Up the Creek without a wag-bag

I've been away for a while, another adventure in the desert, which is why I've not been posting. This season's XTreeeem sport was Mormon-dodging in Utah. Accompanied by a true Hollywood metrosexual, I bravely went deep into the heart of polygamy-country, fueled only by Abbey-inspired piss-and-vinegar, and no small amount of Scotch and beer smuggled across the border from California. Los Angeles is no mecca for hops fans, but the offerings here surely beat the LDS-sanctioned gnat's piss that the State of Utah amusingly deems 'beer'. I won't be too harsh on the Mormons though, it's too easy and at the end of the day they're just too pleasant. They may be crap drivers and have some unusual beliefs concerning underpants, but unlike most religions they're not trying to tax me or terminate me, for which one has to be grateful.

Good times in Utah - a thrilling mixture of the bizarre and beautiful, warm and cold, pleasure and pain, assholes and angels. It is an awful long drive from Moab to Southern California though, not made more pleasant by the malignant odor. There were two of us in the car, transporting a week's accumulated sweat, fear and woodsmoke, tempered only by a few brief squirts of deodorant. By the time we reached Vegas, it smelled like a French cafe after the whores have ridden into town.

* Note for UK readers and other civilised peoples - Indian Creek is managed as a 'wilderness area' which means that everything solid that you take in, you also have to take out. And I do mean everything. A wag-bag is basically a jiffy bag full of cat litter, designed for the purpose of packing out last night's bean burrito.