WORLD OF WILL

Los Angeles is a city with many different personalities – all of them dysfunctional. Downtown is a muddle of shabby and chic. There are boarded up old theatres, run down hotels (including ours) and discount stores but then in amongst that are trendy loft apartments, artisan bakeries and expensive restaurants. Vagrants, beggars and loonies roam, stagger and limp the grubby streets but then so do trendy media types and go-getting executives in power suits. We found ourselves dodging incoherent appeals for money one minute and overhearing a beyond-pretentious analysis of a $500 pop-up book the next. The backdrop to this part of the city is a brilliant jigsaw of old buildings adorned with vintage painted adverts and funky contemporary murals, while the soundtrack is a near-constant cacophony of sirens and helicopters. If nothing else, it feels edgy and exciting. Then there's Hollywood, a word that conjures up glamour and fame. Hollywood, in reality, has an air of cheapness and despe...

One of the great things that comes with the freedom of driving around the States is stumbling across people and places you wouldn't normally see. One such place was in a small town called Glendale, Utah. We were heading west, away from Bryce Canyon, when I spotted a couple of old rusty classic American cars by the side of the road so we stopped for a closer look. It was then that we saw another old car, then another and then another – there were hundreds of them and they were all lying around in this sort of overgrown garden. Then an old man appeared on an old tractor wanting to know, understandably, what I was doing on his land. After a quick chat he told me that he'd lived there his whole life and amassed all these cars over the years – though to what end wasn't entirely clear. Upon finding out that I was English, he told me that his family had originated in England, that his surname was Spencer and he wondered if I knew which part of England they might have been from. ...

Having left Roswell, we spent an uneventful couple of days in Albuquerque searching fruitlessly for a new skylight to replace the one that had been annihilated during that unprovoked attack by a tree. Undeterred by our lack of success, I managed, through my experiences in Europe of mending a broken van with gaffer tape, to lash the carcass of the old skylight together in such a way that at least it wouldn't liberate itself from the van entirely. With the RV all bandaged up we headed west, out into the desert wilderness, for a week of rock-based adventure. We drove through an old volcanic area called El Malpais – the badlands – in which we visited an extinct volcano called Bandera. While this was all very nice and, you know, volcano-shaped, the real surprise was what lay down below. Beneath the ancient lava flow was a cave and in that cave was a "lake of ice". The temperature down there never gets above 0°C so this ice has been there for centuries – scientists have dat...