Through dry grassland and dust the I15 rises slowly then drops away revealing an expanse of hazy desert, by now a familiar sight. Except this time the monotony is broken by a million concrete and glass monuments cowering in baking fumes. You would doubt your senses except the sight's too ugly to be a mirage. This is Las Vegas.

After checking in to my South Strip hotel I walk through the lobby and sit down at a blackjack table. The croupier laughs at my nervousness and my mistakes but after 15 minutes I'm still breaking even. A waitress in a leather bikini asks if I want a drink so I order a bourbon (drinks are free if you’re sitting at a table). At one point I am $20 up and I decide to leave, except my drink hasn’t arrived. And so I wait and continue playing.

A new croupier called Lourdes takes over and she is sour faced and deals bad cards. I’m now $40 down. The whiskey arrives. I drink it down in one and leave. As I walk away from the table I experience (not for the last time in this city) the sticky sensation of losing at gambling: an evil blend of guilt, embarrassment, shame, anger, melancholy, and regret.

On the strip under the desert's blue sky, dreary souls flick flyers at you advertising “Pretty Woman to your Room in 20 Minutes”. We are tempted by "their" naked photos, coloured dots obscuring breasts and genitalia. We wear yard-long plastic tubes around our necks filled with blended ice-based cocktails. Some have pot-bellied bottoms and some are shaped like the Eiffel Tower. A man dressed as a Transformer talks solemnly to a man dressed as Iron Man. Elsewhere, there are other Iron Men. A Spiderman, alone and contemplative sits head-hung by the side of a fountain.

In the Venetian hotel gondoliers punt their gondolas down the swimming-pool-blue canals, singing arias in bass to their entrapped tourists. I walk alongside them on the glossy plastic cobbles to "St. Mark's Square" where the "sky" is a perpetual "dusk".

It's not long until I'm back on the deep carpet of a casino floor. The untameable urge comes upon me to walk over to a roulette table and place $10 (the minimum bet) on red. I watch the ball spin around, land on black, and I walk away $10 poorer. A few hours later I am compelled to repeat the process. Fortunately I manage to stop myself from putting down serious money (the few thousand pounds that are the entirety of my savings).

It's almost as tiring writing about Las Vegas as it is walking through it. The whole strip is a deafening blend of monotony and novelty. Lights flash, cards fly, and you forget who you are. The wonders of the world are recast in plastic American dreams and you forget where you are. That evening I dine at a buffet called The Crooked Spoon and I eat a nauseating list of rich foods and feel sick. In the morning I drive out of there like a wrecked soul escaping hell.

From my final glimpses of it as I drive out west, Nevada looks like what it sounds like: barren scrubland with mountains on the horizon. US 96 turns into Highway 220 and loses all central markings. It's a proper back road and the shortest route to California. The desert then turns into lush irrigated grasslands that disappear almost as soon as they appear. Black cows wander through the nothingness. As I enter into California the valleys get narrower and pine trees start to appear again. The ground turns into a matt grey gravel and the deep-blue Lake Mono appears round a bend. The colours—green, blue, and grey—contrast beautifully.

Five and a half hours after leaving Las Vegas I arrive at my campsite in Lee Vinings, a gateway to Yosemite National Park. I pitch my tent in the sun, wander a bit, eat a burger and fall asleep beneath a thin sheet of green nylon.

The sun rose as I drove into Yosemite yet the air was still very cold when I arrived at the campsite. Putting up my tent I danced the forgotten dance of the shiver.

Walking up to Glacier Point, an ascent of just under 1000m, the number of people walking past me on their way down, including young children and large adults, is alarming. How did they get up the mountain so early? So quickly? Turning the final corner, salted with sweat and exhausted, I see two more large humans in baseball caps and white sneakers licking ice-creams. I soon spot many more of the type grazing on snacks and shuffling along asphalt paths a kilometre up from the valley floor. This was very puzzling. But, as is often the case with the world, turning the corner revealed all...

Glacier Point is accessible via a 4 mile path of ascending switchbacks. Or, by shuttle bus or car to the parking lot at the top. Everyone I saw up there had come by motor vehicle and were eating snacks bought from the gift shop conveniently located at the summit. As soon as I realised that I was one of the very few who had actually arrived by my own energy I became vainly desperate to signal my achievement.

Looking exhausted in boots and sweat were not enough I worried, and no amount of strutting and stomping seemed to get the message across. In the end I gave up, bought a bag of potato chips and a root beer, and sat on a stone to gaze at the view.

Today my journey ends. It's early morning and I open my eyes to the walls of the tent glowing glorious green. I break camp, pack everything up, load the car and drive west out of Yosemite. By 08:30 I’m beyond the gates and soon after that I stop to have breakfast: a cheese, egg and chile sandwich with coffee. Restored, I continue through the yellow Californian hills of waving dead grass.

A penultimate interstate weave throws me into Richmond and a Western Wear shop I had been planning to visit to look at cowboy hats. I try on the black felt Boss of the Plains style and look in the mirror. Its rim throws out such a wide perimeter and the crown erects such a tall mound that the hat insuppressibly broadcasts to even the most culturally illiterate a majestic and muscular manifesto. And if the wearer in any way fails to live up to this manifesto’s rigid tenets, then all the power that the hat can bestow are subtracted in a vicious negation and the wearer is reduced to a ridiculous and unworthy puppet. I decide that I cannot have this hat.

From Richmond I cross the Bay Bridge to the peninsula of San Francisco and then to the Geary Boulevard Hertz office. Straight away—with no banners or bunting or even a word of congratulations—they take the keys and drive the car off. I’m now alone on the pavement, my bags piled up around me.

This is how I give up my velocity and return to the stationary life. In the actual moment it neither feels like a relief nor a shame. Losing the car and arriving in San Francisco is just another stage of the trip, as natural as the thought that: now it’s late, it’s time to go to sleep.