Going from northern to southern California usually requires a motorcycle, a head full of poetry and the famous Big Sur coastline. You leave the foggy Bay Area behind, and head for the palm trees and suntans of the Los Angeles beaches. For us, however, the north-south jaunt took us down Interstate-5 from the rising heat of Davis down the agricultural furnace called the Central Valley, over the Grapevine mountains (turn off the a/c, folks), and into the traffic and cooling smog of LA and Orange County, the ‘OC’. We were going there for the wedding of a friend who, a century ago in Aix-en-Provence, introduced me to my wife; ultimately, you could say, it is because of said friend that I now live in the US. We stocked up the ice-chest with Sobes and sandwiches, filled up the iPod shuffle with Jack, Art and Joni, and head off down the highway.

America is all about its roads, and some of the most memorable Americana springs from that. I’ve never read Kerouac, and despite many visits to the City Lights store in SF, I probably never will; I have seen Convoy, though, which is why every time I see a helicopter or police light aircraft while out on the sun-washed freeway I announce that there’s a ‘bear in the air’. As we speed past a backdrop of already browning hills, I get a sense of just how massive America really is; though it is not one country, but many. You have to travel among them to tell the difference, a lot of the time. Even the States, who make their presence felt in the license plate game (when I wonder to myself what story brought that SUV down from the distant grey shores of New Jersey), are not particularly real entities, and passing over the mountains into the land of LA, I get the feeling that, yes we’re in California, but this is a different country, and the road has brought us here.

Yes, the sun is clearly getting to me, so I splash a bit more sunscreen onto my arms. We eventually roll into the rich country of the OC, strolling by the Balboa Island waterfront, shopping and eating in Newport Beach. The wedding was beautiful, a mixture of Irish America and colourful Persia, in the spectacularly Mediterranean Laguna Beach. It wasn’t the only wedding in town, though; down on the shores of the Pacific, other Happy Couples were snapping photos with long sunset shadows and shimmering waves. We wandered among the palm trees and tuxedoes for a bit, before retiring to the hotel, to finish off the previous night’s cheesecake.

And then back on the road, the very next day. Back over the mountains, back into the Valley, watching the thermometer rise from the early 70s to the late 80s (completely bypassing both punk and new romantic). I noticed that in the supposedly smoggy OC/LA area, my hay fever and related allergies actually cleared up. No sniffling and sneezing for me (I was all ready to put it down to tears at the wedding, too). It took less time to get back to our part of the world than it had taken to go south – or at least it did, until just as we were getting into Sacramento, our car threw a flat tyre, forcing us onto the side of the freeway. We had to wait to be rescued, while juggernauts and Sunday drivers whizzed by at speeds that made the ground shake. An ironically fitting end to a road trip – stuck on the side of the road. At least we weren’t far from home.