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Day 14: Somewhere on Route 178, CA to Yosemite National Park, CA

07.00am
The petrol station attendant arrives, we fill up, and off we go.

11.00am
Sleep deprived, I dozed most of the drive this morning. I don’t know how Courtney has managed to stay awake. Now it’s my turn to drive while she dozes. This is our penultimate day on the road. I wish we were enjoying it more.

Lake Havasu City, AZ to Red Rock Canyon, CA

11.15am
Lake Havasu is waiting for a population explosion. We entered the town last night on a fresh new four lane road studded with junctions to avenues that are yet to be built. In the distance the lake shimmered, oasis-like.

Lake Havasu City is famous for being the home of London Bridge. In 1973 the City of London, unable to stop it sinking, decided to replace the bridge and put it up for offers. A businessman, keen to promote Lake Havasu as a tourist destination thought he was getting Tower Bridge. He made a successful offer of $2,400,000 and spent a further $4,500,000 to transport and re-assemble it at its current location. In the intervening years a number of "English" style buildings have mushroomed up around the bridge, the lamentable inaccuracy of which is clear in the photos. Streets have been named in homage to England; Lake Havavsu sports a Windsor Beach, a Dover Road, and a Hyde Park (yet to be built, right next to a landfill).

Grand Canyon Village, AZ to Lake Havasu, AZ

12.32pm
My sleep was interrupted twice last night by the deranged “yip yip-yip waaoohh!” cries of coyotes. Courtney woke me this morning with the question “Do you think that family ever got out of the canyon?”
“Nah,” I reply, “the turkey vultures are picking their bones clean as we speak.”

We can fit in another quick hike before our check-out time this morning, so we take one of the rim trails. Walks along the rim are the easiest and most touristy thing to do. Shuttle buses deposit their human cargo at the most scenic points; people amble to the guard rails, snap a few snaps and amble back to the next bus fifteen minutes later. We get off at Hopi point, five stops out, and walk back. We see a monument to the first man to map the canyon, an abandoned uranium mine and lots of startling views, which aren’t as satisfying as yesterday’s because we haven’t earnt them.

Grand Canyon Village, AZ

We have the whole day at the canyon today so we sleep in a little later than normal. Most tourists restrain themselves to walking along the rim of the canyon, while some will dip into it using the popular Bright Angel trail. More experienced hikers use the more challenging routes. I decide we’ll take South Kaibab trail down into the canyon; it’s secluded but it won’t kill us.

Almost immediately we see a couple of mule trains. The first carries tourists, the second carries their baggage. This near the rim we’re sheltered by a curve in the canyon and walk mostly in shade. Three quarters of a mile and 600 feet down the trail is a bundle of huge rocks which are our first stop, “Ooh Aah Point”, doubtless named because you say “Ooh" when you see the view and “Aaargh” when you slip over the edge. From here we can only see the upper canyon, the river is shyly hiding in the inner canyon.

We get talking to a pair of hikers who we heard well before we saw them. They are heading down to Skeleton Point, three miles along and 2040 feet down. Do we think we’ll go that far? Maybe. It depends how we feel at the next stop. Most of the folk on this trail are friendly, almost everyone says “Hi” as you pass. Sometimes they tell us how far down they’ve been and we tell them where we’re going. There’s a kinship between those who walk the trail out here.

Holbrook, AZ to Grand Canyon Village, AZ

09.30am

After catching a few snaps of the wigwams and the classic cars beside them we get back on the road.

Santa Rosa Lake State Park, NM to Holbrook, AZ

06.15am

Courtney wakes up early, desperate for the bathroom. She returns to the tent urging me to get up. The sun is about to rise over Santa Rosa lake. New Mexico bills itself as the “State of Enchantment” and I’m starting to see why.

Day Eight, Palo Duro Canyon, TX to Santa Rosa Lake State Park, NM

08.00am
Courtney finds a gobble of eleven wild turkeys outside the bathrooms. They’re pecking about in the half-light because although the sun has risen, we’re sheltered from it by the sandstone walls around us.

As I shower in the bug-ridden bathrooms I notice a large shadow on the shower curtain. I decide to ignore it for the moment. Later, dried off and with contact lenses in, curiosity gets the better of me. I go back to the shower curtain and draw it back to reveal a large locust, five inches from tip to tail.

08.15am
The sun rises over the rim of the canyon. Apart from the wild turkey, everything is asleep: the deer, the woodpeckers and roadrunners, even the flies are slumbering.

08.50am
Courtney and I set out on a hike through the canyon. The guidebook tells us that Palo Duro means hard wood, so the canyon was named after the mesquite trees that grow within it. It’s a week day, so we have the park entirely to ourselves for a couple of hours. The only noise is the sound of our feet on the dusty canyon floor.

Day Seven, Dallas, TX to Palo Duro Canyon, TX

10.00am
Dee’s place – her Dad’s place really – is addictively calm and quiet, but it’s time to get back on the road. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us, possibly the longest of the trip, and very little reason to stop until we get to tonight’s camp site.

Almost as soon as we’re out to the west of Dallas the scenery changes again. It’s even drier, but not quite arid, and the ground lies flat. It’s so sparsely populated that the air is clear, and we can see almost thirty miles in every direction. I’ve never seen a place like this before.

Day Six, Dallas, TX

Dee takes us on the commuter light railway to downtown Dallas. Like many American cities, downtown is a collection of tall office buildings and little else. We’re headed for the sixth floor of the book depository on Dealey Plaza.

We pay our admission, $10 each, and take the elevator up. We spend the next two hours peering out onto Elm street and reading the history of JFK’s assassination. The museum is good, but there’s one big omission. Despite selected stills, the famous Zapruder 8mm movie of the assassination isn’t present. According to the late comedian, Bill Hicks, the Zapruder footage shows Kennedy’s head snapping back and to the left at the moment of impact. If he was shot from the book depository window his head would have fallen forward.

Ignoring the grizzly mechanics of who shot him and from where, it’s indisputable that he was shot, and fairly well accepted that he died as a result. What has never been discovered is why he was killed. The museum offers up all sorts of theories: the right wing, the mafia, pro-Castro factions, anti-Castro factions, but all of them have been disproved. Lee Harvey Oswald was not mad. The man who shot Reagan did it, Dee tells me, to impress Jodie Foster. There was no woman who Oswald desired to impress by killing the president.

The museum strives to provide so much information that the lack of resolution to the story is disguised – or to saturate the visitor so that she no longer cares. But getting your money’s worth isn’t quite the same feeling as knowing the truth.

Day Five: Hot Springs, AK to Dallas, TX

09.30am
We leave the Comfort Inn, which we chose because it has wireless networking in the lobby, to find out exactly what it is about Hot Springs that brings people here. Last night all we saw of town was five miles of strip mall: buzzing neon, rattling air conditioners and four lanes of traffic. Chain hotels, chain restaurants, chain stores and lots of pawn shops, including the intriguingly named Boll Weevil Pawn.

By day Hot Springs hasn’t changed. If anything, it looks worse. What were blank gaps in the neon last night are empty shops and abandoned cinemas this morning. Apparently once we’ve picked our way through this detritus there will be a national park maintained by the government.

Nashville, TN to Hot Springs, AR

Nashville is known locally for two things. Firstly, the publishing and printing of bibles and theological books. Secondly, its substantial number of "Gentleman’s Clubs." Straddling this contradiction between the pulpit and the pole dance is the phenomenon which has made Nashville world famous, country music. From just a brief walk on the sultry streets it’s easy to see how feverish passions, both devotional and lustful can quickly take hold. Nashville air is humid, even at the beginning of autumn.

Cat and Adam, recently-weds originally from Courtney’s home town in New York, have made Nashville their home. Cat did her MA at Vanderbilt, one of the five universities in town, and became a school counsellor. Adam teaches Maths. Seeing their charming, eclectically furnished home makes Courtney and I excited about the apartment which is waiting for us in Davis.

Last night we arrived late, due to traffic jams in the interstate. “The trouble with Nashville,” says Adam on the way to the "Weird Al" Yankovic concert, “is that no-one here knows how to drive.” People start waving at us and flashing their lights. Cat says “Isn’t this a one-way street?” and Adam pulls a u-turn.

Cave City, KY to Nashville, TN

10.45am
After breakfast, ablutions, striking camp, that sort of thing, we went underground for a tour of the Mammoth Caves. As far as anyone knows, there have never been mammoth in or near the caves. Originally called Flat Caves after the original owner, they gained their current monicker when a visiting New Yorker forgot their name, and described them to a friend as “Mammoth holes in the ground,” which of course they are.

Cleveland OH to Cave City, KY

10.34am
We survived the night at Delaware Lake state park, despite Courtney’s fears. While checking in, a slow-talking local sparked up a conversation with us. Pat had scraggly long hair, a paunch, manbreasts and a pitted yet slightly effeminate face. Courtney was eager to get away from his unwarranted attention.

As we were setting up camp in the empty campground, Pat drove his enormous truck and caravan past and parked up a couple of sites away. Courtney looked worried, but we carried on as if nothing was up. A couple of minutes later she said, “Don’t stare, but he’s coming over.”

Pat ambled up to us, smoking a cigarette and carrying photos. “D’ya wanna see ma office?” He enquired, offering me the photos. “That’s ma office,” He said, pointing to the top photo, which as far as I could tell was a snap of two portable toilets in a forest. “See, ma office is portapotties!” he snorted.

Geneseo, NY to Delaware, OH

The car is packed, campgrounds have been reserved, our route is set. Today Courtney and I set off on our epic cross-country drive from Geneseo, NY to Davis, CA.

Lots of people say they want to drive across America, but many never do. We’ve said it ourselves several times, but now we really are doing it because later in September Courtney is starting her PhD in English Literature at the University of California, Davis. If we’re going to move all that way, we thought, we should see a slice of the country.

When Courtney first mentioned the idea I agreed, but with one condition: I wanted us to average four to four-and-a-half hours per day on the road. For an American a drive of such duration is trivial, but I’m not American. I come from an island so small that in certain places four hours is ample time for a journey from the east coast to the west. Split into Englishman-friendly chunks, our road trip will take just under two weeks to complete.

In his book, Roads, Larry McMurtry writes that rivers used to be the arteries of America. Now the big roads, the interstates, pump its lifeblood of commerce and migration. Life on the roads, like life on the great rivers of less industrialised countries, is very different to life a few miles away from them.

… villagers living only a mile or two from the Ganges know almost nothing about it, while the river men are similarly ignorant of conditions even a little distance up the shore. River and village, roadway and forest are two realities that seldom merge, however close they may lie to each other geographically.

For the next two weeks, Courtney and I will be as McMurtry’s river men, caught in the flow of petrol and the spinning of the wheels. Our focus will be on what lies to the sides of the road, its tributaries and diversions, but nevertheless we will be travellers, strangers, a degree removed from the settled communities we pass through.