An Englishman living in California, when a boyhood friend had a sales conference in Las Vegas, it seemed a good excuse for a road trip. “We can do this helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon, the chopper dives into the canyon like it was Airwolf ” he told me, and that was it, we had an agenda, and my 01 Bullitt Mustang had 2000 miles put on it in four days, the journey taking me from San Francisco to Vegas, then onto the Grand Canyon, and back again.

This Mustang is my first muscle car. The Bullitt is a special edition, one year only in this body style, based upon the GT but with a bit more power, better brakes and some styling touches designed to ape the 1968 Mustang GT used by Lt Frank Bullitt, aka Steve McQueen, in the eponymous movie. Next to the big block cars of the sixties, perhaps it isn’t especially muscle bound, but to a European used to sub 100 hp front wheel drive hatchbacks of less than 2 liters, it is pretty muscular. When you press the throttle at idle, the whole car twists just a little. The clutch and shift are weighty, but not too heavy to be used every day, even in a city with as much traffic and hills as my home, San Francisco. I remember when I first drove the car, I couldn’t believe how Heavy Duty, how agricultural it was. I absolutely loved that then, and still do now, although I have since collected other, much more agricultural muscle.

On and off, it has been my daily driver for nearly five years now, picking up some 40k in the process, and during that time I have become familiar with a motor that can seem lacking in torque below 2000 rpm, is a civilized and effective companion between 2000 and 3500 rpm, then becoming something of an animal above 4000 rpm. It has become a habit to drop out of 5th and take 4th for long freeway climbs — after all, what cop sets up a speed trap on the climb up a hill ? Unlike many, I love dark green, and, living in San Francisco, I won’t deny that there is a special frisson to street parking a dark green Mustang, just like Frank Bullitt.

Ford so often stands at the junction of performance and low price — certainly, this was what encouraged me to look at Mustangs in the first place. However, corners seem to be cut when it comes to interiors, and I have to say the expanses of cheap black plastic and uncomfortable seats prompted my buddy to comment as we were leaving Vegas “Bloody hell, I feel like I am being suffocated by a bin bag in here”. Shortly afterwards, while pulling out of the visitor area at the Hoover Dam, the car had its revenge, the passenger seatbelt refusing to retract, leaving my buddy having to choose between riding in the back — “like goddam Driving Miss Daisy” — or placing a higher level of trust than normal in my driving.

Heading home after the trip, I left Vegas in the evening. Eschewing the usual freeway route I cut across Death Valley and up highway 395, running along the Nevada California border. During the day Death Valley can be surprisingly busy; at night, it seemed very, very quiet and rather spooky. The roads are very straight, with twisty bits up in the hills. It was only after nearly falling off the road that I realized the thick dust and my feeble headlights meant that running at just a little above freeway cruising speeds took me beyond the range of the headlights — hence my near miss. I’ve since fitted better bulbs ;-)

Without question 395 is one of the best driving roads I have experienced, fast and open but curving, unlike the monotonous bone straight roads of Nevada. Not wanting to attempt one of the Sierra’s passes while tired in the wee small hours of the morning, I stopped at a non-chain motel, I am not sure exactly where. There weren’t any cars in the gravel car park, but the door to the office was open, a single yellow light on. There was no-one in sight, but a handwritten note asked you to pick up a key from the board and leave your cash on the counter. I only had a $20, so I left that, picked up a key and went to bed.

When the sun came up and woke me through the thin curtain, looking out I could see the motel was perhaps closer to derelict than dilapidated. The car park was still empty, apart from my Mustang, outside my room. The light in the office was still on when I returned the key, the $20 gone.

On the road, fresh from my escape from the Bates motel, life felt unusually good. The landscape was astonishingly beautiful too. In the morning sunshine, we climbed over the Sierra Nevadas and into California’s Gold Country, stopping only to answer nature’s call and snap pictures of the car. The road became narrower, the grade steeper and the curves sharper as we climbed. Around each turn there was a vista worthy of an Ansel Adams photograph, making it hard to know whether to concentrate on the scenery, or the superb road, each corner different from the one before.

The helicopter did dive down the side of the Grand Canyon, while playing the soundtrack to the Conan the Barbarian film, and it was every bit as exciting as we had hoped. However, looking back on the trip, it was the drive home which I enjoyed most.