It could have been Loch Ness. I could have been driving past Abriachan into town. Instead I was passing the point where Sir Francis Drake landed in America in 1579 and the body of water was the Pacific Ocean.

My drive north from Los Angeles to San Francisco avoided the heavy traffic on Interstate Highway 5 by taking the slower but far more picturesque State Route 1. It parallels the ocean and makes the journey a pleasure rather than a chore.

Los Angeles and San Francisco are obviously tourist attractions in themselves and the coast road between them has its share of visitors for no reason other than the views. But my mission involved none of them.

Happily I have been fortunate enough to travel the world and I have visited California many times. I was less excited about driving over the Golden Gate Bridge than I have been before. This was just as well because it was shrouded in fog.

By this time I had already driven the up-and-down San Francisco streets which will live long in my mind because of Steve McQueen's famous car chase in Bullitt. Disappointingly, the bridge did not feature in the 1968 movie because the city's authorities refused to close it to allow the chase to be filmed over its famous rust red span. North of the crossing California continues — the world does not end. The road rolls beyond the town of Eureka up into Oregon, then Washington State and Canada. But if you turn off the freeway and hang a left and a right, you come to Inverness.

To call it a one-horse town would be incorrect. I doubt it is big enough for even one horse. Inverness California has one main street and a row of houses behind it. The main drag comprises a post office, a general store, Vladimir's Czech vodka bar (established 1960) and Priscilla's coffee shop. Priscilla claims to sell the best oysters on the planet.

A mile or so outside the village, perched neatly on the water, is the Inverness yacht club. I am no fan of clubs, be they golf, cricket, rugby or anything else — and I got the impression that unless you earned a certain amount and had a yacht with umpteen masts, you probably did not rate a mention.

Gail Seibert is in insurance. She and her husband Scott are among the lucky couple of hundred who live in Inverness. He is in IT and both are fortunate enough to be able to work from home. They love it here because of the cycling and the beaches and the walking. Their Brittany spaniel, Cutter, confirms this with an incessant wagging of his tail. Scott and Gail, meanwhile, confirm Priscilla's oyster claim.

"What happened in New York on 9/11 brought a lot of people together," she says. "I think what's happening right now with the credit crunch and the financial crisis will bring more people even closer. I can't remember anything quite like it and neither can many people our age. This is impacting on a lot of folks with big mortgages and young families. It is terrible but it has been on the cards for some time. Weren't we all heading for a big fall?

"The fatcats made huge bonuses selling credit to people who could never afford to make the repayments. Now they're suffering. Now it's payback time." The television news is full of business closures and job losses. Car adverts, which once boasted of big and fast, now wax lyrical about miles per gallon.

Priscilla's coffee shop in downtown Inverness, California, where people enjoy the quiet life in beautiful surroundings and the credit crunch seems miles away.

But this Inverness does not appear to be the kind of place where people would notice the credit crunch too much. Not many people live here, and those who do strike me as having enough money not to worry about something as trivial as global economic meltdown.

It is rural, tiny, on the Pacific and surrounded by history. It is a tourist magnet with a transient population who come here for a fortnight in the summer then go back to the ratrace. It is lovely, there is no doubt, but I get the feeling you would not be born and raised here. You would retire here or move here after your premium bond came up or you sold out to Bill Gates.

Raj runs the general store in Inverness and has done so for nearly 30 years. Yet he has not lost a note of his London accent. His place is the fulcrum of the whole town. It sells pretty much everything from groceries to books to alcohol to tools. He has 2000 DVDs for hire and there is always someone queuing to pay at the till. Behind his counter you could just picture an American Two Ronnies do the fork handles sketch. He is from Richmond and goes back every year for a visit. He married an American girl and raised his two children in California.

"I keep meaning to go to Inverness, Scotland when I go back to the UK," he beamed at me as I paid for my Inverness, California postcards. "You're the first person I've met from there. But it sure looks good on the internet. Have you seen the Loch Ness Monster? Has anyone? I must try to get to Scotland next time I go back."

I asked him what life was like. "Life here is great," he said, instantly. "First and foremost it's safe. It's also very quiet. There aren't many houses here and most of them are rented out for the summer. It's home."

A quiet tourist trap it may be but Inverness has two unlikely facts to its name. Only a real movie buff would know this was the place used as the location for the 1995 horror film Village of the Damned.

I am no fan of such cinematic productions but I understand the plot centres around demonic children who had lights instead of eyes and who had all sorts of amazing satanic powers. As a tragic aside, Christopher Reeve, famous for the Superman films, played the male lead in the picture. It proved to be his last movie. During filming he bought a horse called Eastern Express which later threw him after it refused a jump. He broke his spine and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

These were the only unhappy thoughts during my visit. Inverness California is beautiful. A lottery win would take me back there in the proverbial flash. Maybe then I could afford to be a member of the yacht club.

Checking carefully in the mirror to make sure no children with lights for eyes were following me, regretfully I pointed the hire car back towards San Francisco, via Loch Ness and Abriachan.

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