Outside the air-conditioned car, it’s 100 degrees. The Mojave Desert stretches away on either side of the highway. We have been maintaining a steady 60 on the clock for quite a while. But we are, nevertheless, in a queue. The same vehicles have been in front and behind since our last stop at Baker and will still be with us when we get to Las Vegas. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the traffic is solid in both lanes on our side of the highway. And it’s the same on the other side for traffic heading back to Los Angeles.

This is the first stretch of the most ambitious of our motoring trips. The idea is to drive inland from Los Angeles through Nevada, a corner of Utah and a corner of Colorado to Santa Fe in New Mexico, and then return by a southerly route through Albuquerque, Flagstaff and Phoenix. We arrived in Los Angeles late on Friday night, and did very little on our first full day, except relax by the hotel pool and book the hire car, a compact Ford SUV.

Before setting out for Las Vegas, we visited the Getty Centre, housed in Richard Meier’s hilltop building. I find large art collections difficult to enjoy. The best technique I have found is to select a few pieces, maybe connected by a similar theme, and concentrate on them, and for the rest, enjoy the architecture of the building and the location. In the case of the Getty Centre, it is worth the visit just for the building. Unfortunately the air quality was low that morning, and we could see little from the viewing points.

In Las Vegas we stayed overnight at the Luxor, the pyramid shaped hotel. The false at Las Vegas is superficial: remove the fake Egyptian imagery, rename the Nefertiti bar and the Papyrus restaurant, and you would have a solidly built, functional hotel. On Monday we were at the Grand Canyon, on the north side, where we stayed in a log cabin, as fake in its way as the Luxor, but not so comfortable. The restaurant overlooking the canyon has a fine view.

Tuesday night, we stayed at Page, the town by Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon dam, which we toured. The next day was a longer drive, through Monument Valley to Mexican Hat, then onto Durango in southern Colorado. These are open roads, the posted speed limit is high and there is little traffic. We passed the occasional easy rider, toughing out the sun in bandana and sleeveless jacket. After an overnight stay in Durango, we doubled back to visit the Mesa Verde national park. The park is the site for some of the best preserved rock dwellings of the Ancient Pueblo peoples, and was occupied and farmed from around 600 to 1300 CE. From there we drove on to Santa Fe. By the roadside there are a number of nodding donkeys, the old style drilling constructions. I don’t know how much oil there is here.

We stayed Thursday and Friday nights. I liked Santa Fe. It’s much cooler than Arizona due to the elevation. We wandered round the town centre and admired the Spanish Pueblo style of architecture. Local ordinances dating to 1957 insist that buildings should reflect the use of adobe as a material. It’s a fine style, but as a result, you get modern concrete car parks that look like adobe structures. another kind of in-authenticity. We also visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. Georgia O’Keeffe worked in the area from 1929 and purchased a couple of homes near Abiquiu, north of Santa Fe. We also made a side trip to Taos. The road there from Santa Fe follows the Rio Grande, which here is a just a small stream.

From Santa Fe we drove south to Albuquerque, where we stayed Saturday night. On Sunday we headed east on the I40 to Flagstaff. On the way we visited Acoma pueblo, built on a high mesa above the highway, and occupied since the 13th century. The Spanish pushing north arrived in 1540, subjugating the local people after 1598. The church of San Estaban Rey was completed by 1641. The local tour guide stressed how traditional beliefs in spirits called kachinas and structures called kivas, which were rooms for religious ritual, were incorporated into nominally Catholic beliefs and structures.

I don’t normally like chain hotels, and particularly on road trips, we don’t want the ceremony of 4 star hotels. However, for stopover’s, convenience outweighs interest. We stayed at a Marriott in Albuquerque as we had at Los Angeles airport. At Page, Santa Fe and Mesa we stayed at Courtyards and in Durango and Flagstaff at Residence Inn’s. The advantage of the Inns is that they are self catering, so that we were able to shop locally for groceries for supper, and despite being part of a chain, the hotels in Page, Santa Fe and Albuquerque all had very good restaurants.

According to John Rivera Sedlar: ‘traditional Southwestern cooking offers a limited palette of basic ingredients – corn, chiles, beans and squashes. For the most part, this has been a common people’s cuisine, but, by using a small repertoire of basic preparations, the native Southwestern cook learned to combine and prepare these few ingredients in a wide variety of ways.’ The restaurants in the region have created modern variations, drawing on a wider range of ingredients and techniques.

Sedlar was born in Santa Fe and his aunt was cook for Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch at Abiquiu. His book Modern Southwest Cuisine is an excellent introduction to the style. His presentation is heavily influenced by the local landscape and art: ‘The Southwest offers me a wide variety of visual inspiration. The land itself, with its rich earth tones, is reflected in the colour of cornmeal, in pale brown pinto bean sauces, in the brick red of dried chiles and the vivid green of cactus. The textures of Southwestern food add another visual dimension: the rough, blistered surfaces of tortillas, the chunk consistency of fresh salsa, the ridged pattern of a dried corn husk etched on a tamale. An even greater influence comes from the native artists of the Southwest…I have utilized many of these native patterns to decorate my dishes: vegetables arranged like the colourful diamonds of a Navajo blanket, pasta cut in stepped pyramids, sauce essence painted onto plates in the shape of arrows, zigzags and thunderbolts’.

On Monday we drove south from Flagstaff to Phoenix on the day that turned out to be the highpoint of this trip. We left the main highway south of Flagstaff to take a side road through the red rock landscape of Sedona, almost immediately running into a breakdown which blocked the road. Fortunately we were shaded in a pleasant wooded valley while we waited for the road to be cleared. Back on the highway, we made another detour, to Jerome, a former copper mining town high on a hill. After the last mine closed in 1953, it became a ghost town. It is now re-inhabited as a tourist destination and art centre, and the population has risen to 400 or so. We browsed in the galleries and had a coffee in a narrow corner place overlooking the valley. We reached the outskirts of Phoenix in the middle afternoon, when the temperature was 104 degrees. Taliesin West was Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home from 1937 and is now a school of architecture. Once 26 miles from Phoenix, the city has continued to expand and Taliesin West is now on the edge of town. Wright had the foresight to buy the water rights, so that with the aid of a deep well, he had his own water supply. This is dry land though, and it surely can’t be sustainable to build cities like Phoenix in a land so short of water. Taliesin West is building connected to its location, through its low horizontal lines, the materials used in its construction, the pools, and the management of light and shade. Our hotel in Mesa was almost empty. After the sun went down and took the heat with it, we swam in the hotel’s pool in the dusk, and then drove round the corner for supper at a local family restaurant.

Mesa is a suburb of Phoenix and the towers of the central business district were visible in the distance. This is urban sprawl. Before driving on, we visited the Phoenix Art Gallery, a modest collection but nicely presented. We attached ourselves to a guided tour. Towards midday, we left Phoenix on the I10 heading east. Our destination was Twentynine Palms at the gateway to the Joshua Tree National Park. We left the interstate at Quartzsite then headed north and the east. This was the opposite of the drive in convoy through the Mojave; probably the loneliest road we have ever travelled. No habitation for hundreds of kilometres. The abandoned shacks by the side of the road added a sense of desolation to the emptiness. I am not sure we passed another vehicle. Even though I knew I had done the calculations correctly, I started to worry about the fuel gauge, because there was nowhere to re-fill.

Twentynine Palms is a weekender’s destination for Californians. We stayed at the Twentynine Palms Inn. Only here was the hotel the destination. The rooms are cabins overlooking a natural pool, scattered round the gardens away from the main restaurant and swimming pool.  The log cabins at the Grand Canyon are simply uncomfortable: a hotel would make more sense. Here they were perfectly functional. We spent a couple of days driving around the Joshua Tree National Park, which is part Mojave Desert. We were often off-road. The SUV was robust enough, but it is not a place I would want to have a breakdown or get stuck. The Joshua Tree is actually a type of Yucca plant.

We left on Friday morning. We had arrived in the town from the east, having driven through a hundred and fifty kilometres of nowhere, so it was almost a shock to leave by the west and pass all the usual clutter of urban sprawl. The bare hills here have sprung a forest of wind turbines. It is not an attractive landscape. We arrived back in Los Angeles in the afternoon, visited the Los Angeles County Museum, and then returned to the airport hotel for the last night before catching the flight home on Saturday morning.