Arizona to Mexico
... and Christmas in California
Happy New Year from Fish & Trips — and Feliz Año Nuevo from Mexico! When we last wrote, Saskia and I were in Utah, dodging snowstorms and shivering through those long December nights in America’s desert southwest. Now we’re in Puerto Escondido, 2,246 miles further south, watching surfers dart among crashing waves and a pair of majestic humpback whales cresting lazily in the distance. It’s blissfully hot. Palm trees are swaying in the ocean breeze. A speckle of inky blotches, distant paragliders, are drifting in an otherwise spotless blue. Hopefully, you can forgive us for slipping behind. It has been a hot minute.
Also, I’ve only just learnt that we can include photos on Substack — see below!
As you may have suspected, we have been spoilt rotten by the last four weeks and, clearly, have a lot of catching up to do. I’ll try to keep this newsletter as brisk, bouncy and as digestible as I can without stripping out the good bits: New Year here in Puerto Escondido with our one-of-a-kind, show-stopping, fun-plotting, globe-trotting pal Christa (which I’m going to save fora newsletter tomorrow, given how long this one is shaping up to be); some of the happiest days of our life over Christmas with Sask’s big sister and road trip mastermind Tati, my new brother-in-law Ant and baby Rafferti in Los Angeles, as well as Saskia's beloved, extraordinary friends Ceci and Henry; Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. The past is, quite literally, a different country — so back we go.
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Spoiler alert: the Grand Canyon is big. To shamelessly borrow from Douglas Adams, you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. You could stack the Eiffel Tower up five times, base to needle, and still fall short of reaching the rim. Thirsty cottonwoods sprout far below wherever they can find a drink. Wiry pines pockmark the higher rocks like stubble, holding on for dear life. I found the boundless, infinite canyon hard to process, my little brain short-circuiting, and wondered what my dad, with his poetic grasp of the sublime and unfortunate vertigo, would make of it. The park service allows you to drive up right alongside the southern edge, a giddying quirk of this land of the free, so we dangled our legs over the brink. I know what Dad would have made of that.
We camped in the national forest for two nights, Saskia baking fish and the pair of us roasting marshmallow s’mores on a campfire, drinking whisky and playing hide-and-seek in a silver clearing lit by the dazzling full moon. Each night, we were hushed to sleep by the sound of the wind whispering through the trees. Then we waved goodbye to all that, to imperious elk, starry skies and the natural world, and descended on Las Vegas, perhaps the most manmade place in America.
I don’t anything quite compares to the industrial wishing complex that is Vegas. It has willed itself into existence, a fantasy city, fake skyscrapers raised for the business of pleasure, casino-hotels masquerading as great pyramids, medieval castles and the Manhattan skyline (featuring a rickety rollercoaster that rockets through the faux Chrysler and Empire State Building), a trick of the bright lights and old neon.
Driving in, the Hoover Dam and vast thickets of solar panels demonstrate the ingenuity required to make this inhospitable neck of the desert home. An airport is plonked right on the strip. Saskia and I stayed in the Luxor Pyramid after she’d scored us a hefty discount on Lastminute.com, our first lucky break. We can say that we have ridden the mighty New York rollercoaster, watched the Bellagio Fountains dance, nursed sore heads with overpriced room service burgers and, quite extraordinarily, left Vegas in the black. At 1 o’clock in the morning, Saskia promptly turned our last $20 into $600 on the Craps table, mastering a game we still haven’t the foggiest idea how to play. Rowdy pharmacists, in town for a Big Pharma conference, won small fortunes on her hot streak. Casino staff who had finished their shifts put their day’s pay on the table. Ever the fiscal drag, eventually I wrenched her away, in what was perhaps a misguided attempt to get out while the going was good. Who knows if her luck would have run out? In another life, I could now be married to a millionaire. I received my dues: the casino floor actually booed me.
What else, what else? Well, three weeks in California. A rare hot Christmas. We spent a night in Joshua Tree, with its knobbly namesake yuccas, which gave us our first glimpse of the West Coast’s pink-orange sunrises. Then, on to Los Angeles, arriving through an eerie forest of towering wind farms and a thick, sleepy soup of early morning smog. A guide book informed us that LA is ‘a nice place to live, but not a great place to visit’— it’s about 500 square miles of urban sprawl and criss-crossed by freeways, after all — but we were lucky to have two little families who made us feel like it was no place but home. Ceci and Henry live in Venice Beach, as do Tati, Ant and baby Raffi (aka Tats, Tony and ‘Mole’ Steel — also aka TnThree).
Where do I start? With picnics on the beach, furious games of paddle tennis, raucous dinner parties, 4am finishes, Boxing Day on a Malibu hilltop and the occasional jog along the beachfront by way of partial atonement? But then there were tacos in Topanga, hilltop hikes and a memorable sunset trip to the Griffith Observatory on the winter solstice, where the mesmerising twinkle of lights below drowned out any chance of seeing something meaningful above. Perhaps it helps not to ponder your place in the cosmos. In the 248 years it’s taken Pluto to go around the sun, it was pointed out, the entire modern history of America has taken place. (‘Pluto — never forget’, read a T-shirt in a nearby shop. Perhaps stripping it of planet status was a ploy to do just that.)
Back to earth, although Venice never feels quite of this world. Preening houses sun themselves by its shimmering canals, bejewelled with lush palms and fruitful front gardens. It’s Portobello on sea. The golden beach front stretches from the marina down to Santa Monica, where Sask and I spent a happy day trying our luck at the the arcade and spotting dolphins playing in the waves. Oodles of good fortune contentedly sloshes around. (That said, California also has the highest rate of homelessness in the country. It accounted for nearly a third of the country's unhoused population on just a single night in 2022: the best of times, it is the worst of times, all in one state.) When life gives you lemons, you’re in California — in fact Tati admonished us for buying them when you can ‘steal them from front gardens’.
Ceci, an ingenious high-flyer in the tech world and boundless font of fun and games, and Henry, a gallerist and cornucopia of colour in every sense with a limitless imagination, could make a rainy day on death row feel like the Mardi Gras. They are dream weavers, daydream believers (they have a dog called Merlin, who is also truly magical, even when he’s lunging to steal popcorn out of your mouth) and, simply put, two of the most delightful people I’ve ever met. Their house a tasteful riot of artistic flair — dopamine by design — and a hot tub bubbles away in the garage. To top it off, the beach is a stone’s throw away.
Meanwhile, Tati, Ant and Raff, for those that don’t know them, have the combined personal wattage of a newborn sun. Good times roll to their drumbeat. They squeezed us in around managing both burgeoning businesses they run, Looni and Steel Comms, and a twenty-month-old. They lent us their car. They lent us their bed. Really, truly, they were all extraordinary, and we do not deserve them in the slightest. (As a side note, this part of the trip felt oddly as if we were constantly just dodging calamity. The ‘generational’ bomb cyclone that buried everywhere in America but California in snow hit just after as we arrived. A 6.4 earthquake hit Northern California after we’d made ourselves at home in the south of the state. San Francisco suffered its worst floods for 170 years days after we left. The one day we left LA, a former Santa Monica mayor crashed his single-engine plane into the sea by the pier. Are we a bad omen? Our apologies in advance to the next corner of the world we happen upon.)
Saskia and Ceci have known each other since they were tiny and share December as a birthday month — as well as a mutual thrill in springing surprises. For Saskia’s birthday, days after waving a tearful farewell to Wilson the van, I took her kayaking in the marina, slaloming between curious seals and perplexed pelicans. Later, TnThree took us for sundowner drinks on the beach and a knockout, hall-of-famer dinner at Gjelina in Venice Beach, ladling forkfuls from plates of pork belly, Oaxacan grits, mustard and apple greens, bowls of fettuccine and cherry tomato and slices of fennel salami pizza.
For Ceci’s birthday, in an unforgettable effusion of generosity, they went thermonuclear. We’d decided that we simply couldn’t afford to make it to San Francisco, and had made our peace with that. But — surprise! — for Ceci’s birthday she and Henry took us there anyway, a day trip starting at LAX, pulling flights out of a magic hat and putting together a romp around the city that featured all of the hot spots they’d learnt to love when they’d lived here: breakfast at Boogaloo in Valencia, vintage shopping in La Haine, lunch in Marin County over the Golden Gate Bridge, then watching the sun set behind it on the return ferry. ‘San Francisco is buff, Los Angeles is ming,’ said Ceci, and, after the day we’d had, no one could disagree.
It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. We moved house, from Ceci and Henry to TnThree, who were, even more happily for us, dogsitting Shrimps, an effervescent cockapoo. He is a whirling, pillow-humping, delightful ball of golden fur, who generously warms your feet as he sleeps. Christmas morning was spent on the beach, running into the sea, Shrimps and Raffi hot on our tails. Saskia cooked a feast, and we ate, drank, and got so merry that Tati taught us to line dance and Ant did a ten minute impression of a giraffe. Tati handmade Christmas crackers, with personalised hats, jokes, gifts and little gem stones. Did we mention we were spoilt? But the greatest present of all — if you can forgive me for getting hammier than the pork — was spending time with them, especially baby Raffi, who I have now proudly covered miles of Venice with on my shoulders, and would gladly walk 500 more with. Oh, little Mole. You are not yet two years old, and it may be a while before we see you again, but we are BFFs forever. You are a super little human and you light up our lives. If we squinted, we could probably have spotted you from the plane, waving one minute too late. See you later, thank you for another day, we’re off to chase some rays and slap on some more SPF.
come back <3