Western USA

California and New Mexico, and only those two, because they are the ones I crossed myself. The West, as I met it, runs from the Pacific shoreline of California on one side to the San Juan basin of New Mexico on the other, with a long stretch of desert in between. Joshua Tree National Park alone covers close to 3,200 square kilometres; in the 1970s the desert around Joshua Tree passed for the centre of Californian culture, visited by the hippie community and by the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and the Eagles, which is where the giant marbles of the park begin. Further east, White Sands spreads over 715 square kilometres, told in the land of enchantment.

Ocean, hills and desert, in that order, if you drive it the way I did. The Pacific Coast follows Highway One from San Francisco down to Los Angeles, past Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Big Sur, San Simeon and Santa Barbara. San Francisco itself sits on some forty hills, with streets climbing more than 30 degrees and cable cars that never pass 15 kilometres an hour, which is the subject of the streets of San Francisco. Then the land dries out: hoodoos in the San Juan basin of New Mexico, 715 square kilometres of white sand at White Sands, yuccas around Joshua Tree. The dry half is walked in a day inside the Bisti Wilderness.

On Highway 371, south of Farmington, in the San Juan basin of New Mexico. The site covers about 4,000 acres of Bisti Wilderness, some 35 miles down that road from Farmington. The part everyone comes for, the Cracked Eggs, measures only 50 yards long by 20 wide, with egg-shaped rocks more than 3 feet in diameter, and that patch is the heart of man versus wild in New Mexico. Nothing is marked out there: no trail, no signpost, no visitor centre, and motorbikes, quads and electric bikes are all banned. Standing in front of those shapes, I felt like Tintin. The wider continent is gathered in my North American road stories.

White dunes and stone tents, for the most part. White Sands National Park spreads 715 square kilometres of desert, listed as a national monument in 1933 by President Herbert Hoover and redesignated a park in December 2019, with the San Andres Mountains rising to 2,700 metres and the Sacramento Mountains to 3,600 as a backdrop; the Dunes Drive crosses all of it over 13 kilometres, and both sites sit inside a New Mexico of sand and rock. Sixty-four kilometres south-west of Santa Fe, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks sits on the Pajarito Plateau at 1,950 metres, its cones left behind by an eruption six or seven million years ago. Rangers run guided walks at sunset. The prairies are a long way off, in my Middle West wanderings.

Lombard Street, Steiner Street and California Street, if only three are allowed. Lombard Street measures 4.5 kilometres, but its reputation rests on one hundred of them: 8 bends on a 28 per cent slope, which I climbed in a walk through the city hills. Steiner Street holds the Painted Ladies, seven houses built between 1892 and 1896 and painted in their present colours since the 1920s. California Street carries one of the three cable car lines, and the very first car ran on 2 August 1873 under Andrew Hallidie. Above it all stands the Coit Tower, 64 metres high, opened in 1933. The road heading south begins with Highway One down to Los Angeles.

Not in Joshua Tree National Park. The tree photographed for the album cover actually grew in Death Valley, and it has since been cut down. The park itself covers close to 3,200 square kilometres of Joshua Tree country and owes its name to the Mormons, who saw in this yucca the figure of their prophet Joshua; its rounded boulders, nicknamed giant marbles, draw climbers all year, and that is the day told in a morning among the giant marbles. Nearby, Red Rock Canyon State Park has served more than 100 films, among them The Mummy, Jurassic Park and Planet of the Apes, on rock formations dating back some 100 million years. At night the coyotes howl. The Florida marshes give the opposite mood in my journeys through the American South.

Highway One, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, taken slowly. On the Pebble Beach peninsula, the 17-Mile Drive unrolls 27 kilometres as far as the Lone Cypress, a 250-year-old tree standing alone on its rock, and that whole stretch belongs to a slow drive down the Pacific Coast. At Monterey the aquarium holds more than 35,000 animals and plants across 550 species, from jellyfish to leafy sea dragons, and we thought we spotted Dory in there. Carmel-by-the-Sea comes next, a town Clint Eastwood served as mayor from 1986 to 1988 and where he shot Play Misty for Me in 1971. Then Big Sur, San Simeon, Santa Barbara. The northern woods answer that road in my stops along the American East.