A DIFFERENT RIVER
TWO AND A HALF thousand years ago, Heraclitus said: “You cannot step into the same river twice”. Despite that, a few years ago, I promised myself I would not retrace my travels any more but would look for new places to go – new as in new, not just in the way Heraclitus meant. Mostly I’ve honoured that promise.
And yet there are some places that almost become part of you, and that call you again and again. One of those for me is the Alps Maritimes in southern France; another is the south-western USA: southern California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. This is beautiful country, rugged and raw but still with a reasonable number of craft breweries. In March of 2018 I made my fourth (or fifth, depending on how you count them) visit. And my last.
It was in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River, that I realised my romance with the great south-west was over.
You’ve changed*
I had come up from Mexico, a place that I’d found to be much more pleasant and relaxing than I had expected. Admittedly that was Baja California, which has a reputation for being relaxed and pleasant, but just the same. The first night back in the US I had stayed in a tiny place called Boulevard and was treated very kindly by the owner of the Back Country Inn motel who made sure
