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Wanting to see what lies inland and down the back roads, I headed south down the “Palms to Pines Highway” - Highway 74. This turned out to be a lucky choice. After leaving Palm Springs (and passing the BigHorn gated community, as seen on TV, en-route) the road becomes a crazy, winding pass up into the mountains. Having put the roof down and dressed for the valley heat, I nearly froze to death, even with the heaters blasting hot air on my hands. It was worth it, though – at the top there's a vista point that overlooks the entire valley.

Over the mountain and down the other side, and the mountains give way to huge, unbroken plains. This is what I imagined US highways to look like, and driving them in what is essentially a turbocharged shoebox with no lid is almost ludicrously fun. After an hour or so later, past yet another Indian casino and dozens of farms selling Cider and apples, I found Julian, CA.

Julian was, once upon a time, a gold mining town. Now it's a tourist trap: after hours of driving on almost deserted roads I was shocked to find that parking was difficult, as dozens of families from San Diego and LA had swarmed into town for a day out. The main street is preserved in a kind of ersatz frontier style, and there are gift shops everywhere. I had breakfast in the Miner's Diner, which was either preserved or dressed up (again, I'm not sure which) as a 1950s soda fountain, then made a sharp exit.

Heading south again I decided that you can't drive past a turning called “Sunrise Highway” without taking it, and headed up into the Laguna mountains. I figured I had plenty of time to get to San Diego, and with a GPS in the car I couldn't really go too far wrong or get too lost – the magic box would take me to my target motel. And so, brilliantly, an hour or so into the mountains the GPS blinked and died. Nonetheless, the mountains and forest were beautiful. At the top is the Laguna Mountain Lodge, with a great general store and an information centre.

Now GPS-less, I set off into San Diego. The highway map becomes useless in the city, which is a blob of roads, and the Lonely Planet maps aren't really designed for driving, but somehow – with instructions scrawled on the back of my hand – I made it down the I-8 into the city and on to Ocean Beach without a single detour. And, just like Palm Springs, Ocean Beach was in full party mode – this time for Oktoberfest, with beer and sausage everywhere.

Ocean Beach appears to be San Diego's bohemian quarter – it's full of bong shops, tattoo parlours and bars. By day it's pleasant, with a long beach and a pier to stroll down, but on a Saturday night after an all-day beer festival it becomes crazy. By 7.30 everyone was drunk or getting there, the revellers had attracted an army of tramps scrounging cash and hurling random menaces (“you don't want to see me angry, mister”) and the world's least subtle drug dealers were working the street corners.

I stayed at the Ocean Villa Inn – San Diego's premier (and, I suspect, only) dog hotel. All the downstairs rooms were packed full of parties with pooches, but upstairs the rooms have a view over San Diego's Dog Beach (canine friendly, hence the hotel policy). If you have a dog, I'd recommend it. If you don't, it's fine. Oh, and I finally found one of those motel ice  machines that go kachunka-chunka-chunk. Happy days.

Things advertised on local TV in Ocean Beach:

• Suspect-sounding weight loss treatments
• “Laser Televisions”. What the fuck? Some sort of DLP.
• Burger King. This is actually my favourite US advert: man dressed as burger goes to Wendy's Drive Thru, and asks for Whopper. When offered a baked potato he asks, incredulously, “A baked potato? What, are we in Russia?”

And that was it - with all three days up, it was time to head for the airport on Sunday morning. So, all in all, what did I learn? A whole bunch of stuff, in no particular order:

• Californians are the friendliest people on earth
• Being British/a Londoner/a twat I find this uncomfortable bordering on scary
• The Californian coast, deserts, mountains and plains are all stunning
• GPS is good, but maps are vital
• Always accept the collision damage waiver
• Mexican food. Mexican food. More mexican food. Mmm.
• Buying $10 of petrol with a debit card will result in the seller putting a $75 hold on that card
• Doing the aforementioned four times will get your card stopped (gee, thanks, Natwest)
• You really need a car to get around in California - even in the cities
• Seeing California this way is relatively cheap, and massively enjoyable. If you get a chance, do it.

PS - as predicted, I took a gazillion photos. All the better ones are on Flickr, here.

The drive east into the desert and the Coachella valley should take around two hours, and I got off on a flying start by crashing the car. Whee. Ironically I'd negotiated the freeways of LA safely, and was doing two miles an hour in a petrol station outside Corona (where Fender guitars are made, fact fans) at the time. I blame this on two things: firstly, Americans might be surprised to hear that in the UK petrol stations are a one way affair: cars enter at one side and exit at the other rather than attacking the pumps from all sides like a swarm of angry metal bees around a jam jar. Secondly, the Ford Mustang, for all its loud, petrol-guzzling charms, has a few blind spots: they're called the bonnet, sides and rear of the car.

On the road this limited visibility is no problem – point the car, put your foot down, go – but it makes parking a total bastard. Speaking of total bastards, someone thought it would be a good idea to put a two foot high metal bollard in the parking lot, into which I elegantly scrunched the offside front of the car. Fuck.

Fortunately the damage was minimal – it left the indicator light hanging off, but after five minutes under the car I had that back in place. Praising the man who invented the damage waiver clause, I went on East into the desert. All of LA was covered in a thick cloud that looked like it might rain at any minute, but on finally getting out of town the difference was amazing – the clouds burned off, the sun burst through and everything seemed less stressful. Not much later I entered the valley.

When you enter the Coachella Valley, the first thing that hits you is the windmills. They're everywhere, hundreds of them lining the road. The second thing that hit me was the car door after I attempted to open it into the amazing wind that roars through the valley spinning all the windmills. Oops.

Coming into Palm Springs I headed to the “Aerial Tramway”, which takes you up into the San Jacinto Wilderness, a national park that lies atop the mountain side. I was quite pleased that it was a tramway – I figured this would be a funicular railway – rather than a cable car, as I have a terrible fear of hanging from thin metal cables. Predictably, it turned out that “Aerial Tramway” is, in fact, idiot speak for a cable car. Having come so far, though, I went up anyhow.

On the valley floor, the heat was about a million degrees. Up at the top the other passengers pulled out jackets and thick coats, warning one another, and me, about the freezing cold outside. I'd left all warm clothing in the car, but it turned out to be about 25 degrees. At the top lies a restaurant, where most passengers went, and a long path down into the forest. At the foot of that path was a map with walking trails – I was surprised to see that the longest was less than two miles, so I took a spin around there in half an hour or so, which was well worth it to see the views down into the valley below. Serious hikers with the right equipment can get a permit to go off into the forest proper.

Back at the base I headed into the town, only to find the road blocked for the “American Heat 2008” motorcycle festival. The main street was packed with bikers, Harley-style bikes, stalls selling bike-related crap and, amusingly, “the motorcycle injury lawyers who ride”. I took a look in an oldey-timey convenience store full of old packaging and the indian reservation museum, then headed out to the Alpine Gardens motel.

The Alpine Gardens is a classic 1950s motel, now kept in a state somewhere between preservation and crazy kitsch. Fake flamingos, pool balls and plastic bell peppers abound in the garden, alongside part of the original pool sign (“no bobby pins”) and other items from the '50s. It's slightly mad but totally charming, with really friendly owners and a gorgeous heated pool and spa in the middle. And for $70 or so it's a bargain – easily the best place I stayed.

Things advertised on local TV in Palm Springs:

• The BigHorn gated community (looks shit, full of golf courses and $5 million McMansions)
• More gastric bands (a new type, they say)
• Wind warnings (timely)

You cannot, of course, see all of California in three days. In fact, with San Francisco a good nine hours away from San Diego, you could lose the best part of a day just driving up the state and back again. With that in mind, and while sitting in a shopping mall in Del Mar, waiting to pick up my rental car, I formulated a plan. I decided to drive a big triangle through the south of the state: on Thursday I'd head up to the coastal towns of Orange County, on Friday drive across into the desert and the Coachella Valley, then on Saturday drive down through the mountains and forests inland on my way back to San Diego in time to fly out early on Sunday morning.

Plan complete, I was pleasantly surprised at Avis. When booking a rental car online I'd picked a “convertible” - no other details were available, but the picture showed what looked like a Toyota of some kind with a soft top. The car turned out to be a  Ford Mustang, complete with a huge four litre engine and ludicrous turbocharged acceleration that makes a comedy “wheeeeee” noise when you put your foot down. With the roof down (and after working out how to put the roof down) I headed to the coast, then north on the freeway.

The Lonely Planet guide makes much of the traffic on the freeways around Los Angeles, and says that you'll need “nerves of steel” to navigate them. In fact, anyone who has ever driven the M25 in traffic will feel right at home – it's just that the road surfaces are terrible, with huge great cracks in them, and most people don't go above 85 miles per hour. After an hour or so heading north, slowly crisping in the sun – spray on sunblock isn't so useful in a convertible, as it only coats the rear seats – I turned onto Highway 1. This winds its way slowly up through the beaches of Orange County, past Legoland, and into Laguna Beach.

Ever seen a movie or TV show set in a Californian beach town? Those fictional beach towns – Neptune, for example – are, more or less, Laguna Beach. It's stunningly beautiful and staggeringly, visibly rich. The beaches are clean and curve for miles, there are palm trees everywhere and the town itself is so neat and tidy that it appears somewhat unreal. I bought a road map of California in a beautiful little bookshop (I had a GPS, but that's not much good if you want to find the best route rather than the quickest), and had a coffee in a beautiful little coffee shop. In fact, just about everything in the town could be described as “beautiful” and “little” - except, perhaps, the property prices.

The main thing I noticed in Laguna Beach, though, was the birds. The entire town is covered in utterly fearless seagulls that perch on every roadsign and are quite prepared to stand and stare you out until you get within a foot or two - and even then they look like they're considering whether it's easier to peck your eyes out rather than move. There are also equally fearless but amazingly cute little birds that bob around chupping and twittering while attempting to steal your food, and wading birds down on the shore that, again, don't seem to care how close you get to them. Beats London and our pigeons.

I Stayed in a motel called the Tides Hotel, which was cheapish ($99), friendly and comfortable, with a neat old fashioned telephone that may have been chosen to look twee, or may have simply never been replaced.

Things advertised on local TV in Orange County:

• Coal (“America's Power”)
• Gastric Band Surgery. Stereotypes, ahoy.
• “Semi-Annual Pie Sale”
• How not eating fast food for breakfast one day a week can save $900 per year
• Hair dye that leaves your hair “a touch of grey”

Also noted: the Starbucks shops here are open seemingly forever, and are packed with people, sitting doing nothing, at 11pm. Why don't they go home?

Travel certainly rates as one of the most pleasant surprises of my job: before joining Dennis as a Staff Writer I had no idea that magazine work would ever require a passport. As it is, I've done plenty of mundane travel around the UK - exploring the glamour of Sutton Coldfield, for example - but I've also been lucky enough to visit China, Korea, Singapore, the US and most of Western Europe over the past six or so years.

The downside of travelling for work is that, no matter how wonderful it is to get to places that I could never otherwise afford to visit, these trips are never holidays. For one thing, Helen's not there. And of course there's work to be done - never fun when jet lag is scrambling your brain backwards, for example, and you're trying desperately to plug credit card details into a completely incomprehensible foreign website to buy wireless internet access to send your emails.

And of course there's seldom any free time. Sometimes we get half a day or so off if the job runs for several days, and in Singapore our six-day schedule allowed a whole day to roam the city, but I flew in and out of China in 24 hours - there wasn't a free minute to look beyond the hotel, let alone explore the town. I'm still glad of the opportunity to see new places, but I can see why someone might want to pack it in for a year and travel the world properly.

And so tomorrow, if all goes to plan, I'm off to California. The first three days should be as usual: about 16 hours of travel to get there then two days of press conferences, interviews and, hopefully, some interesting news to write up. Rather than starting my fourth day in a mad dash to the airport, though, I'm picking up a hire car  - I've delayed my return for a few days in the hope of actually seeing the America that lurks beyond the city limits, and which to date I've entirely missed out on (although having just read this I'll be sticking religiously to the speed limit, so who knows how far I'll get). Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but I'd expect a deluge of shoddily taken Flickr photos in a week or so.