California Dreamin'

ELLE’s Genevra Leek hits the highways to discover the other side of the Golden State, where the landscape is breathtaking, the wine is award-winning and the weather is just right

Every year for about the past decade, my childhood best friend and I have sworn it’s the year for an all-American road trip. The kitsch diners, the dodgy motels, the wide, open spaces and the cheap-as-chips fashion outlets. We map it all out in our heads over a vodka martini or three, then do absolutely zero to make it happen. Until this year, that is, when winter was once again looming and the Cali sunshine finally proved too tempting to resist. Los Angeles, we agreed, was not on the agenda – we’d both had good times there, but this was about the “other California”. So with a sketchy plan we touched down in LA, hired an SUV and right-hand drove our way into the trip of a lifetime (ditching the dodgy motel idea – that was never going to happen).

LAS VEGAS

Vegas is technically across the border in Nevada, but the best way to kick off a West Coast road trip is with a visit to Sin City. After a misguided detour to the McDonald’s museum just east of LA (one of us, aka not me, watched The Founder on the plane), we were well into the four hour drive on Interstate 15 and already tasting the frozen margaritas. Until we were tasting the dust of the breakdown shoulder. Lesson one: fork out for the satellite phone. A 90-minute delay and a highway patrol chaperone later, we pulled into Vegas in the front seat of a tow truck exchanging back slaps with our driver/saviour Eugene.