Mustang Road Trip

I love a road trip, and since a particularly ludicrous one in Australia a few years back I´ve been dying to get back behind the wheel for some motoring mayhem. The freedom of the open road with nothing booked ahead appeals more than any other form of travel. No airports, no bus-stations, no robbing taxi drivers, just a nice cruisy motor, the open road, and the unknown.

We left Rarotonga and spent a wet New Year´s eve in Disneyland. With that nonsense out of the way, it was time to get down to the real purpose of the American phase. Sadly we only had two weeks and, unlike Australia, didn´t break down, drive through any floods, share any barbeques with road-train drivers whilst waiting for rivers to subside, rescue broken-down backpackers, strap the transmission together with insulating tape or get any death threats from irate roadhouse owners five hundred miles from civilisation. We did tackle torrential rain, fog, darkness, dirt roads, ice, snow and endless straight tarmac, took our rented black convertible Mustang to meet some real Mustangs in the Navajo Indian reserve at Monument Valley and cruised the strips in LA and Vegas.


First challenge for the trip was to find a Mustang, which I had fancied trying out ever since the new model appeared in UK car mags about a year ago. The way car rental is organised made this difficult, and strikes me as bizarre. You don´t book a Cinema ticket for ¨Harry Potter or similar¨ or order ¨White bread or similar¨ from Tescos online only to end up with a banana. Why, then, do car rental websites only allow you to book a ¨Ford Mustang convertible or similar,¨ leaving the motoring enthusiast open to the horror of paying top dollar for their desired drive only to end up with a VW Beetle (a genuine alternative offered to me at LAX, honest!) I quickly recognised that booking in advance was fruitless. We would have to see what they had at the airport.

Arriving at LAX, it turned out the usual counters for Budget, Avis, Hertz etc found at most non-third-world airports (and some third-world ones too) were absent, and instead there was a barely audible free telephone with a number of poster advertisements for rental companies. Budget, Avis, Hertz etc either didn´t answer, cut me off, or had no idea whatsoever whether I would get a brand new Mustang, old model Mustang, VW Beetle or a banana. By the time Sonia and I and our baggage had been shuttle-bussed to a rental company, it would be too late to try elsewhere - we would just have to take whatever they had.

Hence I ended up hiring a car from the only agency which knew what cars they had, and definitely had a black, latest model Mustang convertible. They were called Rex Rent- a-Car. I presume the Rex/Wrecks pun was not intended, but was simply advance warning of their level of intelligence. Fortunately we didn´t have any accidents, breakdowns or thefts and delivered the car back in better condition than we found it (having put it through a carwash for photographic purposes!) so we didn´t have to test out whether the insurance we were paying $25 a day for actually existed.

First stop on our itinerary was Las Vegas. Vegas is not big and it´s not clever, but it´s certainly different. As the whole point of travelling is to see different things, Vegas is a must-see destination.

In Vegas the hotels are cheap, but you can´t so much as breathe without haemorraging cash. Much like Disneyland, it´s a little fortress-bubble of fantasy nonsense surrounded by wasteland. We stayed at the Luxor hotel, which has the most amazingly space-wasting design of any building I´ve ever seen. The main part of the hotel takes the shape of a large pyramid, all of which constitutes empty atrium space apart from a tiny bit taken up by actual rooms around the outer walls. We were ¨upgraded¨ to a more spacious ¨tower¨ room, which was largely indistinguishable from any ordinary Holiday Inn/Best Western standard offering. But the rooms are not the point of Vegas hotels. The point appears to be to create a bizarre fantasy land, bringing together world-famous sites such as the Pyramids, New York skyline and the Eiffel Tower, as well as fictional castles and palaces, but keeping any hint of reality out. So far, so Disneyland, except you can´t drink in bars with animatronic leopards at Disneyland. In fact, that is the only real difference I can think of - in Vegas they have added booze, gambling and topless dancing in amongst the taste-free plastic castles, concrete waterfalls, mechanical trees and wooden shows. It´s Disneyland for grown-ups - a magical getaway from all things real.

We ate excellent but expensive steaks and watched a badly executed replica of the London show Mamma Mia. In this production, one actor tried to carry off an upper-class English accent seemingly without any experience of the English or their accents other than studying the character Boycee from Only Fools and Horses. Other actors and actresses mauled their out-of-tune ways through ABBA classics but failed to be as lifelike as the rubber elephants at the bar in the MGM Grand.

With the Mustang standing by and open road ahead, we couldn´t leave quickly enough.