Chapter One: America, I Had Arrived - solo. Fiji, LAX, the 405 and a $23 Tent

Australia to California: The Start of a Solo USA Road Trip

There’s something strangely momentous about arriving in the United States.

It might be the sheer distance. Flying from Australia, the Pacific is not a polite little body of water, not one you just hop over. It is an enormous blue commitment. It stretches below you for hour after hour until you question whether continents are going to exist again.

Or perhaps… America has spent the better part of a century making itself so culturally familiar that flying in feels like stepping through a television screen.

Either way, after only fifteen hours, Los Angeles spread out beneath me. Freeways, warehouses, neighbourhoods, more freeways, coastline, harbours and that vast, hazy sprawl that seems to continue forever. America… I had arrived.

Technically, the journey began many hours earlier in Brisbane, aboard a Fiji Airways flight departing at the entirely civilised hour of 11:35am. Somewhere between crossing the international date line and reaching the middle of nowhere, you surrender. Time as you know it? That ceases to exist. Breakfast, dinner and bedtime happen whenever; sometimes asynchronously. And in this case, it became an overnight flight regardless of whether it was actually night. Long-haul travel has its own time zone. One governed mostly by tray tables, the meal they decide to serve you (oh, steak? Must be mid-Pacific dinnertime) and whether the cabin lights happen to be on.

Before Los Angeles came Fiji, and I had mixed feelings this time around. Fiji has always fascinated me. The name triggers an aggressively beautiful picture: white sand, turquoise water and sea turtles, coconut palms bending toward the ocean as if contractually obligated, tropical fish, cold drinks with teeny tiny umbrellas and approximately seventeen uninterrupted hours in which nobody expects you to achieve anything.

That Fiji is real, of course. But the country becomes more interesting the moment you look slightly beyond the postcard. Even from the air and around Nadi, you catch glimpses of another landscape entirely: sugarcane fields, mountains softened by tropical haze, small houses, farms and roads that feel deeply rural almost as soon as you leave the airport precinct. Fiji is one of those places where enormous luxury resorts and ordinary village life exist remarkably close together, and the juxtaposition is striking. Tourism is a huge part of the country’s economy, yet much of Fiji remains agricultural, local and wonderfully removed from the polished fantasy sold in brochures.

And perhaps that’s exactly why I keep wanting to come back. There is something about Fiji that feels unfinished to me, like every airport stopover is a teaser trailer for a trip I haven’t taken yet. Two years ago we spent just one day driving a haphazardly small rental car around backroad pot-holes in an attempt to immerse ourselves deeply in the ‘other side’ of the postcard. To escape the places the tourists flocked, and to see the real Fiji in-between flights. Those too-few hours piqued a curious new space in my heart – one with a wild, dynamic sense of realness and a distinct lack of overpriced cocktails (thank goodness). People smiled easily. Life seemed to move at a slightly different rhythm. The landscape? …lush and raw and lived-in. Not manufactured or groomed for visitors. We weren’t interested in the space the world’s most luxurious resorts were tucked into. But it wasn’t near enough.

One day, Fiji properly.

This time, though… a less-than-welcoming plastic seat in an air conditioned terminal and none of that real raw adventure. Instead, four hours in Nadi that felt like forty, and partially because I had another eleven hours of economy-class character building ahead of me.

Fortunately, I grew up travelling with parents who thought crossing oceans with children was a perfectly reasonable recreational activity. Somewhere deep in my body is the muscle memory for long-haul flights. My adult brain may now protest the indignity of sleeping upright, but the rest of me knows the drill remarkably well: eat dinner quickly, drink the wine (disclaimer: I did NOT do that as a traveling tott), construct a sleeping position that would concern a physiotherapist, and surrender.

I woke for breakfast somewhere over the Pacific, when our friendly flight attendants decided it must be morning (ish). I drank the sort of coffee that approximates “good” - purely because you’ve been asleep on an aircraft for an indeterminate number of hours in pretzel pose. 

And not long afterwards Southern California appeared beneath us.

First the jagged Catalina coastline, then Long Beach, then neighbourhood after neighbourhood stitched together by freeways. Los Angeles from the air always looks slightly impossible. If you look off into the distance, it doesn’t so much have an edge. Buildings and roads just multiply across the landscape until mountains finally force the city to abruptly stop.

The flight itself had actually been painless, but my knees disagreed. This, apparently, is one of the less-advertised developments in middle age: you cross the Pacific and various joints lodge formal complaints. Even though you did nothing but sit.

LAX immigration went surprisingly smoothly despite the maze of corridors and taped-off passenger lines (which line to even choose? Who knows?), which lulled me into the dangerous belief that the difficult part was over.

Then came baggage claim. My suitcase, which had obediently travelled roughly twelve thousand kilometres with me, chose Los Angeles as the moment to assert its independence. I stood at the carousel watching bag after bag appear, circle a few times, be claimed and then wheeled away in victory. The crowd thinned. Families left. Business travellers vanished. Eventually we were down to the sad final crumbs of luggage circling slowly beneath fluorescent lights, and mine was nowhere among them. Then the conveyor belt switched off and panic set in.

So I checked my AirTags. “Last seen in… Brisbane.”

I refreshed it. Then refreshed it again. Then realized that my cell phone data was not working. Turn-off-and-back-on three times. AirTag in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Then… gone.

AirTags are marvelous little devices. They give you just enough information to become significantly more anxious.

Bag nearby.

Wonderful. How nearby?

Nearby.

Maybe.

After approximately eighteen more checks and several laps of the baggage area I broke out into a cold sweat and wondered what next? I spent three minutes holding my phone at various angles as though trying to contact a satellite personally, then gave up on my AirTag. I resigned myself to the fact that I may need to find a Walmart and buy a toothbrush and a few new t-shirts to get through. Then the conveyor belt turned back on and my suitcase popped out.

Almost last, of course. I’d arrived absurdly early in Brisbane (I’m one of those people), so my bag loaded first and was then buried underneath the worldly possessions of everyone else on the aircraft. So apparently punctuality has consequences. Early bird? …gets to sit at baggage claim panicking.

From there, all I had to do was collect a rental car. Simple.

Airport rental-car systems fascinate me because airports and rental-car companies need one another desperately. Yet almost every airport on Earth has arranged these entities as if the two are in the middle of a bitter divorce. LAX has elevated it to an art form. A grand, shiny new rental-car complex now sits about nine blocks away from the terminals, requiring a shuttle journey that could be described as dubious. It began with me being compressed into a bus aisle with an entire youth travel group – and a few scattered extra travelers, some looking more panicked than others. The youth were cheerful, loud, tiny, glamorous, snapping selfies and apparently travelling as a single biological organism.

Personal space ceased to exist somewhere as we left Terminal 5.

By the time we reached the enormous new rental-car facility, I was beginning to miss the tranquillity of aircraft.

Inside came a maze of arrows, lines, escalators, floors, machines, queues and a slowly dawning realisation that nobody seemed entirely sure where the available cars were.

The credit card reader stopped cooperating first, the poor woman saying only; “you’re my last customer before I clock out.” Then there were no cars. Then I wasn’t presented with an actual contract before too large a deposit was drained from my account (more on that later). Then there were cars, but apparently not the cars people had reserved. Or wanted. A 4-foot-nothing grandma grappled her way up and into a very large oversized pickup truck, tweeting “I didn’t reserve this one, but I quite like it!!” I questioned whether she could actually see over the dashboard – and then whether I should warn the rest of Los Angeles to stay off the roads tonight.  

At one point I was offered a sizably rugged Jeep that looked ready to invade Utah. And for one glorious moment I considered it. Then I remembered my mission to drive all the way to Texas. That was more than a few miles.

“How’s the fuel efficiency..?” I asked.

The attendant paused just a moment too long.

I declined.

Eventually through persistence, patience (had to dig deep there), luck and the kindness of several employees, an SUV appeared. Not what I’d reserved, but closer than the Jeep. The guy handed me the keys apologetically. I threw my bags in, climbed into the driver’s seat and was immediately reminded of one small-yet-consequential logistical detail.

Americans drive on the other side of the road. I was not sufficiently rested nor mentally ready for that challenge. I had lived here before, so this wasn’t exactly new. But driving on the opposite side after a significant absence still produces a faintly unsettling sensation. You know what you’re doing, but every muscle-memory driving instinct is quietly shouting at you.

My GPS chose this exact moment not to load. Perfect.

I pulled out into the sunshine, chanting in my head; “keep to the right, keep to the right, keep to the right…”

Thankfully, navigation returned just as I reached the 405.

Unfortunately, I had reached the 405.

There are few introductions to Los Angeles more authentic than completing twenty hours of international travel and immediately hitting traffic. Because spending an hour and twenty minutes travelling six miles is exactly what I was looking forward to after airports all day and night.

The traffic was thick, the sky had that familiar Southern California haze, and everything felt very suddenly American again. Enormous trucks, enormous roads, enormous billboards. Most of them for movies like Spider-Man 73, or for attorneys called “Hank the Tank” or “THE GORILLA” (I am absolutely not kidding). And everyone was attempting to get somewhere urgently while moving at six miles an hour.

Eventually the city began loosening its grip. I worked my way toward the 91. Somewhere around Yorba Linda the horizon began to open. Hills appeared. The traffic thinned. The afternoon light warmed. After hours of concrete and brake lights, Southern California became beautiful again.

My destination that evening was deliberately unambitious: a roadside hotel near Norco, beside Interstate 15. There was a reason for Norco, but that belonged to tomorrow. Tonight I needed food, a shower and a bed.

I’d ambitiously chosen this particular big box hotel because it looked reasonably new, had good reviews and, critically, included free parking and breakfast. These are two amenities that become extraordinarily glamorous at this time in your life. And once you reach an age where paying fifty dollars to park at your hotel feels personally insulting. Both were applicable today.

I expected functional.

Instead I opened the door to what felt, in my travel-worn state, like a penthouse. It’s marvellous how your outlook on life changes with a discovery like this; a full kitchen, a proper living room, an enormous television, a king bed buried beneath pillows and a shower that looked almost capable of erasing the previous twenty-four hours. There is no shower quite like the first shower after a long-haul flight.

I emerged feeling at least sixty-three percent more human. It was time to embark on one final California ritual: In-N-Out Burger.

I stand by my belief that In-N-Out is better in California, so it’s almost always my first stop when I return to California. Partly because nostalgia has its own appetite (ravenous, currently) and partly because after an entire day of flying, a burger wrapped in paper is, actually, medicinal. Sixty-nine percent more human, and counting.

Then, because I had not yet made enough (bad) decisions that day, I drove to Walmart to buy camping equipment.

The following night I planned to camp solo in Joshua Tree National Park. And since I flew here, I had exactly zero of the equipment required to do this.

The logic was simple enough: buy cheap basics, hope for a few sales / survive Walmart on your first day back, use the acquired goods for the camping portions of the trip, avoid hauling half a sporting-goods store across the Pacific. And hopefully survive a night or two in the wilderness. What could go wrong?

Miraculously, this part of the plan? …it worked.

A three-man tent for $23.

A sleeping bag for $16.

A tiny propane stove, food, water and several assorted wilderness tools… none more than $8 a piece. This is the part of the story in which the protagonist suddenly becomes all-too-aware of her impending grand adventure, requiring wilderness essentials, gadgets and thingamagigs. Will she need a water filtration system? Satchel? Is there a requirement for a hammer-meets-hatchet-meets-multitool? Probably. Self-inflating sleeping pad? Extra tent stakes, made of ultralight carbon fiber? All very necessary, and all while standing marginally sleep-deprived in the camping aisle of a big-box American superstore.

The entire setup came to barely more than a hundred dollars. I did put most of the stuff back, though, opting for bare essentials. Boring.

The real highlight, though, was the cashier, who was tremendously proud of this particular Walmart. She gave me an unexpectedly comprehensive history of the building while scanning my purchases. Apparently it was new. Very new. There were construction details, the hype leading up to opening day. Dates. Design features. The family members that joined to celebrate. It was weirdly charming. I half expected her to pour me a cup of tea and break out the biscuits. Only in America can you wander into Walmart late at night for discount adventure, and leave having received an unsolicited architectural briefing.

Back at the hotel I collapsed into bed and, against all reasonable expectations, slept properly. When I woke the next morning, I was somehow functioning on local time.

I made coffee and sat beside the window as the sun rose over the hills and the morning gathered on the freeway. Thirty hours earlier I’d been in Brisbane. Now I was in Southern California with a rental SUV, a $23 tent and a loose plan to drive into the Mojave Desert alone.

I felt considerably better than any of those facts suggested I should. Five out of five stars.

However, I’d also adhered to the golden rule: Always give yourself one comfortable night before voluntarily sleeping on the ground.