailed to a bit of two by four.)

The Amish Space Program was well underway

Niagara Falls is Canada’s biggest tourist attraction, being as it is the home to Planet Hollywood, WWE Café, Ripley’s Believe it or Not and Louis Tussauds Wax Museum. Every year thousands of Americans cross the state border to visit the numerous haunted houses, splash in the indoor water park and do all the things they can do in Vegas but with different money. Its glow in the dark mini golf is second to none and the towns’ vaguely racist name appeals to many latently supremacist mid-westerners.
But tucked behind the fun parlours, mirror mazes and porn shops are a couple of rather mighty waterfalls that seem to single handedly prop up the Canadian economy. There were several choices on offer to help fully experience the epic concept of falling water, many involving being inside a movie theatre and watching graphic video reenactments of actual water falling. All the attractions bear evocative names such as ‘Niagara Fury’ and ‘White Water Walk’. We opted for ‘Maid of the Mists’, which utilized the rather old fashioned concept of getting on a boat and looking at them. We caught an elevator to the dock (I told you, only terrorists walk) put on smurf condoms and sailed up into the roaring mists. Many words could be used to describe the experience: awe inspiring, overwhelming, colossal, but top of the list would have to be deafening and wet. Twenty minutes later we were exchanged with a dry load of blue bagged tourists, placed back in the fart filled elevators and ejaculated into the gift shop.
Niagara itself is not large so even the ghetto area where we were staying was in easy mugging distance of downtown. We had decided to camp the previous evening, but not before checking out the numerous cheap and sleazy hotels situated nearby. Being cheap and sleazy myself I thought it a perfect fit but although rooms often featured heart shaped tubs and vibrating beds, they often failed to have doors while the décor could be best described as ‘dead hooker chic’.
We bailed on Canuckland in the afternoon, glad to be getting back to the Land of the Free, or at least the Land of the Significantly Cheaper. The customs officer didn’t care where we’d been or what we had in the car. Crossing back was so easy I realised the worst thing you could bring back from Canada is a baguette and a dose of moose clap. You could even bring a moose across as long as he had a visa and didn’t want to work.
Have just realised I haven’t said fuck once in this post.

Tardy Smurf

The Seventies called, they want their architecture back

I’m in Canada. I’m not sure how it happened but I woke up and everything was metric. Everyone’s speaking a weird language called NotEnglish and it’s raining. I saw a moose and a beaver, not in that order. Montreal has an underground pedestrian tunnel system beneath much of the city for when it gets really cold, which is apparently most of the time. We went there to explore this magical and mysterious subterranean kingdom and found it less like Wonderland and more like Westfield. Imagine Highpoint Shopping Centre if you will, but with less Commodores, more baguettes and about the same amount of stabbings. I practiced my French by queue jumping, smoking and retreating quickly in good order.
There is supposed to be a Notre Dame Cathedral here (one of the franchises obviously, not the original) but the police blocked off every street within the CBD so people could enjoy riding bikes in the torrential downpour. I don’t know if they raised enough money to cure cancer but they definitely raised pneumonia awareness. Unable to get anywhere we gave two bucks to a homeless guy with a hump to swing off a lamp post and scream ‘The bells! The bells!’ thus fulfilling our cultural agenda. Canada does not impress me so far as it’s more expensive than the States, alcohol is bizarrely hard to get and there seems to be a complete lack of gun related crime. Combine this with the miserable weather and if it wasn’t for the garlic and the funny street signs I’d think I was at home. Even the moose we saw didn’t have proper horns. It was still big and moose-like but without the horns it didn’t feel committed to its role, as if it was a bit over the whole tourist thing anyway.

And where the fuck is Childe Rowland?!

The dream is over. I’ve been wanting to deny it, but after six weeks of dropping wanton ‘G’days’, ‘Strewth’s’ and ‘Crikey’s’ I have to face the awful truth: no one gives a shit. No longer are Australians in this country feted and toasted like rare beasts and exotic birds. Gone are the days where the sound of a billabong in your accent caused drinks to be laid gratis on the bar and young ladies of American persuasion to joyfully ‘head Down Under’ without money changing hands. I’m not sure who ruined it for the rest of us (though personally my money’s on Jesse Spencer) but the closest we’ve come to cultural recognition was in a Florida rest stop when the ageing captain of a Road Whale cracked himself up saying ‘That’s not a knife!’ several times in a row and asking me where my kangaroo was. His hillbilly guffaws died when I said it was out the back next to his banjo and his sister and I left before he could do me an injury with his walking frame or say ‘cobber’ again.
Anyway we’re in Maine. Beautiful Maine. Land of lobster, book shops, antique barns and Stephen King. Maine itself is much like it’s most famous author: very prolific, has a good set up followed by some flabby exposition and a chilling twist at the end, in this case Canada. To truly replicate the Maine experience, sit in your refrigerator on a rickety chair, eat a lobster wrapped in an old book and watch The Mist.
But Maine is awesome. Indeed, a state can only truly be described as awesome when it has lobster as a fast food. In Bar Harbor I ate lobster ice cream (vanilla and fish – a natural combination), lobster sandwiches, lobster soup and even a blueberry pie (no lobster, it was just that good.) Lobsters are highly esteemed in this state and have had the vote since 1957. Indeed, many Kennedys have been lobsters and Marilyn Monroe was rumoured to keep one on her person at all times.
Originally covered in rain and mist, the next day in Bar Harbor broke warm and sunny so we explored the rocky mountains of the Acadia National Park, trekking to wild isolated destinations on rugged wilderness trails only to discover that they ended with a carpark and fourteen thousand pensioners that had got there before us in a tour bus.
A sunset worthy of our cheap cask wine was watched, toasted and duly photographed as we got drunk on the pier and photo-bombed the other tourists. Despite my loud uncouth behaviour no one got angry with me as really, who’s going to front on a pants-less drunk Australian smelling of lobster? I might have had a frickin’ knife.

Makes 'Victoria: The Garden State' seem a bit lame

My audition for the Spiderman musical did not go as planned

Salem equals Witches. And unlike the good people of Roswell, the residents of Salem have embraced their history with all the fervour of a dying kid on a dolphin. T-shirts, tarot readings, ghost tours; this town knows where its’ bread is buttered and lays it on thick. Also unlike Roswell, in which an event of dubious authenticity had a museum whose earnest conviction could have shamed the Smithsonian, the museums representing Salem’s authentic and well documented past seemed to have been put together by Uwe Bolle and the guy who thought up Weekend at Bernie’s.
Of the town’s approximately eleven billion museums, we chose The Salem Witch Museum, partly because it’s name seemed fairly indicative of what we were after but mostly because it was closest to where we parked the car. Appropriately describing the experience we had inside is difficult, as I’m torn between ‘shitastic’ and ‘craptacular’, with a few outside votes for ‘fucktarded’
The history of the Salem Witch Trials was summed up in a twelve-minute presentation during which a booming voice over boomed as we watched lights come up on various mannequins stolen from Macy’s. Afterwards we were treated to a guided tour of a small room containing the ‘Changing Perceptions of Witches’ exhibition where I learnt the difference between a still shot from The Crucible and a poster from The Wizard of Oz. (Hint: it’s Daniel Day Lewis’ beard.) Two mannequins dressed for a midnight session of Lord of the Rings explained to us about Wicca while the tour guide mouthed ‘kill me’ through desperate eyes. My brain was starting to haemorrhage and I fought hard to stay conscious as I was struck by a sudden premonition of waking up in a bath full of ice one kidney short (not necessarily a bad trade for getting out of there). Just in time however, they unbarred the doors and in true American tradition we exited through the gift shop.
The actual Witch Trials of 1691 and 1692 are a mind-blowing example of what can happen when people are really fucking bored. In a world where pornography was a woman’s nose and iMax was called ‘being outside’, accusing people of Devilry gave a welcome respite from the daily grind of work, pray, try not to die of smallpox, pray some more, masturbate furiously, flagellate yourself in repentance for said masturbation then get up and work again that made up the average Puritan workaday week. That the one man to call bullshit, John Proctor, was hanged as a witch despite being right just proves that an individual can never beat the system and no one likes a smart arse.
Salem apparently has some other interesting history involving pirates, vampires and Rob Lowe but by that time my wallet had called the Rape Crisis Centre and had left for a counseling session. We continued up the highway towards the mystic east and the misty swathes of King country.

Actual educational outcome

The week has been split between NYC and hanging with my sister, brother in law and beautiful new niece in leafy Connecticut. Once again, we found our poor road tripping selves being lavished with luxuries such as food, heating and non-moving bedding.
Having spent the time enjoying myself far too much in this most big of all apples I realise I have fallen behind on my accounts, so a brief précis of a weeks worth of fun seems appropriate.
For reasons best not gone into (vaginal blackmail) we found ourselves in New Jersey watching Bon Jovi play a hometown gig. The rain had been pissing down most of the evening (the elements and I were in agreement on the support act) but the Gods of Rock smiled upon the little man with the big teeth, stopped the downpour and let the music rule for three hours. We danced and sang along with mullets of all ages as Jon, Richie and the other two no one really cares about turned back the rock clock. (Though from look him, Richie Sambora only turned it back to lunchtime.) It took us longer to get home than the band had played for due to the amazing cultural experience of a New York traffic jam at one thirty on a Thursday morning.
The next few days were spent in Manhattan experiencing a variety of well worn tourist experiences: we waved at the Statue of Liberty, considered walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, took photos of stores they wouldn’t let us into and gave money to black people who sung to us in subway trains. On Fifth Avenue I passed the glass roofed Apple store and slipped on fresh nerd drool. Men and women of all makes and models queued all the way down the spiralled staircase, breathing heavily and sweating like Gary Glitter in an orphanage. The store below was a morass of seething humanity, like something akin to Dante’s Inferno (if Dante’s tortured souls were pleading less for mercy and more for iPads). Moving on I recorded a moving tribute to John Lennon in front of the Dakota building before spending all the time allotted to the Guggenheim museum inside FAO Schwartz, the toy store out of Big. (And yes, I did dance on the big piano and no I didn’t get a promotion. In fact, I now realise that Big was definitely a fantasy movie as Tom Hanks didn’t have to hurt any children in order to skip the queue.)
Saturday night was spent watching and then drinking with the Henson crew at Stuffed and Unstrung thanks to my muppeteering friend Tyler. We’d had dinner and drinks with young Sir Bunch before the show, then moved on with the crew afterwards to a traditional New York bar called ‘Pete’s. It is apparently the pub that O. Henry made famous, though whether it was through his writings or the thirteen bodies he stored in the basement was unclear. Many laughs were had and interesting people met and anyone who says it was me that humped Brian Henson’s leg obviously had less to drink than I did.
More leg humping was on the menu as Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell performed live for my viewing pleasure in the heartwarming tale of a racist bigot looking for his missing hand in a seedy hotel whose manager has a thing for gibbons. Ahh New York. A grand time in a grand town.

Safka releases her inner bogan.
It's not a tough lock to pick.

Greedo shot first

Yes we can.

Deeply, deeply moving...

We needed an edge. We’d become weak and soft with easy living and canned pet food and needed to get back that eye of the tiger. Washington had made us too civilized and despite the awesomeness of her museums we had been left disappointed not seeing Obama on the White House balcony licking a nicotine patch. (Incidentally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the sitting President of the most powerful nation on earth trying to kick the sticks while in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Having quit myself, I understand that the only thing between Canada and total nuclear annihilation right now is a strong coffee and a pack of Winnie Blues, so if the man wants to spark up in the Oval Office, can the lecture and get him a fucking ashtray.)
The New Jersey Turnpike seemed just the thing to unleaven our travel bread so we hit the 95 North late in the evening and went hard. No stopping. No prisoners. No Mercy. We stopped in Baltimore half an hour later for dinner. The town seemed nice, just the right blend of John Waters and The Wire. We ate in a small bar and grill within easy walking distance of hookers and met people who said ‘A-ight’ a lot.
Our mad overnight dash up the New Jersey Turnpike soon continued and saw us one evening in a truckstop car park richer and thirty dollars worth of road tolls poorer. (Eight bucks to cross the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, which was probably a lot more than he ever paid to do it. To be fair, he may have been getting shot at. To be unfair, he wore a girly wig and funny pants.) Our first view of the Manhattan skyline was impressive and unforgettable in the way that only a city skyline completely obscured by fog can be. We stopped briefly at my sisters’ then returned to the city that never sleeps to fulfill a life long dream of watching someone else be famous on TV.
I’d done everything humanly possible to screw up getting tickets to the last Letterman taping for the season. An extra special show featuring Sarah Jessica Boring was planned and we now waited breathlessly at the front of the standby queue being hectored by Late Show oompa-loompas concerning appropriate behaviour in the studio. (No whistling. No Heckling. No references to the dubious parentage of SJP’s children.) I’d put in for the ticket lottery several weeks earlier and been successful but missed the call from the audience co-ordinator and lost my chance. Leaving random abuse referring to the co-ordinator’s dubious parentage on her answering machine had not encouraged her to call back so using a different name I tried the standby ticket number. I managed to get through but when questioned, failed to recall that Alan Kalter was a Fanta pants and the damned ginger cost me seats in the stalls. And so I found myself well back in the ‘maybe’ queue as people with tickets loudly weed themselves at the thought of viewing a sneak peek of Sex and the City 2, and SJP riding a camel. (No jokes here, it’s too easy.)
Standbys in front of us were slowly being granted spots in the guaranteed line until it was us next in line to be granted a golden ticket made of green paper. An oompa-loompa arrived however bearing the grave news that there were no tickets left, but once everyone had been seated, if there were any spare seats we could put on hair shirts and make supplication at the alter of Dave. The queue of Standies had bonded by this stage, trading life stories and favourite Dave moments. (‘I liked it when he saved the world!’ ‘I liked it when he brought world peace!’ ‘I liked it when he ruined the Oscars.’) The woman behind us had tried four times over the years to get into a taping and apparently never been this close. She seemed both near tears and complete loss of bladder control, dancing with agonised anticipation like a four year old with a UTI. We swore solidarity with her, declaring we wouldn’t go in unless she did too. An oompa-loompa came out and said there were only two more seats available, so we pissed her off and went inside.
We had seats. We watched the show. Dave was funny. SJP was not. The clip to Sex and the City 2 played and there wasn’t a dry seat left in the house except for two upstairs in the balcony. An hour later we were back on Broadway standing in the New York sunshine and ticking off the bucket list.

Safka demonstrates her excitement at the upcoming Spiderman musical 'Turn off the Dark.'

Deeply mired in the Washington’s one way system, I cursed my genetic inheritance that leaves me unable to pay for parking. Visiting Das Kapital on a Sunday I thought would not only ensure us of an untimed car space, but also mean that all good patriotic American’s would be hanging at Jeeber’s house watching the game (or whatever they do there) thus making parking easily available to heathen tourists like myself. But no, the place was full and I circled ever outwards like the rings of Saturn in search of a place to dump Sir Ian. We’d had good luck already when stopping to see the mighty statue of Lincoln in repose but had decided to drive closer to the White House as people seen engaging in any form of exercise in this country are often shot as terrorists. Lincoln himself was worth the short walk. A monument that manages to be both inspiring and devastatingly intimidating at the same time, (most likely the desired effect) Lincoln sits sternly overlooking the country he helped forge. The expression on his face is commanding but also quite pissed off, not unexpected of someone who not only has been sitting on cold concrete for a century without hemorrhoid cream, but also took a headshot from the old timey version of Brad Pitt.
The morning had been spent at Arlington National Cemetery, originally the home of the great Confederate General Lee. It was turned into a Union cemetery during the Civil War as a big ‘fuck you’ to Lee for helping the South make the North look stupid, but the idea stuck and so many thousands of Americans who served are buried here rather like a great marble scorecard. Several presidents are here as well including JFK, ironically placed amidst a beautiful grassy knoll.
But after Arlington, Lincoln and the big concrete pencil thing that is totally not a dick we spent a good hour in the car meandering through the choking traffic. Except for most of the people, Washington is very white. The buildings are carved white edifices that loom down at you and everywhere is stone and power.
Eventually finding a space somewhere near Kansas, we visited a random festival celebrating the food of the Americas. Like the Americas, it was pretty full with too many people trying to get into so we put Safka’s expert shoplifting skills into action, made off with some overpriced yet delicious paella and headed for the White House. Luckily Kansas is a good spot to see Chez Obama as security being what it is, it’s difficult to get any closer. After the obligatory photo opp where Safka threatened to leave me if I took my pants off, we spent hours wandering the myriad halls of Washington’s Smithsonian Museums. I saw spaceships and dinosaurs and Whoopi Goldberg breathlessly informed me about the galaxy in the Plane-arium, rather like watching a mash up of Star Wars and The Color Purple. Skylab was there, the Wright Brothers too and a real life Lunar Lander that looked nothing like a tinfoil and pipe cleaner construction belonging to a Year 9 art project.
As the gunshots and sirens of the nations capital faded behind us, I realised how edumacated I had become. We had toured the city’s great monuments spent hours wandering its awesome museums and walked decades in dog years to our car and back.

Patriotic weather shield defies Communist rain

Totally not a dick

A family career tomb

What do ‘Zombie Apocalypse Unit’, a guy called Bubba and a woman with a badly permed mullet all have in common? They sell guns! And not just any old weapons of mass destruction, but high-powered sniper rifles (for when that grassy knoll is just too far away), gold bling .44 Magnums (for the gangsta pimp in all of us) and the AK74 SU with 30mm suppressed grenade launcher (for when you absolutely, positively… well, you know the rest.) Yes, we attended the Southeastern Guns and Knives Show in Fredericksburg, kind of like a survivalist’s swap-meet or a reality show of World of Warcraft. Apart from the fairly mind-blowing array of weaponry available for purchase, it was the vendors and attendees I found the most compelling. Unfortunately, photography was punishable by redneck so I have no images to represent the varied moustaches, mullets, buzz cuts and walleyes that graced the packed aisles. My current porn ‘tash meant I was able to blend in but I was still under strict instructions from Safka to rein in all sarcasm, insults, faux hillbilly accents and general sniggering, which mostly I managed to do, though the guy purveying a P90 sub machine gun and wearing a Cats t-shirt really pushed me to the edge. (On reflection it just proves you can pack serious heat and love show tunes at the same time. Although the local amateur production of Annie Get your Gun could be terrifying.) We slowly browsed the stalls in shock and awe. Safka fell in love with the cutest pink .38 Sig Sauer while I was torn between the aforementioned Magnum and a Desert Eagle with laser sight. Amongst the sales of Confederate belt buckles, anti-government propaganda and beef jerky, I found a pair of hunting sunglasses with a tiny HD video camera built in, for when you want to be able to re-watch that screaming deer in its death throes or just make some gonzo porn on the fly.
Thoroughly freaked out but with the bloodlust on us, I realized we needed to go that step further and see some actual war and destruction. Happily, we stumbled across a Civil War re-enactment of the Battle of Harris Farm in nearby Spotsylvania. We munched on giant turkey legs as hundreds of volunteers dressed in the Grey and the Blue fired cannons and muskets at each other, fell off their horses and generally played Army for an hour or so. Being a Civil War re-enactment in Virginia I figured it wasn’t going to be a good day for the Union and by the end of the hour there were many of them lying in the grass in hideous death poses, chatting idly and scratching their balls. Truly war is a terrible thing.
The volunteers apparently camp on the site in traditional civil war style and fight several battles over the weekend. We wandered through the encampment and chatted amiably with some of the dead as they relaxed afterwards with a traditional Bud Lite.
As we left, a small child asked his mother if the good guys had won. ‘We won this one honey’ she drawled ‘but we didn’t win the war.’

The technological superiority of the Confederacy was evident

'I can see the force is strong in this one..'

Some post-SNL careers were quite unexpected

Initially Grandpa refused the nursing home

A longish detour had led us to the Hamptons to celebrate the Jubilee of Chesapeake. This appeared to consist of pubescent teenagers wrestling black faced sheep (racist) and a carnival seemingly popular with no one. (Spooky as that sounds it was less Ray Bradbury and more Shannon Noll.)
War sounded like much more fun so Petersburg was marked on the itinerary. On the way however, a stop was made at a large bargain store to buy a puppet. (It was a large bargain.) I tried to pay with my trusty Visa travel card, already used continuously throughout the trip, but was told by the mouthbreather at the checkout that she couldn’t accept it because the card didn’t bear a name. I told her that I didn’t have a name. She wrestled with this furiously for several seconds before following the mental flowchart back to step one and refusing my card again. I tried some light flirting by asking her if they were all her own teeth, to which she blushed, replied ‘Some. I guess’, but still wouldn’t take it. Giving up, I gave her a card with someone else’s name on it, stepped around her overbite and left. The more bargain the store, the more bargain the staff.
Leaving the Interstate again we discovered a seemingly abandoned theme park called ‘South of the Border’. This strange collection of rides and racial stereotypes appeared to provide hapless tourists the experience of illegal Mexican immigrants crossing into the USA. Not sure if it really was closed or just waiting for dark.
At Petersburg we walked on bones of long dead men and considered the seventy thousand casualties of the ten-month Civil War siege. I thought of the mighty combat fought to forge my home state of Victoria, where almost twenty seven people died in a nine minute battle, the small number of casualties due mainly to the fact that most of the combatants had fucked off, it being the weekend and all. Sometimes I just love Australia.
The Siege of Petersburg is known for many things, mainly for how often the Union Army managed to balls it up and yet still go on to win. The Disaster of the Crater is a particular standout, when the Northern soldiers completed a feat of engineering brilliance by tunneling under the Confederate lines, packed said tunnel with four tonnes of gunpowder and tore the Southern pickets a new one. What had been the frontline billets of a Virginian Artillery Regiment, sleeping peacefully in the wee small hours, was suddenly a massive smoldering crater containing a veritable Mechano set of body parts. Despite the brilliant success of the plan however, not a lot of thought had been given to the follow up as instead of avoiding the large smoking pit of hell that had so recently appeared in front of them, fifteen thousand Union troops ran straight into the hole. Here they then stayed unable to advance up the sheer sides of the pit until the Confederates kicked them out four thousand casualties later. God was apparently on everybody’s side that day, and nobody’s. The Union General Ulysses S. Grant later described it ‘a stupendous failure’, as ‘monumental clusterfuck’ didn’t read as well off the page.
In need of cheering, Richmond, capital of the Confederacy (or bottom of the AFL) was visited and we chanced upon the Edgar Allen Poe museum. This contained, amongst other things, signed letters by the great writer, a lock of his hair, his television and a hot girl in reception.
Although not his house the museum was located in the oldest surviving building in Richmond (1736) and contained ‘The Enchanted Garden’, a horticultural creation modeled on the description of said garden in Poe’s poem ‘To Helen’. As the garden consisted mainly of a square of grass and a few pot plants, I decided Helen couldn’t have been much of a looker.
Richmond was lovely, with a feel and look about it reminiscent of both Sydney and Melbourne. (As if this was the child they wanted to have but got Adelaide instead.) Toured the very impressive Capitol building, managed to avoid getting arrested (see photo) and called it a day.

A country rich in history

There's a metaphor in here somewhere

Saf finds Governmental porn stash

'This Governer ran on a platform of tree support.

Debating whether fireflies were fairies or irradiated mosquitoes took up much of the morning drive, but, arguments aside, Georgia is very noice. We continued through verdant countryside watching the roadkill change from ‘dillo to skunk and almost added to it when a wild turkey stumbled onto the interstate, obviously drunk, threatening traffic with a broken bottle. I’m not sure if it was wild or just aggravated but it looked like it does on the label, and that’s certainly more reliable than Wikipedia anyway.
We rolled into beautiful Savannah, the oldest planned city in the USA. Old houses, old riverfront, old people in RV’s touring the museum in the hopes that someone will let them die in one of the exhibits. An excellent museum really but the Americans have a knack of writing about savage losses in a fashion that depicts them as glorious victories, Savannah providing a case in point. The town was the site of a months long siege where the Allied forces for American Independence were gloriously unable to remove the dispirited British forces time and time again before eventually making a valiant retreat away from the battle leaving the foolish British in control of the town. They don’t deny the fact that they lost, they just put it in a way that makes it seem that it was a strategic defeat that would deliver the whole of the country into their hands. Considering they eventually won, maybe it was.
(On a side note, The Alamo is another classic example. Much is made of the vastly outnumbered defenders holding out for thirteen days before succumbing to the ravening Mexican hordes. Somewhere on a plaque behind a door in the cloakroom where the light doesn’t work is the fact that no one attacked them for twelve of those days and when they did, they went down like a two dollar hooker.)
Moved on to Charleston in South Carolina, another old city settled in 1670 and ate some nachos roughly the same age. Big houses I will never be able to own and the feeling that Secession is only a few beers and a loss to the Yankees away. Nice but not as nice as Savannah. I discovered that Charleston has it’s own accent which bears a close resemblance to the voice of Snake on The Simpsons. Did a ferry tour to Fort Sumter enhanced with pre-recorded audio done by the ghost of Troy McClure while dolphins played in the bowsprit and fished jumped and flipped under the gaze of the strange dark seabird we’ve named the Devil’s Pelican.
Heading out through the suburbs towards the next border I saw posters everywhere encouraging people to elect Bill Conner as Governor because he’s shot people and so knows what to do with the economy. (Ironic as no one I’ve met seems to vote.) These political posters where combat experience is exchangeable for a policy platform are only outnumbered by advertisements for Jeebers and bumper stickers pointing out the questionable nature of Evolution. The Man is omnipresent in South Carolina, His name plastered everywhere. Indeed, a cunning placement of the words ‘Jesus is Here!’ on a petrol station sign led to an awkward situation when further enquiry was made as to whether He was staff or management. And so we travel on…

I will have your fish AND your souls

I shot policies like you in Iraq!

mm yes. You make a good point there.

So Florida has finally come through with the goods. Rude annoying arsebags, Jeebers freaks and tour groups have given way to relaxing good times on a perfect beach and near instant-porn speeds on the interwebs. Thanks to Larry (who we met randomly in Melbourne last Boxing Day. I tried to explain cricket to him and he tried to explain American politics to me. A fair trade.) and the lovely Elizabeth we have had our batteries recharged, lead replaced in our pencils and been generally treated like kings (not Rodney). Seafood dinners, bbq’s and copious amounts of crisp refreshing mountain fresh Coors Lite (I’m trying for some sponsorship here) were sprinkled amongst sun tanning and ocean frolicking on aforementioned perfect beach.
The Sunday was a little overcast so Larry and Elizabeth took us down to Sarasota (in the convertible – oh yeah) so we could see a bit of old school Florida. Apparently the west coast of Florida was essentially built by one John Ringling of Ringling Brothers Circus fame and as such the roads tend to loop de loop and more than fifteen people can fit into a mini. He went a bit Citizen Kane in the end, bought a lot of art, a massive garden and built what is known in architectural circles as a big fuck off mansion before going broke and bequeathing it all to the State of Florida leaving them to pay the hugely outstanding bills. A true philanthropist. Our visit to Chez Ringling and its surrounds was most awe inspiring. I made a solitary fart joke in honour of the great man before we left to drink beers at the marina.
But Monday found us leaving the delights of Anna Maria Island and heading towards Georgia. We stopped on the way to visit the permanent Dali exhibition at St Petersburg. What does Dali have to do with Florida? Well nothing but nevertheless they have a fairly impressive permanent Dali exhibit next to the boat yard and just up from the ghetto (we got lost). In order to make uniquely genius works of brilliant art more appealing and accessible to the masses, the gallery has invited certain public figures to comment on the paintings, which they then place next to the works. This led me to learn that Joe Maddon, coach of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team thinks Dali’s oil on burlap impressionist piece Cadaqués is ‘pretty cool’. The gallery is fairly awesome however, with many of his best works on display. The holographic installation of Alice Cooper blew my mind out the back of my skull, thus making Dali’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the wall behind me even more surreal.
Some hard driving north has since seen us cross the border into Georgia. We’ve camped amongst tall thin trees and low lying palms while fireflies flicker and dart like restless sparks in the forest. Nice.

Welcome to my lahvelee hoeme

Our friend Larry had invited us to the west coast, which he promised had been sprayed for rednecks, so we flipped Miami the metaphorical finger and bailed. Passing through the Florida Everglades we thought we’d stop for an airboat ride through the ‘River of Grass’, a misnomer really as it is in fact made of alligator poo and tour groups. Scooting along this aquatic savannah on a metal plate with a ceiling fan strapped to the back of it made me feel all Don Johnson, (though Don wasn’t too impressed and soon asked me to stop) and it was invigorating to experience the wind through my hair as the helicopter motor removed the higher frequencies of my hearing range. The tour place we stopped at, one of approximately three million along a hundred metre stretch of road, recommended itself to us by having a life size diorama of a bear about to surprise buttcanker a deer while riding in the back of an airboat. (This unfortunately was not indicative of the either the wildlife or the amount of animal buggery we saw on the tour. The best thing we did see was in front of the gift shop and took the form of a mullet that Michael Bolton would have hunted down and masturbated over.)
Later as we watched a fairly lame bout of alligator wrestling (never bet against the house) I noticed the propensity for female tourists arriving in Florida to buy shorts with a severely inappropriate arse to cloth ratio. Now, no one likes to get stuck on the highway watching the mudflaps on a semi so I don’t see why I should either when I’m queuing for the bathroom.
Back on the road, we hightailed it through panther country and drove hard to Anna Maria Island where Larry had arranged a company condo quite literally on the beach. I shaved my beard into what I thought was an appropriate porn moustachio and finished the day drinking beer, eating seafood and watching the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico.

The gators weren't the only things that were hungry

When will someone stop the madness?
(Note hot bear/deer action in the background. The deer suspects nothing. Nothing!)

And it was the best Christmas ever...

A day of relaxed decadence was called for so we headed for Miami’s South Beach to laze and frolic. After a cheap beachside breakfast amongst the art deco opulence we paid our respects at the location of the chainsaw scene in Scarface, (Now a ‘Johnny Rockets’ burger bar. Coincidence? I think not.) then hit the broad white sands, rented an umbrella and settled in for the day.
I mused on the unfairness of life as immediately in front of me lay an extremely attractive young lady sunbathing topless with almost matching bottoms. She lay all day thus exposed but in deference to the fairly scorching Florida sunshine, she rigorously applied a generous amount of sunscreen to her entire body every hour on the hour. She was so thorough in her application that I felt I should do the right thing and tipped her twenty bucks.
But both our lazy pleasure and my half chub were short lived as there arrived next to us, in a hideous cackle of hick drawl and billybobs, the first honest to goodness white trash we have met on this trip. I wasn’t sure if they were a family or just from the same trailer but it seemed that one of the billybobs and one of the girls were boyfriend and girlfriend, as nauseatingly demonstrated by their tongue slapping oculations and constant physical intimacy. Listening to their conversation further I realized not only had I made a mistake as to their relationship but that in some parts of the world it is perfectly acceptable to put suntan lotion on your sister in that fashion.
They were in fact a family of four (plus the Brazilian rent boy they had picked up off a Gonzo porn shoot), and it was the mother that led the cacophony as she rolled squawking on the sand like a birthing harpy, a sound we later deciphered as laughter. Her two daughters’ contributions to society seemed to have been urinating in the gene pool and appearing in The Bang Bus and despite their surgically enhanced chesticles, both had been unable to escape their mothers’ genetic legacy of a face like a bucket of smashed crabs. The three of them gabbled and jibbered like spastic hookers (or ‘ho-tards’ to use the Latin), while the son/son in law (I told you, the line was blurred) a hulking bald condom of a man, hairy like a dogs armpit, capered and pranced overexcitedly at the unexpected chance he had been given to procreate.
Loud, drunk and obnoxious they shattered the blissful peace that had been. As we grimly huddled under our rented umbrella, I wondered how long it would be till they finished grooming each other for lice and started hurling their poo. I had a sudden epiphany that Natural Selection was an utter fallacy as by Darwin’s reckonings these people should have died out around the invention of birth control. Intelligent Design may not be a science (at least above the Mason-Dixon line) but it does prove that God either has a nasty sense of humour or lives in a trailer with his sister.
Sunburned, hungry and philosophically challenged we retired from the beach and headed towards our camp near the Miami Everglades. Our mood was lightened as we passed the brilliantly named Last Siesta Retirement Village and I reflected on the day, pondering the value of the caste system, or a least the value of a .45 with a full clip and a free fire zone.

The budget cuts on Miami Vice had been harsh

Our National Geographic Atlas listed it as Trinity Towers RV Park. What it should have said was Trinity Towers RV Park and Evangelical Christian Revival Praise Centre. I’m not sure what gave it away; The brochures for Holy Land (‘Christianity’s own Theme Park!’) in reception? The Angel shaped street lights? Perhaps the fact they advertised Full RV pullthroughs, hookups and baptisms. Whatever it was, we realized too late that we had stumbled onto a compound of Branch Floridians for whom the Rapture was due yesterday. In addition to Camping for Christ, Trinity Towers was also home to the Trinity Towers Broadcast Network beaming such pious programming as The Resurrection on Trial, To Hell and Back, and a feature film on the life of Jesus called The Revolutionary. (Though personally I doubt whether a man of Middle Eastern descent trying to check in wearing sandals and a toga and calling himself a revolutionary would be greeted as the Messiah. Makes you wonder whether the Second Coming has already happened but the poor bugger’s somewhere in Guantanamo with a bag over his head listening to Barney the Purple Dinosaur till his ears bleed.)
Unfortunately the ‘Gold Frankincense and Myrrh’ Gift Shop was closed by the time we got there but I did notice they had a Virtual Reality cinema, which I thought very appropriate.
We camped uneventfully without burning in the nine fires of hell but the Lord did punish our heathen ways by sending one of his minions to whipper-snipper the grass outside our van at 7:30 in the morning. Not exactly the apocalypse but very annoying none the less.

Either the Second Coming or the Myer Christmas windows

For the Messiah who has everything.

So Florida up to the present time has not been the joyous cocktail of cocaine, titties and chainsaws that I had read about in the tourist brochures. A distinct lack of interwebs at camp sites has left me unable to blog, check the percentage of erroneous facts in said blog, or surf for porn while pretending to blog.
We had crossed the State line from Alabama late in the afternoon after spending a lazy morning in Mobile, a very cool mini-version of New Orleans without the music, bars or legal drinking on the street. The police here ride horses and dress perpetually in Mardi Gras masks as the town is the birthplace of this famous carnival. True as that may be, it was obviously the unwanted bastard child that was quickly adopted out but now that it has grown up famous, the city is claiming ownership and selling t-shirts and Carnival masks like it was LiLo’s dad when they stopped the welfare cheques. It was very popular with Confederate troops during the Civil War as a place that was not on fire and still had hookers, at least until the Battle of Mobile when it still had hookers, but they were on fire.
It really is a beautiful and laid back coastal city and we found an excellent bookshop where we bought and traded our way to a new travel library.
But Florida however has not been our immediate friend. Camping has been expensive, interwebs is less universal than all the other states so far and McDonald’s does not subscribe to the $1 large drink promotion (the tight arse travellers’ rehydration friend). We passed through yet another town called Baldwin, our third so far in this country, (and like the brothers there has only been one worth seeing) and stopped briefly at a Seaworld which had a seafood bbq restaurant positioned next to it, probably to give the dolphins some incentive.
Later in the day while pirating free wifi from McChucks without a purchase (Fight the power, people, fight the power.), we thought we had scored with an eleven dollar campsite and even rang ahead to book. Upon arrival however we discovered the park had no power, (ironic considering it was within ten miles of a nuclear power station) no trees, (maybe not so ironic considering it was within ten miles of a nuclear power station) no consumption of alcohol and was across the water from a naval installation complete with low flying (like fifty fucking feet) apache helicopters making sweeps over our campsite as if I was doing video crosses for Al Jazeera. (It was one time people.)
Just to really push the sand into the sphincter they had a ‘no sleeping in your car’ policy, (the theory obviously being that terrorists don’t have tents) so they wouldn’t let us stay despite the lateness of the afternoon. Being situated in the middle of nowhere (according to official military maps) this was not an ideal situation so an immediate vintage Mick charm offensive was called for. However, my rugged Aussie good looks failed to win them over at reception this time, as did my rugged Aussie ‘Fuck You.’ The place looked like a test site anyway and as luck would have it, we discovered a lovely State park down not far down the road. Still expensive but situated in a lagoon complete with armadillos (uncharacteristically alive and unsquashed,) bobcats and military grade mosquitoes. We scored some beach time, (though the Apache choppers seemed to still have a lock on me) ate Alligator Jerky and watched a brilliant sunset enhanced only by God and the toxic smoke from the reactor stacks.

From sea to shining sea...

Bet you thought I was kidding, right?

Still not kidding.

Leaving N’awlins, (as the cool tourists are calling it), I considered all that had happened over the past few days in this crazy town. The previous evening had led me into a conversation with one of the local douche bags regarding politics. It had started out as an innocent enquiry about where to eat that night, but the twenty-nothing mouth breather with the neck-beard began to hector me about Obama being a socialist puppet. I made a rookie mistake by not immediately stabbing myself in the eye so taking that as a sign of agreement he continued to rant on about how McDonald’s is giving everyone nob cancer which is why there shouldn’t be universal health care in this country and that politics today is dictated by Heigel (A German homosexual philosopher, not Katherine). Unable to resist such a juicy tasting plate of dickhead, I began to counter argue his rabid statements by making up credible sounding philosphers of my own (‘But you realize that Rogen counters Heigel’s divide-and-conquer theory which is also backed up by Schlichtenstein and Fromberg’s writings on pervasive Republicanism.’). He ran out of big words and fake names before I did so I bought him a double shot of fuck you and left him crying into his Merillion t-shirt.
Ah New Orleans. But that was behind us as we sped through Mississippi like it was Smokey to my Bandit. The radio let us know we had crossed into Alabama as Jeebers was back behind the decks and giving shout outs to the Holy Ghost. Alabama, famous for having the highest mullet to moustache ratio in the Union, is a very pretty state, home to an abundance of wildlife and inbreeding. Saf and I spent a pleasant hour playing ‘What roadkill is that?’ (Gator. Gator. Armadillo. Black guy.) before winding our way down to the pleasant sounding Dauphin Island. Named by a deaf guy trying to say ‘dolphin’, Dauphin Island is home to Fort Gaines, a naval installation pre-dating the Civil War and site of the Battle of Mobile. Too broke/cheap to pay to go in, we took photo’s of the canons, made explody noises and went to bed.

Our entire photo album of Mississippi

The first thing you see in the Alabama Tourist Centre. Really.

Pretty much speaks for itself

Three days in New Orleans. How to describe it? Impossible except in a Rain Man style list, its autistic brevity and free association capturing the sheer awesomeness and good times that were had in this fabtastic town:
Buskers. Buskers everywhere. Stomp bands, tap dancers, living statues, living pictures, fortune tellers, astronomers. No mimes. The bars of Frenchman Street. Constant music from every bar on every street. Good bands. Great bands. Cover bands. Blues bands. Breakfast jazz. Dinner soul. A gi-normous black man in a purple suit sings with a voice like velvet gravel in a bourbon soaked sock. Hurricanes, daiquiris, absinthe, bourbon, mandatory drinking on the street. Muffalettos. Po-boys. Oysters, shrimps, crawfish. Naked women on swings. Titty bars, sex shows, no cover, no pants. Voodoo. Hoodoo. The faint but constant scent of vomit on Bourbon Street. Drive Thru Daiquiris. A Streetcar named Maintenance. Vampire tours that turn out to be unexpectedly brilliant. Cigar bars. Biker bars. Wankers. Funksters. Pimps. Touts. Tits. Tourists. New Orleans.

The fifth Vacation movie was a little darker

This is actually a painting by Dr Seuss. Seriously.

Woke up in Lafayette this morning still trying to shake the memory of the fat guy in Wal-Mart from the night before. Wal-Mart provides courtesy scooters for the disabled and criminally lazy and his had broken down somewhere near the moccasin aisle obviously following a trail of marshmallow peanuts or possibly plankton. As he sat forlornly on the crumpled remains of his overtaxed whale buggy, I first thought the poor fellow had a nasty case of genital Elephantitis that was being more publicly revealed than perhaps was either necessary or legal. (Though honestly, gigantically swollen hairy balls are nothing to be ashamed of.) However, I soon realized that what I had initially taken for his oversized nutsack slapping around the back of his ankles was actually his guts hanging out each leg of his moonman shorts creating the visual illusion of a pair of mammooth wrinkled spunk-buckets the size of my fricking head. Some things you can’t unsee.
We were up early anyway having found an early morning swamp tour for the reasonable price of twenty dollars with crazy thrown in for free. Immensely entertaining, I learnt a little of the swamp and it’s fragile ecosystem but much of the cutthroat politics involved in the rough and tumble world of swamp tours. Our Cajun guide Thibedeaux apparently had Stephen Seagal-like skills (his comparison, not mine) that he would soon bring to bear on another rival tour operator. (Presumably he was referring to the Under Siege Seagal not Urban Justice Seagal where the man has a stunt double just to sit down). As well as mad-skillz in the martial arts department, Thibedeaux also had several billion dollars of real estate investments, a personal line to Barack Obama, mafia connections and a plan to rejuvenate the Lafayette Film Industry. Despite an almost overwhelming urge to politely suggest his questionable statements were utter bullshit, his hubris was far too engaging and besides, floating in a small tin boat in the middle of a ‘gator infested swamp with a madman is enough to make you suck it in and say things like ‘wow!’, ‘Seagal’s amazing’ and ‘That guy totally has it coming man.’
Gazing intently at a nesting yellow beaked heron while Thibedeaux took a piss out the back of the boat, I considered the possibility that were we never coming back from this tour and decided to hold back my usual analytical skills of Seagal movies as well as my comparison of Seagal to a python that has swallowed either a cow or that fat guy from Wal-Mart.
Back on dry land, Thibedeaux did give us an excellent food tip about a Cajun place just off the interstate on our way to Baton Rouge. He was right and Saf and I had our seafood gumbo cherries popped with food that blew our mouth tasters out the back of our skulls. Ah – mazing.
As we now sat in the outskirts of New Orleans in a government approved traffic jam, we heard passing news of the oil slick off the coast currently making local prawns easier to deep fry. Momentous as this was, I was more excited by the presence of the Batmobile in the lane next to us. It was definitely the Batmobile, assuming you believe as I do that when Batman drives around incognito he does so in a slightly beaten up ’05 Mazda Miata .
We checked into a hostel in the Garden District and I enjoyed the feeling of once more walking naked in my bedroom without the threat of being placed on the sex offenders list as had been threatened in a previous campground. We began to take a walk round the area feeling very ghetto, then freaked out and ran back to our car so we could drive about with the windows up. Soon discovered that we were in the New Orleans equivalent of North Fitzroy and rather than being mugged by a junked up homie we had more chance of being run over by a stockbroker in a Saab.

mm mmm that fat guy was deelicious!

Nananananananana Batman!
Robin was following in a Pinto

The morning started with an epic win in the shape of a free mocha frappe from Mickey D’s drive thru. No extra purchase, no happy meal, nothing. Just a ‘You have a big sign outside saying free mocha frappe so pony up grill jockeys’ into the speaker box. There was a half hearted ‘But you’re supposed to purchase something…’ crackled out of the talk thingy but I had already screeched off to the service window singing the ‘Frappe that’s free!’ song to the tune of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ (which may be the actual words. I’ll have to Google them). Jacked up on icy cold caffeine and frosty sugary goodness, the snap decision was made to have corn dogs for breakfast to round off the five food groups. For those unsure (as we were) as to what a corn dog is, simply put, it is the Devil’s Hotdog. Take a plastic sausage, wrap it in a sweet vomit batter and you have something that both provides the nutrition of a fingernail and contravenes the UN Charter of human rights. If Hitler had had corn dogs, we’d all be speaking German right now.
The bad karma of our free frappe continued as we made an unfortunate trip to the worst toilets in America in Pelecios, which made a fitting end to the corn dogs in any case. Spent our last evening in the Lone Star State eating tinned ravioli in Lake Livingstone State Park.
Started early and passed through Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas, as fast as the corn dogs did us the day previously before crossing into the wilds of Louisiana. Paused for beers in Shreveport, home of Fangtasia and vampires that don’t sparkle. We couldn’t find any kind of True Blood tourism angle but did discover that due to it’s encouraging tax concessions, Shreveport has a burgeoning film industry and has been the location of many Hollywood productions such as The Mist, Disaster Movie and Monsters of Anal 4.
Moving on, everything went a bit Lost Weekend as a mutantly oversized bee nearly caused a suitably comical end to our journey by flying through the window and hitting me in the head at 75 mph. Taped his still twitching body to the windscreen as a warning to other bees but wound my window up anyway.
As we set up camp in the swampy wilderness of Lake Bisteneau with it’s hanging moss and blackened, twisted swamp trees we soon fell asleep to the sound of what I think was ‘gators date raping each other in the marshy surrounds.

A frappe addict going into encephalitic shock.

Re-enactment of actual events.

Being both the setting for Disney’s last film about Davey Crockett and the name of our rental car company, it was obviously destiny that we visit this famous monument.  Getting there early to avoid the expected masses, I was aghast to see the huge number of people lining the streets outside in anticipation of the ten o’clock opening.  However, rather than crowding my view of a piece of American folklore, they all pissed off into Ripley’s Believe it or Not across the road as soon as it opened and I was left alone with my memories of Fess Parker battling Mexicans in silly hats.  (Interestingly, I found out later that Ripley’s and Louis Tussauds’ (no relation/trademark infringement) House of Wax stand on the site where most of the actual fighting and arse kicking took place so maybe they were onto something.)
Being a valued customer of Alamo Rental Vehicles™, I haggled hard to get a discount on the entry fee,  reducing the woman at the gift shop to a sobbing mess as I fiercely suggested that Davey wouldn’t have paid to get into the Alamo and if she didn’t let me in I would go all Santa Anna on her arse.  Informed by a passing security guard that there was no entry fee, I claimed victory and stalked away to look at novelty key rings.
The shrine itself is fascinating, the only disappointment being that Crockett was most likely not wearing a ‘coonskin hat as he died on the palisades. Nevertheless he did run to a funky line in embroidered vest work that was very pimp. My conversation with another tourist was cut short by Safka dragging me away as I tried to explain to the man from Tennessee that while the sentiment was nice, it was unlikely that the South would rise again due to their lack of heavy industry and other contributing economic factors.
We kicked on to the coast, stopping at Corpus Christi and while we did not see the body of Jeebers, we did come across a WWII aircraft carrier which was almost as surprising. I looked but he wasn’t there either so we had a swim instead. Continued surfing the radio waves and hit an awesome rock station whose tagline was ‘nothing but Rock! And they did: Stone Temple Pilots, Chilli Peppers, Phil Collins, Nirvana, Aerosmith, Phil Collins, Green Day, Phil Collins… My feeling is that ProgRock was always more Prog than Rock but that didn’t stop In the Air Tonight getting at least two airings in the space of an hour. And it’s not as if it’s been just this station; since Arizona Buster’s been popping up on every divet in the bandwidth, even the Mexican ones. Seriously, the man is like a fucking god in this part of the country. The main thing I remember about No Jacket Required was Collins trying to prove that bald was the new black but even that doesn’t stop Sussudio getting a fair flogging south of the Mason-Dixon line. (Sussudio? What does that even mean?!?) Now that I think about it, the audio tour at the Alamo was narrated by one ‘Phil Collins’. Coincidence? I think not.
Continuing along the Gulf of Mexico, we landed in Rockport for the night. I had a film (Hotel Motel) screen at their local film festival several years ago and, film festival organisation being what it is, we checked to see if we’d missed the session. Rockport is beautiful and we took a tour through the gated communities with their private canals and personal jetties for the fabulously rich before checking into to a trailer park for the fabulously redneck. It was about then that we discovered the best thing so far about America: the convenience stores all tend to have a massive ice box very near to the front counter fully stocked with 24oz (a pint and half in old money) cans of beer for around $1. One freaking dollar for an elbow-to-wrist length tube of icy cold well brewed hobo juice! Sweet! Our supersized brewskis provided excellent refreshment as a full on redneck screaming match in front of a nearby trailer provided our entertainment. This was only a curtain raiser for the main event later in the night when the cops turned up and it became a full blown episode of Reno 911. I caught this getting up for a late night wee and stood watching the mayhem in my jocks and sneakers and generally fitting in rather well.

Pimpin'.

Hobo Heaven in a Can.
One dollar people. One. Dollar.

We were somewhere deep in the intestinal snarl of the San Antonio highway system when the ‘low gas’ light started giving me the finger. Desperate to find a way out, I drove down random off-ramps but every exit we took brought us to new stretches of curving five lane madness and overpass insanity while the fuel indicator danced and mooned me from behind the steering wheel. As an extra ‘fuck you’ it displayed the 85 cents we had saved by not filling up at $2.95 a gallon some miles earlier. I’d initially had some confusion with the gallons to litres conversion, as the American gallon is only equivalent to 2 and half litres, as opposed to the 4 and half of the Australian gallon. (Also common in the southern part of the country is the Spanish gallon which sails the high seas in search of plunder and is worth over three litres.)
Eventually making it to the mean streets of the San Ant outer suburbs, Safka wound her window up in fear of a car jacking while I sniggered derisively at her paranoia and locked my door. (You have to remember that many of these people killed Davey Crockett.)
Our eventual camp was most awesome and, combined with the heat and earliness of the afternoon, provided us with some much needed pool time. Twenty five dollars bought us four margaritas and two plates of the best fajitas I have ever tasted at a little Mexican taqueria across the road. Well primed with a couple more two dollar Coronas, we hit San Antonio’s main tourist drag, the Riverwalk,. Like a theme park river ride but with more Mexicans, the Riverwalk beckons drunken visitors to meander dangerously close to its unguarded edges, which I thought was awesome but sent Safka’s OHS sensibilities into serious meltdown. The evening was wonderfully warm and balmy and the thickening dusk meant I could anonymously nudge small children into the murky stream as we perambulated along the pathways. I felt like I’d traveled to some wonderful beer and tacos fairyland as the sunken, meandering walks are lit only by soft lanterns and some guy selling glow sticks. Mariachi trios play endless repititions of ‘White Dove’ and I heard so many versions of ‘Quando, Quando, Quondo’ I had to stop and look around for Murph and the Magic Tones. A stop for beers at a bar set up under an ancient bridge was followed by a romantic forty minute wait for the bus back to our camp where we returned to the Mexican taqueira for more three dollar Margaritas and a drunken stumble into bed.

Safka shows here immense displeasure at three dollar margaritas

Several children drowned while I sat here. Very beautiful evening.

Despite Roswell proclaiming itself as the Dairy Capital of New Mexico, they aren’t fooling anyone and it’s aliens people want to see. Some of the local businesses have embraced this, so badly drawn Communion style ET’s peer out from furniture stores, car dealerships and mortgage brokers (‘Our prices are out of this world!’ – I shit you not). So to get right to the source of it all we hit the aforementioned UFO Museum and Research Institute. Right away I knew we were onto something as they took away our backpacks to prevent us from knocking off any of the valuable and mind-blowing alien shit they had lying around in there. The museum is based around a linear time construct so begins with a brief history of UFO sightings in the 1940’s and quickly gets more boring from there. Multiple photocopies of the same news clippings and dodgy affidavits by people who heard shit from other people are brilliantly displayed next to old typewriters and conceptual dioramas of what the crashed UFO might have looked like if anyone had actually managed to see it. In order to get your moneys worth from the five dollar entry fee, you can sit in the non-futuristic plastic chairs and watch an old Kyle Mclachlan film about Roswell for ninety minutes or wait till the afternoon when they play three episodes of Alf. Seriously, it’s like when you had to write that three thousand word essay for school that you knew nothing about so you just repeated yourself and waffled vaguely about things you thought might be relevant to the topic in the hope the teacher didn’t read it and just counted the words.
After twenty minutes of finding more aliens by scratching my balls I called bullshit and we hit the gift shop, bought an inflatable green alien and fucked off.
Crossing the border into Texas, we turned off the beaten track and drove into a Teen Horror/Slasher movie. Rocking up in some backwoods town called Balmorhea we found that the camp ground at the State Park there was full. Following a dirt track through some reeds some miles out of town we found another camp that had the whole Crystal Lake vibe going on, complete with tin roofs shrieking in the gusting wind, eerie water birds honking from rusted pickups and weird hillbilly eyes peering through dilapidated venetian blinds. Weirding out a little, we headed back into town and found another sign indicating a campground right on the main road. Although the sites there were grassy and had power they were also completely deserted. Additionally there was no office, the toilets were padlocked and all the buildings around us were boarded up. Realising we had not seen another person in the town since we’d been there (hillbilly eyes don’t count) we hit the road again before things got too Jamie Lee Curtis and the crazed slaughter started. Fortunately the bridge wasn’t out so we made it back to the highway and drove another sixty miles to Fort Stockton. Finding the only open RV park in town (the very literally named Trailer Park View) the woman there was obviously so taken with my rugged Aussie looks that she offered us the site for free providing we were gone by morning, didn’t leave our car and told no one of what happened during the night. Updates soon.

Hmmm...convincing

Loving the Alien

The morning drive through the Gila National Forest (pronounced with a Spanish ‘G’ as in ‘H’. Again – racist.) was a spectacular coit clenching journey with twisting roads, soaring cliffs and no edge barriers. Fortunately this soon gave way to the thrilling flatness and straight highways of the New Mexican desert. A boot scoot through the radio dial gave us quite a selection of stations, both Country and Western, so we sped along to such good ol’ boy classics as Rain is Good (self explanatory), There’s nothing wrong with a Hard Hat and a Hammer (possibly a metaphor), I Got to Get into You (most likely not a metaphor) and I love my Wife but I love Fishing (please God be a metaphor). The commercials for Medical Marijuana and Tattooing had long disappeared and we were treated to sponsored messages for Christian Schools (‘Is your child going to Hell?’) and breakfast ice-cream. (‘Start your day the American way.’ – The inference being that if you didn’t then you were probably the kind of person that was on a ‘no fly’ list and worked on Fourth of July.)
We made a special detour to visit the awesomely named town of ‘Truth or Consequences.’ However, rather than being titled for starting life as a hard bitten Western settlement, the town changed it’s moniker in the 50′s to the name of a popular game show in order to gain national advertising. That’s right. A simple re-branding exercise to divert the shittiness associated with the town of ‘Geronimo Springs’ to the brand new and exciting hot springs village of T and C. Yes, hot springs. Similar to Daylesford but without the charm or the lesbians the town is a health centre. Aside from the cool name and the dubious benefits of its oxidised water however, T & C is a shithole. Nevertheless the name did cause us to stop by so maybe Colac could consider becoming ‘Deal or no Deal’.
Gave a quick wave to White Sands Missile Range, home of the first Atomic Bomb test and laughed at the warning signs for six legged deer. A stop in Carrizozo provided some of the most ball tearingly hot chilli I’ve ever had, which only cost me a small down payment in cash with the physical balance due approximately eight hours later. The bar itself was adorned with enough deer heads, neon beer signs and antique firearms to qualify for instant cliché status or at least a spot on the Strip in Las Vegas. However it maintained a certain authenticity that can only be gained by existing in a tiny dirt poor Southern town with no visible economy and very little infrastructure. Carrizozo was apparently the location for the post apocalyptic film The Book of Eli and it seemed that not a lot of set dressing had been required. Nevertheless, the town was engaging and quirky, not unlike a rotting corpse with a spinning bow tie; definitely one of my favourite places so far.
A dust storm of Dorothy proportions blew up as we neared Roswell and we discovered that the alien crash landings of 1947 had induced a one hour time difference to Arizona meaning the UFO Museum and Research Institute was closed. We camped in a salt lake outside of town and shot our own post-apocalyptic film as entertainment.

The natural beauty of America continues to amaze

I'll see you again in a few hours...

Arrived in Tombstone to discover it is smaller than Sovereign Hill but with a higher gun to moustache ratio. We indulged ourselves in a strange form of dinner theatre and watched people in various guises shoot each other while interpreting the Three Amigos. I learnt many things about Tombstone such as that Six Gun City is the home of the two dollar margarita and barmen in one scene sometimes put on ponchos to become Mexicans in another and the $2 margaritas help you buy this. The actors work for tips: In your FACE Equity!!! While we didn’t see the gunfight at the OK Corral (being 129 years too late) I did notice that Wyatt Earp looked less like Kurt Russell and more like Kim Gyngell.
Drove through the delightful Bisbee with it’s curving streets and then the less delightful Douglas with its non-curving trailer parks. I won’t say it’s Hell, but it can’t be a long commute.
Long stretches of Arizona morphed into longer stretches of New Mexico, dotted with historical markers about the last Indian wars indicating glorious victories or sickening atrocities, depending on your point of view. Saw where Geronimo surrendered ending Indian resistance to white settlement, a place almost as bleak and desolate as he must have felt.
Our overnight park was in Silver City, which is, as the name suggests, a large centre for copper mining.

Tipping was strictly enforced

We came, we walked, we swore. Four sweaty rugged hours we trekked through a devastatingly large ditch and it was Ahhhhmazing. That’s right. Totally incredible. No, nothing smart arse, petty or snide, just an absolutely phenomenal experience. It would seem that the farther you get from the city the harder it is to be cynical. (Though not impossible) We walked the first part of the Kaibab trail (an American-Indian word meaning ‘meat wrap’) and while the way down was easy, the way up highlighted my complete and utter lack of cardio and thus how subsequently screwed I’d be in a sudden zombie apocalypse. Sunset was viewed from the Canyon rim, a indescribably beautiful and romantic experience as I took photos while Saf sat on the bench behind me holding her own hand.
As darkness fell we took refuge from the plunging temperatures (It freaking snowed!) and prowling mountain lions in the back of Sir Ian and made Deliverance references till someone nearby played a banjo and we freaked out.
This morning we headed south for Phoenix via Bedrock City and the Stone/HannaBarbera Age. We took the scenic route to Sedona and found the radio waves had been highjacked by Christian Rock so Jeebers was our DJ as we passed through the monolithic natural monuments seen in a thousand cowboys films. John Ford’s hard bitten saddle jockeys no longer inhabited Sedona however, replaced by a plague of hippies, helicopter rides and crystal shops working the tourists for their greenbacks. The Sedona Movie Museum did give a detailed history of the many movies made in the area as well as pictorial representations of iconic Native American Indians such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Burt Lancaster and Ernest Borgnine.
On our travels today we crossed many wonderful American place names including *snigger* Beaver Street, *chortle* Beaver Fur Canyon and Dry Beaver Creek *Bwahahahhahahah!!!*. So mature.
We hit Phoenix, had lunch at Hooters (Best. Restaurant. Ever. ’nuff said), called out the names of the three real Beatles as we passed through Tucson then ended up somehow in the town of Benson, an early ’80′s sitcom set in the Arizona desert. Goodnight.

The Canyon was truly amazing

Saf finally does some of the driving

So after a short delay participating in a live action ‘People of Wal-Mart’ 4D experience, Saf and I hit the road to the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam is a very impressive piece of engineering approximately very high and built entirely by the CIA in an elaborate attempt to get Castro. Despite an obvious lack of Transformers™, this did not stop me kicking every yellow Camaro and yelling ‘Bumblebee you mute fuck!’ until a policeman asked me to stop. He then turned into a police car and drove off and Megan Fox (Saf) refused to give me a hand shandy. Being an obvious terrorist target the Dam is apparently in constant danger from Mad magazine’s Spy vs Spy™ and we kept a lookout for be-hatted men in dark overcoats sneaking about in the baking heat.
Moving on into Arizona we tracked down Route 66 (we just counted) and drove along it, which was very much like driving along a straight flat road through the desert. Phil Collins provided an appropriately inappropriate soundtrack courtesy of the only radio station we could pick up and so we prog-rocked hard through the Hualapai Indian Reservation. We didn’t have one so we passed through without stopping. Taking a break at the historic Route 66 Hotel Sign™ in Seligman, (famous for its use in ANZ bank brochures advertising foreign exchange rates), we ate Tails and Snails™ in the nearby RoadKill Cafe™. Pushing on with the setting sun we made it to Williams deep in Elk country about 50 miles south of the Grand Canyon where we’ll head tomorrow. This is our first night of camping and while our mighty touring van Sir Ian’ is very cosy, Safka’s decision to serve baked beans for our dinner was perhaps a little misjudged…

Have you seen this man?

Norsca Fresh

Ended our last day in Vegas extremely hungover after drinking plastic footballs full of frozen cocktails as we wandered round Freemont street with the world’s largest television hovering above us. The TV spoke to us intermittently, creating the sensation of being in Orwell’s ’1984′ but with more hookers or Tom Cruise’s ‘Minority Report’ but with less denial.
In preparation for the rough end of our trip we went to an enormous outdoor camping shop, decorated like a wilderness area and roughly the size of Sydney. I experienced the irony of standing in a faux African savannah complete with faux lions watching massively overweight Americans ride around a shop dedicated to the great outdoors on a mobility scooter. It is possible however they had been released into the store as game.
Have just noticed that from the window of our room, the hotel pool looks like Picasso’s dick.
Must sign off here as we have to check out of Ye Olde Excalibur Hotel and hit the road to the Grand Canyon. The hotel has been fine but smells like a giant stale ashtray and even the pens look like cigarettes. Las Vegas has been fun, Freemont Street especially as it’s much more like the old school Las Vegas that I expected and less like a bogan fraternity street party that is the Strip.

For a richer, smoother writing experience...

Picasso's Pubism Period

Woke early intending to take advantage of the ’7 buffets in 24 hours for $30′ deal and instead wandered round an authentic replica of 18th century Paris listening to Mid-Western Americans complain that ‘I thawt Pairis would be bigger.’ The queue for the authentic replica Parisian buffet also went back to the 18th century so we abandoned it in favour of the Planet Hollywood Trough and Bucket. Still had to queue but it wasn’t long till we’d been tagged with wristbands identifying us as official Vegas Buffet Pigs™ and let loose upon a multitude of carbohydrates and artery clogging heart stoppers. Sirloin steak, eggs benedict and belgian waffles all featured on my breakfast plate and again later in my post-breakfast food baby. The mixture of sugars and transfat had altered my consciousness and before I knew it we were deep in the bowels of the MGM Grand buying tickets for a Cirque du Soleil show. Saf got a little over excited by the four floors of M&M World™ and worked off her sugar rush by shoplifting a pair of thongs from Walmart (True!) where we picked up some stuff in preparation of roughing it camping style for the rest of the trip.
Lost our minds a little bit more on the Sponge Bob Squarepants 4D ride (which is 2xDD) and gained a nasty case of motion sickness, nearly adding my own bit of 4D to the people in front of us. Ahh good times…

So I knew it was too easy. Our run of serendipity came to an abrupt end this morning as the hire car company ironically named ‘Enterprise’ refused to let us take our van further than Arizona – apparently their cars get lonely the farther they get from the mothership. Spent two hours over at Alamo rental in a last stand (see what I did there?)organising another car which finally happened and our American experience began to expand further than the cultural delights of the LAX area. Instead of rocking it in the Mystery Mobile as originally intended, our car is somewhat like the bastard love-child of a station wagon and an ice cream truck but with more flavours and less child molesting. Saf quickly dubbed our new ride ‘Sir Ian’ which I quickly expanded into ‘Sir Ian the Metal Ball of Possible Fiery Screaming Death’ after my first right hand turn experience. Had a nutritious breakfast of tacos around midday then drove across the Mojave Desert. (Mojave pronounced with a German J which is possibly racist. Also known as the High Desert which probably has less to do with the Germans and more to do with the bats). I count the drive as a success as I hardly crashed and no one much died. Massive RV’s everywhere towing small 4WD’s behind them, making them look like weird roadbound whales, riding the bitumen ocean with their calves. At the rest stops, whole pods of them would beach themselves next to each other and I received some strange looks as I heaved against their sides screaming ‘Be free! Be FREE!!!!’. I consistently drove five miles over the speed limit and was overtaken by everyone, discovering at the same time that tailgating is a favourite past time of Californians. (Euphemism unintended).
Arrived at our fabulously tacky hotel ‘Excalibur’ and had to carve a path through rabid Timeshare Zombies in order to check in. Heading out onto the Strip in search of sustenance and moral turpitude I quickly started my collection of Hooker cards given out by the local Mexicans as a community service. I have quite a lot already including Mandy, Julie and Wendy lacking only Gonorrhea, Herpes and Syphilis to make a complete set. Tired, starving and now sexually frustrated, I ate half a pigs back before we lamed out and returned to our Tower Room, just past the Sword in the Stone Bar and down from Ye Olde BlackeJacke tables ($10 minimum). The bad new is that Tournament of Kings, the live action horse riding and jousting dinner experience held downstairs at Excalibur, may be booked out for the next two nights so I might just have to do some of my own ‘Basement Jousting’ in order to get a ticket. (Euphemism intended) Anyway, off out to work on my gambling addiction and complete my collection of Hookers… I mean Hooker cards. Hooker cards.

It’s been easy. Almost too easy. Something’s definitely not right. A trouble free check-in followed by an un-delayed flight with good movies and plenty of sleep was obviously just a precursor to the full terror of American Customs Officers. Except it wasn’t. And they weren’t. Not a lube laden latex glove in sight. Not even a speculum and a flashlight or a lazy can of WD40 and a butter knife. Desperate to have something to blog about I tried to bring this up in a vaguely casual fashion as we passed through Immigration (though how a body cavity search can be vaguely casual I’m not sure) but was told quite smartly that this was LA, not ‘Frisco and would I please put my pants on and get back behind the line. He still slipped me a card however.
Despite the curious lack of celebrities hanging around LAX (Molly Ringwald does not count), we did see some Pimpalicious goodness in the hotel lobby which enriched our simple antipodean lives. With a regretful sigh I realised that even if I grew an 8 inch handlebar moustache and wore a bitchin’ leather cap I would still look more Village People than Snoop Dogg.
Anyway, we’re here and we’ve started, it’s late and I’m tired. We pick up the van tomorrow and brave the insanity of LA highways for the first time – Stay tuned for some hilarious video of the event which we may also need for insurance purposes.

Have just booked our hotel for three nights in Vegas – the fabulously cheesy Excalibur Hotel ‘The only castle where YOU RULE!™’. Being an authentic medieval castle in the desert, you have to pay for internet but the room does come with a traditional medieval 42″ Widescreen TV. Their two resident shows include ‘Thunder from Down Under’ (I believe the name Dutch Ovens Ahoy was taken) and of course TOURNAMENT OF KINGS! That’s right! They have Jousting! In the basement! No, not an euphemism for brutal anal rape but REAL jousting in a REAL basement! It’s the Cable Guy all over again and maybe this time I get to be Jim Carey.

That’s right folks, We (meaning Mick and Saf) are about to head off to Obamanation™ -  the land of the big, weird, wacky, dang and hodown.  Follow our adventures as we roadtrip Stateside via Mystery Mobile for the next three months FTW!