'Looks Just Like Devon'. Welcome to Californishire.

Shooting across Death Valley, leaving glittering Las Vegas behind, we headed to one of our final states and the Pacific Ocean. California, once governed by Arnie, home to Hollywood, land of sunshine, medicinal weed and beach bums.

The plan was to skirt around Los Angeles and head north, taking our time meandering up the Big Sur coast - a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that National Geographic voted a Drive of a Lifetime. 
We had set aside days to visit San Luis Obispo (the happiest place in America) and Monterey on the map, but had a week to fill with whatever else took our fancy.

Along the way, we stopped off at another roadside attraction, an old mining town called Calico, a couple of hours west of Vegas.
It marketed itself as a ghost town but unlike Steins, was still home to a collection of workers and gift shop owners. It was tidy and neat with a wide main street, souvenir shops serving Starbucks coffee and those old time saloon swing doors that we so longed to see. While it was fun to wander around and look at all the Western kitsch for ourselves, it lacked the soul and eerie-ness of Steins, New Mexico.

We stayed until sundown and headed further west, ending up at an appalling dive of a motel out in the Santa Clarita woodlands. The carpet was littered with the detritus of previous occupants that clung to the soles of our feet after we had wrenched our sweaty All Stars and socks off. There was also a mysterious smattering of dried blood in the shower. Luckily the TV offered some respite by allowing us to view the latest episode of Jersey Shore so we could watch Snooki, Deena and Mike 'The Situation' et al and forget about our glum surroundings.

It was probably one of the only mornings we were up, packed and on our way before 9am, such was our desperation to get out of there. We pointed the car up to Lompoc for the night and then San Luis Obispo the day after, where we explored bubblegum alley, a revolting piece of audience participant 'art'.

The short alleyway was completely covered, top to bottom, in millions upon millions of coloured gum. Some had been squeezed into tiny models and statues before being pressed onto the wall, displaying a weak stab at creativity, while others had been allowed to dry and then decorated with permanent marker. I had the strange sensation of being in Ms Trunchbull's torture chamber so hastily took my shots and made like a tree out of there.

The Californian countryside looks a lot like southern England. There was an abundance of lush green hillside from which I expected a Teletubby or Hobbit to come bouncing down, along with paddocks of lazy cows and fields full of chestnut-coloured horses. Very pleasant on the old eyeballs indeed.

We rolled into a car park on the side of the highway, facing the ocean where we had been told a seal sanctuary lay. Sure enough, there they were glistening in the winter sun, fat and slug-like, rubbing their eyes like teenagers suffering hangovers after an illegal house party.

Elderly volunteers in blue windbreakers were on hand with factoids about the creatures - the males entered into vicious battles for sexing rights with the females, and sometimes they broke free of their fenced pads and wiggled along the highway. I never saw this for myself but the lady was the expert so SHUT UP.

We stood cooing and calling to them from the elevated walkway, attempting to engage them in conversation and clapping like excited toddlers when they bothered to raise their heads in our direction.

And then we drove up in a leisurely fashion to Monterey, where using her top notch booking skills, Leah had secured a four night stay in a motel for a ridiculously cheap amount. We took it easy, sliding into holiday mode, mooching in and out of 'treasure' stores (secondhand shops), eating clam chowder on the sea front and fresh samosas in the local market and perching on the bar at various British pubs where the owner got us free entry into the 17-mile drive, a scenic route through the north end of Monterey. All we had to do was say at the gate that we were there to see our Uncle Iain. Easy as.

As the 12th of December 2012 grew closer, discussions of how to mark my 26th birthday became more persistent. What did I want to do?, Leah asked. My mum also rang from India, bellowing down the phone (which is the way most Indians talk to people on international calls) demanding to know the ins and outs of my celebration schedule. In all honesty, I wasn't bothered. I'd be happy stewing in a bar for the entirety, slowly mourning the loss of my early twenties and wondering once more, how I'd become so bloody ancient. Melodramatic.

In the end we settled on kayaking in the open sea and I'm glad we did. We saw a wild seal in action, mauling a crab in its sharp, slippery claws as if it was a cheeseburger. I stuck my feet in the terrifically cold Pacific ocean for the first time, dangling my toes in the seaweed and freaking myself out by imagining a shark gnawing my leg off, while quietly trying to race ahead of the Gass; Expert Kayaker.

the Gass fails to give way. OFFICER!

In the evening we made use of the motel's hot tub and sat drinking $7 Californian champagne under a clear sky, making absurd wishes whenever I caught a shooting star.

'I wish for a tumble in the hay with Captain America!',

'I wish for the power to command all the creatures of the sea!',

'I wish for a real-life hoverboard!',


'I wish for more champagne. We've bloody run out'.

Et fin.

Eight Ways to Stay Sassy in NOLA

Feeling less fierce? Sass levels dwindling? Fix up, look sharp. Here's how we kept the attitude topped up in the US Capital of Sass; New Orleans, Lousiana (NOLA).

1. LIVE SASSY 
Book a bed at the Best Hostel of All Time, the AAE Bourbon House New Orleans run by a peroxide-haired bombshell and Sass Commodore-in-Chief, Jayson. He is the only hostel manager to date to wake me up and drag me to Walmart in search of turducken with all the trimmings for Thanksgiving dinner.
Whether you're in the mood for sass or not, it could be hurled at you from across the garden or handed to you sweetly on a paper plate, alongside your barbecued franks and potato salad. It all depends on the waxing phases of the moon. 

2. DRINK SASSY

Indulge in some of that pre-loading David Cameron is always banging on about by procuring a two-litre bottle of $10 vodka from Walmart. Amatuer Sass Cadets can begin with starter bottles of Bud Light Lime while the more sophisticated and refined have a tasty bottle of wine to turn to. The vodka vanished alarmingly quickly thanks to the obscene measures being poured by the Gassonimator. Before we knew it we'd been vacuum packed into a convoy of taxi cabs and whirled out to NOLA's drinking-and-mugging hot spot Bourbon Street. Here the streets are rained on by alcohol, cheap carnival beads and STDs. Already meatballing around the pavement, a kind soul threw me a Hand Grenade and three minutes after imbibing it, the cocktail shot through my veins and exploded like an a-bomb right behind my eyes. 

3. FIND AND FRIEND FELLOW SASSERS

solid life motto

This was one of those rare fantastic times when the planets align and the cosmos conspires so that we were in the right hostel with the right people at the right time. Our fellow hostellers were all a bunch of right wrong 'uns, a good mix of Australians (all from Melbourne, weirdly), a scattering of American and the rest, British. There was a news editor from the Beeb goading an erotic dancer from Portland Oregon who looked exactly like K-Stew, the Real Inbetweeners (four English boys studying in Illinois had come down to Naaaawlins for Thanksgiving break and they were the living, breathing Will, Neil, Jay and Simon. They hated that we immediately christened them the Inbetweeners, but not more than they hated being called One Direction), a pair of Scottish LADs interning at a Texan oil firm and two Brummie girls, cool in black with heavy eyeliner and tattooed arms.
The evening was young and ours to claim. 


4. FLASH YOUR SASS ON BOURBON STREET

Rules for Bourbon Sass include: partnering your hand with a drink at all times, smearing yours and others' face with gold glitter and Vaseline, administering sass at a bar to cut through the queue, sassing with aplomb on the dance floor, duckfacing those with inferior levels of sass while sucking on a neon jelly shot in syringes, snapping fingers at raasclat bouncers who, though younger than you, still require checking your ID, dishing out some smartass sass to poets trying to sell haikus and ditties on the pavement, withstanding a Hurricane cocktail, hailing a cab without passing out, throwing up without getting any vom on your only Going Out top. All with nothing less than optimum sass.



5. FESTIVE SASS
Thanksgiving in America is up there with Christmas in terms of ceremony, decoration and excessive carb consumption. With our newly formed NOLA Collective, we decided to trawl through the aisles of Walmart to create a feast of our very own. I was tasked with making a carrot and orange salad, which managed to go awry the minute I picked up the grater. However, Leah saved the day with her Mother Hen routine and spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen, sweating out her dishgushting hangover over trays of crispy roast potatoes and parsnips.


6. BLACK FRIDAY SASS
Back at Walmart, elbows at the ready and the fire for a true bargain burning in our hearts, we braced ourselves and pushed into the fray. There was a netbook for $188 with my name on it. We got there and Darrell the department manager informed us that all twenty six had sold out. What kind of company stocks just twenty six laptops on a day as serious as Black Friday?!
INITIATE SASS.
'Na uh honey. OH NO. Whaaaaaat, you bein' serious?!' Jayson sassed, hip jutting to one side and hair quivering with rage. He assumed the duckface and went off into one, demanding the number for Walmart HQ, then flirting with him before threatening lesser staff members with letters of complaint at this shoddy display of retail incompetency.
I was glad he was on our side, fighting on my behalf for this  injustice. One Walmart worker, inevitably called Shaniqua, had four gold teeth in the front of her mouth and looked as though she could knock my burgeoning sass right out of the state if I tried it. She and Jayson tangoed in a crazy sass war, but then Jayson got distracted by half price duvets and my netbook was lost forever. 



7. CASUAL SASS
I managed to meet up with a super-stylist chum who was in NOLA on fashion business. Unfortunately this was the morning after the night before and I was accessorised with bits of glitter in untamed hair and gloopy eye bogey. I stumbled out of a cab at 10.55a.m, feeling like my internal organs had been blow dried, by a mile-and-a-half long queue outside Cafe Le Monde in the French quarter. Alcohol still seeping out of my skin and sticking to my frock in the warm November sun. I found Buntface and we ran into each other's arms by a street performer in the middle of yowling to Michael Jackson's BAD. Then we went to a record shop and got clawed by the owner's kitten before falling into a pub for burgers and bread and butter pudding. Casual, like.
On the walk home I watched a woman strangling a fish on the banks of the Mississippi and found five hundred rupees in a park. Moral of the story: Sass is as sass does.

christmas tree merboy sass

8. DILUTING SASS DURING CRISIS-TIMES
Once upon a time a douchebag came to Nawlins for his 21st bday. He was the kind of livelong moron who hunts down a party with ferocious hunger and the gleam of embarrassing desperation in his eyes. I BETTER FIND SOME FUN OR FUN'S GONNA BE IN TROUBLE. Birthday Douche drank all day. He drank all afternoon and into the early evening. By 7pm he had completed his transformation into a fully developed douchebag and could barely stand. Still, he drinky, raising the odds of getting punched in the face as the minutes slipped by. Oh, Birthday Douche was in for some ass-whoppery tonight.
New Orleans tradition dictates that birthday boys and girls pin a dollar bill to their top and people give them money to celebrate, so Birthday Douche does this. But Twattiness is a stench sniffed out and avoided by humans and dogs a mile off so no  $$$ for him, yo.  We shed ourselves of him and his insufferable ilk and headed out into the warm Friday night, dancing gleefully in a Bourbon whirl before very nearly setting my hair alight in a candle-lit, firehazard-worthy bar. I later found Birthday Douche, on his knees in the hostel bathroom, full blown crisis raging in the middle of the night.  He had fallen out of the cab in front of the hostel and cracked his jaw on the pavement. Now blood was gushing profusely from his douchey chin. Somebody had rung for an ambulance. Everyone had come out of their dorms to watch his pitful mewling and highly public meltdown. ENTER SASS. He twitched while I talked, trying to dial down the sass and calm him down while still taking the piss as much as I could. 'It's okay you massive vagine, that's not the real Grim Reaper you're seeing', I laughed at his falling-down-drunkeness 'No mate, no. No one's laughing at you. That's from inside your head. Twat'. He looked confused, unsure. HAHAHAHAAHHA. He deserved no mercy. Earlier in the evening he had chest-bumped his friend in the middle of chugging his Modelo beer and screamed  'PARTTTTEEE' into the sweet Lousiana sky. I had simply shared a look with Leah and Goodluck Jonathan, our favourite of the Australians. 'Someone concuss this guy, please' the look had said. He should have been issued a detention slip and been sat facing the corner wearing a Dunce hat instead of allowed out with the grown-ups that evening. 
Birthday Douche caught the word 'ambulance' and bolted like a disabled gazelle into the street, flailing and wailing at the intersection where the bored paramedics were parked. Costs around $7k to call out an ambulance in these parts, if you don't have health insurance. SUCKA. I should have sold popcorn, it was such a great show. After about ten minutes, I tired of watching him run away in pathetic slow motion from the medics (who admirably crawled behind him at 0.3mph rather than running the imbecile over) and clambered into bed, falling asleep in my mascara and strands of Mardi Gras beads.

DOUUUUUUUUUCHE

p.s - Stay sassy.