Steinbeck

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Isabel who was told by her English teacher to read a book called The Pearl. Then she read Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, The Pastures of Heaven, Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charley etc. Eventually, at the age of 17, she read a book called East of Eden. At 19 she chose to study American Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, favouring this degree over its English Lit counterpart on account of the compulsory year abroad in America. At the age of 21 she was allocated Reed College in the Pacific NW as her exchange school. Before leaving, she told her scholarship donor that reading The Pearl all those years ago was the butterfly wing which has since determined the trajectory of her life to date. With respect to this, she also told him that the only place in America she must and shall visit was to be Steinbeck's Salinas Valley, located approximately 100 miles south of San Francisco.

The parental unit, always keen to satisfy the idiot's various whims, therefore arrange an extravagant diversion to Salinas, Carmel and Monterey on their way to Yosemite. We start off in Salinas, which is something of a ghost town. Maybe it's the fault of Memorial Day. Salinas seems more functional than touristy, and indeed The Steinbeck Center in the square is pretty much the main event, an incongruity next to a multiplex cinema and a parade of pseudo-Mexican restaurants. The idiot attends to every exhibit with fevered concentration; the museum is arranged according to novel, as opposed to theme or chronology, and includes as much detailed information about the film adaptations as it does the writing. James Dean, John Malkovich, Gary Sinise - one can't complain. She spends near to three hours in there, emerging at last looking post-coital and flushed. From the museum we drive to the graveyard so the idiot can pay her respects. She sits firmly on the memorial stone and grins with thumbs up.

We are booked to stay in a motel-type inn affair in Carmel Valley. We pass the Corral de Tierra on the left side of the car, and, ignoring the road and the smell of petrol, she convinces herself that she is astride a horse in the opening chapter to The Pastures of Heaven, bearing down on sun slants and farmland and dust.

This is her poetic gaff, not mine.

The father and the mother could quite happily miss out on a meal in the evening, but the idiot and I are having none of it. We end up in the best bar in the world, two minutes up the hill from our inn. It is quite literally the most American thing I have ever seen: actual men in checked shirts and braces sitting drinking (I hope) whiskey, a head shot of John Wayne on the wall, and spurred boots hanging from the ceiling. The idiot is in raptures. We order southern salads of black beans, sweetcorn, guacamole and chilli. The mother raises a sceptical eyebrow at her huevos rancheros.

On Day 2 of our road trip we spend the morning getting lost along the '17 mile drive' past Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove - a Bermuda Triangle of golf courses and vulgar real estate. Well, on one side anyway. I concede that the other side, the coastal side, is rather picturesque. My only complaint is that there are too many birds, meaning that the mother stops the car every few seconds and rushes outside with her binoculars around her neck, shouting "Peter! Peter! Oh you must see this." We complete our Steinbeck tour with a visit to Monterey, for tourist pics beneath Cannery Row. Monterey Bay Aquarium costs near-to $30 per person, but, while we mull it over, an amazing lady bumbles up to us proffering free entry for another party of 3 (completing her voucher for 6). We are inside within a matter of seconds, and the lady bumbles off again into the seahorse section and out of sight, the fairy godmother of overpriced aquarium access. "Yes, idiot, you shall go see the fishies."

Consette x