I had been to the US on a few occasions and had always enjoyed my times in California. Phil had never been and wasn’t convinced he wanted to go. However, it was my 40th birthday trip so my choice and I was sure he would love it once he was there. He had this idea that California was a nightmare of traffic and industrialisation, which is true for places such as LA. However, you don’t have to go far to get away from it all in California. On this particular day we had headed for the hills (well actually mountains) behind Ventura. We practically had them to ourselves and it didn’t take us long to get pretty high. In fact we ran out of daylight before we ran out of road to explore.