This little trip has been full of surprises, and Las Vegas was one. Against all my expectations, I really enjoyed it. I think that the key is to recognise that it's not so much a city as a gambling and nightlife-themed amusement park where a couple of hundred thousand people happen to live. I approached it as an oddity, a weird but wildly-successful experiment that was a stroke of pure genius on behalf of whomever came up with it. Without its ...

I was following State Line Road through the desert. I could see that I was in the desert, and I even had the song about the horse with no name stuck in my head, but more than that I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what state I was in. I had been going for some time out of Death Valley Junction, which from memory seemed close to the state border on the map, but I hadn’t passed any signs or anything else to tell me that I’d entered Nevad...