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.

300 miles to go to the Pacific (and our 4000-mile mark). Today Joe’s bike made it to the Harley store on Route 66, and a new battery was prescribed & installed. Then Joe went on ahead to the Grand Canyon (‘Amazing,’ was his summing up, as I’m sure it was mine when I saw it, and everyone else’s, plus, with a smirk, the old standby: ‘the biggest hole I’ve ever seen’.) Meanwhile the Harley mechanic on duty replaced with a whole new footrest a broken heel-part on my right-hand Kuryakin footrest peg. The effect was incredible. My spasming, aching right leg suddenly returned to me whole and responsive – just because there was metal under its foot again. A magical change, as was Joe’s other purchase, a change of seat, giving his coccyx an easy ride for the first time. Two happy campers hooned along (Aussie for ‘went fast’) through the desolate scrubland east of Kingman, Arizona. (I should add regarding the Grand Canyon that there are clearly exceptions to your fearless explorers’ snobbish indifference to official ‘sights’: in my case it would be the Blue Mosque in Isfahan. I think it’s the one remaining place, aside from old beloved haunts, that I yearn to see.)

Abandoning the deep questions, as in Why-Didn’t-Paul-etc? (see yesterday’s blog), I set my mind to challenging the widely accepted rule that no one sings a song better than its originator, and began a list of truly appalling originating recordings of songs later rescued by others. Seven Bridges Road. (Ever hear Steve Young’s version?). One Step Ahead of the Blues. (JJ Cale mercifully many steps ahead of Roger Tillison.) Love Hurts. Soon my mind wandered back to Taos, the most numinous spot we’ve visited. Christina, whom we met on the ‘Big Meadows’ campsite in the Blue Ridge Mountains, has become an email pal, and calls herself ‘Big Meadows,’ a rather titillating nom de email; encouraging us to ride Hwy 1 up the Pacific Coast (we need no encouragement – we’ll be doing it) she mentioned an encounter with a man at a particular spot on the coast road while she was biking it North to South (best way to keep the sea close), a man who may have been a hallucination, she says, but seemed to be a combination of Jack Kerouac and John Muir. I promised we’d look out for him.

Hallucination – this took me back to our Taos visit. It was where my Kuryakin footrest broke (and I knew this was Queen Mabel’s revenge for my mocking words about her), drawing a crowd including a friendly local policeman. After the policeman left, a tanned, slender fellow approached me. ‘Dude,’ he murmured, ‘Did I dream it,’ (he did), ‘or was there a red pickup here just now with a woman who delivered a package to your bike while the cop’s back was turned…?’ (There wasn’t.) ‘And some coincidence that the cop was here, right?’ A whole imagined scenario of drug-delivery romance; and yet something strange happened that day, because over the next 48 hours small replaceable objects kept going missing from our bikes. It serves me right for my shameless sallies about life chez Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was a woman of power; her husband Tony was a match for her – he arrived on her property, set up a tepee, began drumming, drummed day and night until Mabel came and begged him to stop. He refused, saying he would stop only when she joined him in his tepee. (Love Hurts!) This she did, dismissing her husband and marrying Tony. You want romantic?

…a bike problem. Joe’s Sportster sputtered before starting, at our first stop en route to Arizona, and at the second, ‘fatal’ stop it wouldn’t start at all. Made that all too familiar dead battery noise. I knew a mynah bird that could do it perfectly. It could also do an immaculate engine-turning-over-but-won’t-catch. The bird lived in a 2nd hand car showroom in Richmond. Made those sounds to every customer – not a good sales pitch for the company. I bought a car there, and it broke down within 100 miles. The sales folk said, Gosh, tee hee, what bad luck. Then they discovered that when I paid for the car I had written them (purely in error) a cheque for 250 pence (pennies) instead of pounds. They were not pleased. Happily today the filling station was full of bikers, who produced jump leads and started Joe’s bike. It got us to our Arizona destination, where we have a promise of jump leads for the morrow, when we head for nearby Flagstaff and the Harley dealers there. They have a new battery reserved for us.

Bikers’ conversation goes the same every time, much like horse riders on the plains back in the day. ‘Where y’ headed?’ ‘[Destination.] Where you headed?’ ‘[Destination.] Where you comin’ from?’ ‘[Point of departure.] Where you comin’ from?’ ‘[Point of departure.]’ Silence. ‘Ride careful.’ ‘You too.’ ‘Look out for the other guy.’ (This has replaced ‘Look out for injuns.’) Joe bought a souvenir miniature of the state flag of New Mexico. Like me he has fallen under its spell and likes it best of all the states we’ve seen.

Today was a long old day. Usually we stop every 60 or 70 miles, but with Joe’s shock-revived battery in mind, we headed off again and completed the day’s 250 miles in one rush. Very blowy day, out on the plains. Not much to see except fake forts and trading posts and ‘Indian cities’ (one building – selling knick-knacks) and fake dinosaurs. Happily the plains dwarf them all. I let my mind play over the profound, unanswerable questions of the cosmos, such as Why Couldn’t Paul Write a Tune Worth a Damn after John Died? (No emails, please, citing Silly Love Songs or Mull of Kintire or Band on the Run. Think quietly about Blackbird and remain silent in the face of mystery.)

I first came to New Mexico 30 years ago, to play poker (in a private game, not a casino one), and fell in love with the state. (I didn’t lose in the card games, which put me in a friendly frame of mind.) It’s my favorite state of the union. Desert has its own charm, but New Mexico is different – there’s a sublime sacredness somehow inscribed in the landscape. And then there’s Santa Fe, unique among great cities of the world in its architectural continuity – low adobe structures everywhere – and in respect of its relation to its environment. It says, Do not, even for one second, look at what I am. Look at where I am. Many cities have spectacular settings. None is as modest in this regard as Santa Fe.

On the road north to Taos, we pulled in at the Old Dawg cafe, a crumbling structure which proved to contain local people only (as you’d guess from the exterior), an astonishing mural (you’d never guess) and the best Mexican food either of us had ever eaten. More than that, it was the only Mexican food I’d ever eaten – including in Mexico – that deserved the title of a cuisine. Lip-numbing green chilis, in a league of their own. This was the experience Joe and I are looking for – not gourmet food or even great meals but simply the unexpected. More than any other reason for our companionability is the fact that neither of us cares for sight-seeing; we like to soak in the place; and we like to ride. I have friends who really know the city they live in, they know where the best new chef is; they use the city. I have never developed such knowledge or even an interest in it. For me a city is the barely definable feeling (varying, and encapsulating each city) I get when I sit and watch its people, or walk its sidewalks. Surprising conversations. Sometimes, surprising food.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan house exceeded all expectation. I’d rank it among the dozen most desirable houses I’ve ever seen. (And I’m very covetous where houses are concerned. I don’t want to live in any of them – I just want to dream about what it would be like.) The outside of Queen Mabel’s folly is perfect adobe wish-fulfilment, full of tree-shaded nooks, a sweet stream running beneath the steps that lead up to the house – for which the magnificent Taos mountain provides the view. And indoors! Tiled floors, wonderful wooden pillars and panelling, the most gracious kind of comfort set in the starkest landscape. Judy Gentry, one of the receptionists, showed us around, offered us cookies, water, coffee… a magical castle to crown this wonderful region.

America the strange: the filling station near our campsite features a shop that sells no beer. It sells everything else such stores sell and, as the manager was quick to tell me, it is the only filling station store of its kind in America. The reason? Its owner is a Muslim. But that’s only the beginning of the strangeness, the manager (a 30-ish man of Middle Eastern origin) continued eagerly. Look at this, he went on, pointing to a vitrine full of crack pipes for sale. With the owner’s knowledge, I asked? The manager nodded. There’s other stuff too, he said, darkly. Why? How? The manager shook his head, as baffled as I was. So: a crack (and ‘other stuff’) accessory-selling motorway station, which stocks no beer. Beat that.

A much-needed rest day, with 5 days of riding ahead, two of them longish, before we hit Ventura Freeway (I’ll spare you the refrains – 2 songs at least) and Los Angeles; a day spent napping and idly picturing the life – as many others have – of Mabel (or Mable) Dodge Luhan (or Lujan) Sterne, Queen Mabel whose palazzo (now a glorified B&B) we hope to see tomorrow: Mabel the relentlessly manipulative human being I’m only too glad never to have known, wonderful rich brilliant Mabel with her unsuccessful attempts to unseat the marriages of D H Lawrence and Frieda (another tough nut, probably tougher than Queen Mabel) and Rob and Una Jeffers – a despairing Una did shoot herself in one of the bedrooms of Casa Luhan, but happily recovered.

Plate-throwing Frieda; hubby Lorenzo smashing a long-playing record over her head; are these the distant echoes we should listen for tomorrow? Or Dorothy Brett calling for her ear trumpet (whose name was Toby)? Or the clickety clack of Dorothy typing out Lorenzo’s novels at Rancho Lawrence, just up the road from Mabel’s place, and now owned and cared for by NMU tho’ alas unavailable to visits by casual pilgrims? This evening spent mostly gazing at the Sandia Mountains behind ABQ, a last spur of the Rockies, as sunset cycles them through their astonishing change from gold to orange, through brick to purple, and finally to a bright silver ash. My camera lens can’t capture it. But then again it’s good that there’s something for which you have to actually be here.