You got it. June gloom days. Attempt the Pacific Coast Highway, if at all, with many layers of clothing, and prepared to see almost nothing. When it’s a hundred degrees or more inland, this heat sucks moisture off the sea in the form of a cold fog. Anyone see John Carpenter’s The Fog? (I know; there’s a remake; never saw it.) Like that, only without the pirates. And with cold. We saw it coming in the distance (photo, left). By the time we reached Morro Bay you couldn’t see the tops of the Morro Bay power plant’s smokestacks. Hearst would never have built San Simeon if he’d first seen the coast this way.

Eventually I cut back up to Rte 101, a beautiful ride across the mountain folds. Once you get to 101, it’s death by boredom. Lots of grapes, though. And hot as hell. But Rte 1 was cold as a witch’s tit. Some choice. I hate heat, and we’d already done the desert. But gritting my teeth through 150 miles of cold fog was more than I could face. And eventually the heat on 101 lessened as the day waned; followed by something out of movie special effects – it was like being in The Wizard of Oz: approaching Salinas, a tornado sky rushes in, yellow-grey and so low you feel you could touch it if you reached up. Cold, too. Same every year, Salinas folk told me. Some of the weirdest weather I’ve ever experienced. Distracted me completely from the bike and the petrol gauge and I just reached a place called Wild Horse Road in time to refill.

The one on the left is for my oldest friend, I mean my friend of longest standing, Steve Wilson, novelist supreme and prince of bikers – and the reason this tour is taking place at all (50 years ago he introduced me, enduringly as it turned out, to motorbikes). Here’s to you, Contender – a name we both adopted, a good few more than 50 years ago, from Brando’s words in the celebrated Waterfront taxi scene with Rod Steiger. Steve’s birthday tomorrow. He’s beating me to 71. As ever. And the image in the photo, specially for him, is the original San Miguel Mission bell, the very thing itself, as in the song, our old favourite, ‘Manuel…close the door.’

I felt the thrill, setting out this morning, of the engine’s roar and the freedom of choosing a place on the road. A child-sense of freedom. Added to this, at high speed in racing traffic, taking delight in poise and grit – something of war in it.

Today’s meditation, an odd one but born perhaps of crossing the continent. America as a classroom. At the front, the smart kids. At the back, the cool kids. Lumpen America in the middle. Picture it as geography: the cool kids go West, are the West, Californian. The smart kids head East, are the East, New Yorkers. And the Jews own both Hollywood and New York. How does this look, from the middle of the class?

One moment I’m at Jeff Lynne’s sitting in his recording studio quaffing champagne & listening to demo tapes of new songs and being driven by mine host in his Cadillac back to a guest room bed whose comfort I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere. Then – tonight, as I pictured it – at the San Luis Obispo campsite putting up my tent and wheezing long and hard into my inflatable sleeping mat and happy as a clam. Happier, really. (Just as well.)

Instead: Pismo. Sounds like a contraction of Pepto-Bismol. Pismo Beach. Must be a delightful place in summer. Oh wait, it is summer. But it’s freezing – freezing – cold. One of those glorious quirks of American weather (I learnt all about crazy weather when teaching in Texas). Joe and I confessed to being colder today riding up the Pacific Coast than we had been during the entire trip, including the infamous ‘Big Meadows’ night in the Blue Ridge mountains, when the temperature fell into the 30s Fahrenheit. The guilty party was an icy fog off the sea, creating a strip of micro-climate which vanished as you went inland; nonetheless, wet-suited surfers by the hundred had flocked to the ocean, to be sure not to waste a weekend. We juddered our way up to San Luis Obispo, and shrank from the prospect of putting up a tent with freezing fingers. Tomorrow… God willing… on the famous Highway 1 section up through Big Sur and Carmel, the weather will give us a break. We keep hearing about how it’s 106 degrees in Northern California. We already did 106; 110 in fact; couldn’t we have a nice moderate climate, please?

We’ve had several candidates for sweetest city on our tour of America; for sheer unpleasantness no city approaches, in my view, the one we just left: Los Angeles. For one reason only. Its drivers. L.A. has so many gorgeous neighborhoods, a match for any city anywhere. And if you could just stay in your neighborhood! (As many do.) You mightn’t think bad drivers could make so much difference. Have you been to the Far East? If you have you probably think you’ve experienced bad driving at its finest. In that case you’ve never been to L.A., or experienced finding yourself hurled into Death Race 2000 at a few moments’ notice every time you hop onto one of the seemingly innumerable freeways, overlapping, underlapping, mapping this tortured city as if it were an electric-chair victim criss-crossed with exploding veins. Remember ‘On The Beach,’ the movie about one last suicidal car race at the end of the world? Try shifting lanes (on 4 wheels or 2) all the way across a 6-lane highway with 80-mile-an-hour madness in every lane. It’s enough to make you want to live somewhere else. L.A. doesn’t need a Grand Prix. It is a Grand Prix. 24/7. (Tho’ of course if that’s how you like it…) It’s not just in L.A.. Driving north up 101, trying to work up enough speed not to be rocked by passing cars, I gave up at 80 (on a 65 mph speed limit highway) when every single car on the road was going 10 mph or more faster. Living the dream – or living a video game?

Today a big day for me: my new novel, all 700 pages of it, is published today. 3 fellow-writers have praised it in terms that are the highest any book could hope for. Are they right? They also say it’s my best, but I’ve no idea. You write in a certain exaltation, not really imagining that the work is definitely worth anything, but with delusions of adequacy. Looking back at it, you read passages with some satisfaction. But why would you imagine this has any validity? It’s all the more wonderful to be told it’s good, to have readers chortling (it’s a comedy) as they read it in their garden. The world at large has as yet no interest in my work, and if I sell a hundred copies it’s a decent tally. (And think of painters, selling work to a single buyer to take home and keep private!) One or other of my books might achieve a ‘breakthrough.’ But they remain, each of them, what they are, the children of your heart and soul, and mind (one reader in particular praises this new one for its information on erudite matters). If anyone at all looks on them as lovely – what bliss!

Meanwhile I’m girding my loins for the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, with its interminable little bends, and the ocean below (don’t look – focus on the road!). Joe has been visiting his old friend Joey, I my old friend Ian, once famous as ‘The Saint’ on TV, veteran of many plays and films and now a successful author too, of plays and children’s books. We reminisce: schooldays 60 years ago!! He phones another old friend, and we reminisce about schooldays 55 years ago. He has emphysema; I remind him that with this disease you live forever and die in your sleep. How strange to be older (as all older people have always felt) – when you feel so young inside, and when the old days seem so fresh in mind. Fresher every day, as if calling you home.

Tonight another Los Angeles party, this one in Eric’s honor, given by the super-rocker Jeff Lynne. Will there be musicians? I hope I manage to recognize their names. It was easier last night with actors, recognizable by sight. My mind will be mostly on the road already, visualizing the trip up to the lovely town of San Luis Obispo. And I’ll be raising a secret toast to my book and my wonderful editor, John Keller. The novel is also available on Kindle – I hope a few people will download the e-book version. It comes in three separate volumes. I must go and iron my shirt for tonight.

Leaving Barstow. No wonder Tarantino had Uma Thurman buried alive outside Barstow, in Kill Bill. To be in Barstow is to be buried alive. 4000 miles, 1500 of them on Route 66 (ending in ‘Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino’ as my pal Tommy crooned to me – quoting the Stones & ‘Route 66’ – down the phone this morning) / I-40, and finally we were able to echo Xenophon’s glimpse of the Black Sea near Trebizond after the epic march of the stranded 10,000: The sea! The sea! 60 years ago the Anabasis was the first Classical Greek text I read in class (similar in simplicity to Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which we studied at the same time), as did so many others, once.

The ride to Los Angeles from Barstow included one of the thrills of the trip: on Route 15, as we were about to cascade into its curvaceous 2000-foot plunge (down to 3000 feet above sea level) from the high plains, a blast of cold air met us so strongly that for a moment it seemed less like a change in temperature than a bizarre mistake – as if the doors had blown open on a refrigerator truck right in front of us. We’d become so used to 100-degree-plus riding that the effect of the sudden uprush of cool air was as much alarming as refreshing. The next astonishing this was the worst traffic jam I’ve ever witnessed – more than 30 miles of motionless cars and trucks, mercifully going the opposite way to us, trying to get out of L.A. in the middle of Friday, up 210 through Pasadena to 15. Horrible sight. Not as bad for a/c-equipped car passengers – not as bad as if we were stuck in it at the mercy of the heat.

As always the chief joy of the trip, making otherwise anodyne or noxious coffee and gas stops at gas station food marts into a truly American contrast between the sordid culture and the lively humans who endure (and are addicted to) it. I spent a while with an Atkinson Construction driver whose mother had bought a Harley Softail when she was 65, to ride east across the continent to honor a buddy fallen in the Vietnam War and recorded on the Wall in D.C.

In L.A. we were greeted by our wonderful host and hostess, Eric and Tanya Idle (departing shortly for the gigantic Monty Python reunion in London, soon to be broadcast across the world), and shown to a sumptuous room each, followed by a dinner in honor of one of American’s great contemporary historians, Stephen Greenblatt, whom Eric and I met 50 years ago in Cambridge, when we were all students. I was the surprise guest – I hadn’t seen Stephen since those days – and was the most surprised of all when he instantly recognized and embraced me. Eric had decided to set him a further, even harder test by asking me to expose my naked back to the dinner table and its august gathering (including the distinguished actors Julian Sands and Anjelica Huston, and the prince of magicians, Ricky Jay, who forgave me this display and were all extraordinarily nice to me), in order to see if Stephen could identify the author of the very long German text that tattoos its way all down my back. It’s an obscure piece, but on close inspection of its distinctive style, Stephen identified the author, the philosopher Theodor Adorno – greatly to his credit and everyone’s amazed admiration, and to my huge relief that he hadn’t been elaborately discomfited at an event in his honor!

110 degrees in Death Valley (Arizona warnings describe it as atypical and ‘dangerous and excessive heat’): not my idea of fun on 2 wheels, but Joe liked it better than I did, and praised the desert landscape. A bit lunar for my liking. And just too damn hot. Entering California brought a surprising checkpoint built in the manner of old-style European customs buildings, subjecting all travelers to inspection & meant to establish how much everyone wants to get into California or more probably smuggle illegals into California. Either way it was an introduction to what real Amurricans see as the Californian sense of entitlement (like the New York City sense) and why they dislike both coasts.

Added to this the charmless cunning of obliging drivers to cover surprising distances without a filling station and then charging $5 a gallon when one is provided. At the filling station, a friendly fellow called Jim Fitzsimmons, Sales District Leader for Frito-Lay North America, asked me to witness his bid to achieve some kind of award (unrelated to Frito-Lay) by riding 1000 miles in 24 hours, plus a bigger award for another 500 miles in the following 12 hours. He wanted me to sign his verification chart. I did. ‘Jim, you really need a verification,’ I suggested, ‘from a mental health professional.’ ‘Beg your pardon?’ ‘You need to have your head examined.’

Arriving in Barstow looked as if it might be the appropriate climax to the day: certainly a candidate for ugliest small city / large town on the planet. Heat still rising as the afternoon goes on; no campsite (try camping at 100 degrees). Ryan, the young manager at the Budget Inn, is no Barstow enthusiast: ‘shitty town’ was the nicest thing he said about Barstow – which is like a ghastly re-run, at once lurid and decaying, of every down-at-heel American town, moribund franchises like an outbreak of hives in building form. Ryan can’t wait to get out. He’s 21, working 8 hours a day for $2.50 an hour. Why’s he even still here? Michael, night manager at the Knight’s Inn in Kingman has just signed up to join the Navy for 5 years, with 80 grand in college help as a lure: America’s way of recruiting young Americans to the patriotic military-corporate mind. But who could resist? Why would anyone resist? A life of Kingman, or Barstow, versus see-the-world and college for (all but) free.

We, gilded travelers, LOVE the Budget Inn. It has a pool! Cold, wonderful, sparkling water, right on Main Street, the stinking gas-fumes-belching road, main artery of Barstow’s eczematic Franchise World. We don’t care. After Death Valley and the Mojave’s hell on wheels, we’re in paradise. As I write this, Joe is out shopping for steak (I bought & prepared breakfast and supper the last day or two, but now we need the real thing). The reality-series version of our trip: Travels With My Chef. Incredible how Joe can produce a gourmet meal with antique camping equipment. ‘It’s all in the chopping [of the vegetables],’ he says.