TransAmerica

Why old people walk slowly

2006-11-20T13:26:00.000+01:00

I know now why old people walk slowly. It's not that they can't go faster, more that they don't want to get there sooner. If you have nothing to do but walk and feed the ducks, you walk there slowly, you feed the ducks slowly and you walk back slowly because it helps fill the time.

That's how I was in Sterling. I stayed another few days in the motel and rationed my walks into town - v e r y s l o w l y - because the alternative was to stay in my room and read or write or watch American television. I watched American television only when I could no longer read or write. It's the only time you'd want to watch American television. Watching American television drives you to sleep, which is another excellent way to pass the time.

Over-blessed with shut-eye, I woke one morning at four and resolved to sit on my bike. All felt a lot less swollen down on the dark side of the moon and I had hopes that, albeit with pain, I could maybe ride again. If I could ride an hour and have an hour off and carry that on all day, perhaps I could go further than the group each day and catch them before the Rockies. I desperately wanted that.

But... I could ride only if I hung flop-bot over the side of the saddle. I could make it round the motel car park but there was no way of getting through the day, still less as far as the Rockies. The ride was over.

At the library I found a site to sell me an air fare for a lot less than the $1 800 originally quoted but still a lot more than the return fare I had originally paid from France. I then booked a place on the train to Chicago, which was the easiest and possibly the nearest international airport to be of any use.

The first pick-up to pass my raised thumb fulfilled its name and picked me up. The driver knew not only Hutchinson, where the train would stop, but the bike shop I was going to ask to courier my bike back home. I couldn't take it on the train because, while Amtrak accepts bikes at staffed stations, Hutchinson was unmanned.

The train left in the small hours and arrived in the middle of the following afternoon. I have nothing but praise for Amtrak, other than the bike incident. It is short of money and that shows in a slight shabbiness . The trains roll and judder and travel at only a third the speed of French trains. But the experience is wonderful. I could sit in my upper compartment and stretch out my long legs, or recline my seat to the near-horizontal, and I could watch the mists of early-morning America evaporate in the rising sun as we rolled through woods and fields and past rabbits that looked at us and cows than trotted away without knowing why.

Why so few Americans travel by train, I don't know. You don't do it if you're in a hurry, that's true. You do it for the romance, for the experience, the time to talk to other people, the chance to see an America you'd never see from the interstate. In that, it was exactly like cycling and, in its way, the train attracts the same sort of person.

Chicago I know nothing of but the stations of the metro, the walk to a travellers' hostel, the inside of an Italian restaurant to which I must apologise for a spectacular level of travel-induced body odour, and then the taxi to the airport next morning.

I travelled Air Canada, to Toronto for a six-hour sleep on the floor, then to London. In London I took the bus 60km to the city's other airport and from there I flew to Toulouse. It had cost me a fortune and sending the bike cost almost all the bike was worth. As if that weren't enough, the papers weren't marked "personal effects" and I ended up paying import tax on it as well.

For a week I felt merely tired. It took three showers to get properly clean. My clothes were no better. In another two weeks the injury began to improve and I could start riding again, if with discomfort. I rode to the Semaine Fédérale, a week-long international rally held in a different area of France every summer. There I had a great time riding with 10 000 other bikies but I could never forget that I was supposed to be crossing America.

It hit me hard the day my former travelling companions were due to reach the Pacific. I heard they'd been dancing on the beach. And then it all overcame me. I am by nature optimistic and insouciant. But I became depressed and very quiet. I began to feel I had failed. I forgot the good parts and wished I had never gone in the first place. In that mood, everything had been bad, from the business with the passport to paying tax on my own bike.

But, things pass. After a while I felt happier. I could remember the laughs, the people I'd met, the stories I'd heard, the breathtaking friendliness and warmth of Americans. It is the time for that mood to change that accounts for the gap in finishing this story. I realised I loved Americans, who in their own land are so different from those you meet outside it. I loved much of America, a country not at all like the view its government seems determined to give of it.

I couldn't live in America. It is for me, a European and very much a European, too far from anywhere. It is a giant island which happens to have neighbours. You can travel for thousands of kilometres and speak English and shop at Walmart and watch the same braindead television .

But to visit, it is wonderful. That's why I plan to go back. Not next year because family and cycling projects get in the way. But in 2007 I want to cross America again. I thought about re-riding the TransAm itself. But then I realised that as far as Kansas I'd be passing the same white wooden churches, the same men on motor-mowers, the same gas stations selling weak coffee and sublime if artificial pastries. And then from Kansas, the route would become a challenge, as though each extra day were some sort of darts board on which I had to play an ever higher score until I hit the bull's eye of the Pacific.

So, no. Next time I will ride the Northern Tier. It goes from the same ocean to the same ocean but it has the merit of dodging into Canada. Canada is the only country I have visited without going outdoors. I have a stamp in my passport but I never smelled fresh Canadian air. Forgive me, Canada: I'll do better by you next time.

FINAL THOUGHT: When I entered America it was with an expensive visa that was very difficult to get. The immigration man gave me a slip of paper which I had, at the risk of going to jail if I lost it, to present to the emigration man at the other end. And what happened?

When I left Chicago for Canada, nobody checked the visa, nobody took this slip of paper. Nobody even asked for my passport, still less stamped it. So when one day you hear there are x million illegal immigrants in America, remember to subtract one. According to the records, I am still there.

The end of the road

2006-06-20T00:37:00.000+02:00

Well, the optimism wasn't justified. I am now all man and no longer as cuddly as I was but it is still too painful to sit on the saddle. And that's how it could stay for another two weeks. The result: the great ride is over and the adventure finished.

It has been a wonderful experience to be here and, if you've been good enough to read any of this, you'll know I've met some of the most friendly and interesting people of my life. It's a bitter thought that it has come to an end over something so trivial yet so painful.

Rural Kansas isn't the easiest place to get out of. America isn't known for public transport. Kind-hearted people are trying to sort out a lift to Hutchinson, the nearest town to have car hire, but I don't yet know the answer. It may be I can drive to Chicago and get myself home from there, although the so-called cheap fares sites are now quoting an outrageous $1,800 for a one-way fare to Toulouse. That's several times what I paid for the original return.

Of course, at that rate, it could prove as cheap to have a car for a month and a half and get to Seattle and go home on the original dates. But there's nothing I can do until I get to Hutchinson.

The greatest charm would be to take a train to Chicago. It wouldn't be expensive, either. But the twist is that although the train stops at Hutchinson, you can't get on there if you have luggage to put in the freight van. And I have a bicycle, of course.

Well, doubtless I shall get it sorted out. I doubt I'll be able to add anything to this site for a while so, if you have been, thanks for taking an interest and thanks for all the encouraging messages.

We're simply nearly the best

2006-06-19T21:28:00.000+02:00

While I wait for a medical miracle, an anecdote...

All communities have to make the most of what they have. If they haven't got an Eiffel Tower they can't boast of one.

Pittsburg, Kansas, doesn't have an Eiffel Tower. Or much else. Attractions offered in the city's guide for visitors include "Big Brutus - the world's second-largest electric mining shovel". Note the "second-largest" and the suggestion that non-electrical shovels may turn out larger.

Then there is the Veterans' Wall at nearby Girard, just like the famous one... but only half the size. All the names of the fallen are on it but the short-sighted should remember their glasses.

Still, Girard does have "one of" the world's largest American flags. I love not only the "one of" but that bit about the "world's largest", which sounds impressive until you remember that 99.9 per cent of American flags are probably within America itself.

And it's only "one of the largest". And as with the almost-biggest mining shovel, there's no suggestion where the real thing might be.

Perhaps this explains why the big flag is called simply The Big Flag. Anyway, since you're itching to know, it is 30 feet by 60 and "while you can see (it) from your vehicle, you really must stand under the Big Flag to appreciate its true size."

Now, I haven't been unkind and picked all this from the end of a long list that started with something good. These are the first three visitor attractions recommended by the Crawford County (in which Pittsburg stands) visitor guide.

To it, I am grateful for information that Crawford County is "the heart of America" and "home to several nationally-known treasures, like Big Brutus, the world's best fried chicken, and Pittsburg State University."

It takes a special sense of pride, don't you think, to place a fried chicken ahead of a university?

Half-man, half-cuddly toy

2006-06-19T21:05:00.000+02:00

Well, I have been grounded in Kansas.

A few days ago I noticed the start of a saddle sore. They're not that uncommon and usually they go away. This one, though, persisted and in one day grew to a lump the thickness of my little finger and as long as my little finger from the big knuckle to the tip.

By chance, we have a doctor on this trip. Bob is a lovely man who retired from medicine the day before the ride began. He diagnosed something with a medical name which sounded a lot worse than it was. In effect, it was that I had something akin to a blister, a great dense area of fluid which couldn't escape because - unlike a blister - the skin across it was too dense.

The only way to burst it was by a visit to hospital. And so, arranging a lift to Wichita in a pick-up driven by a man called Jason, I took my first and doubtless expensive step into the American health system.

Well, it was more plumbing than surgery. I was cut and pummeled and drained and plugged and sent back out among the healthy. A couple of enjoyable free days followed with my friend Erie, who was kind enough to stay with me as my guardian angel... and then the bump came back.

I had had in any case to arrange for a doctor to see the wound to make sure all was well. When he saw it, the diagnosis was that the plug had dropped out before the draining had finished and that I had healed too fast. This, of course, is a tribute to British pluck and fortitude and my brimming youthful good health.

The bad news is that the doctor's opening words as he laid his fingers on the affected area were: "I'm going to hurt you."

The good news is that he is himself a cyclist - the frieze below the ceiling of his surgery is of cyclists in glorious action - and so unlikely to be one of those medics who simply want to tell bikies to keep off their bikes for another month.

By chance, his name was also Tom Simpson. As I told him, the last time I had met a Tom Simpson, he had died a month later in the Tour de France. Tom 2 said it was unlikely he would get to ride the Tour de France but that he had always dreamed of riding across America. Therefore he would get me on the road as quickly as he could.

To this end, he put not just a wimpy little strand of gauze into the wound, as the hospital had, but what he estimated as "between a foot and 15 inches." I have become half-man, half-cuddly-toy.

In 50 minutes from now, and across the road from here, I shall see him again and he'll pull out all that gauze in the way a conjuror pulls a string of flags out of his sleeve. Tom's prediction is that I may be able to start riding again tomorrow.

If I can, and if I can ride around 20 miles further each day than the group has been doing, I should be able to catch them in five or six days' time, just before the Rockies. But it all depends on what happens in what is now just 48 minutes' time...

Wish me well.

Jus' drinkin' coffee someplace else

2006-06-19T20:53:00.000+02:00

Life on a bike is often reduced to enjoying the effort and scenery... and wondering where you can next eat a sticky bun. My progress across America could be measured in sticky buns.

That was how I met Edgar and Bob, in a filling-station cafe. When I asked Bob, the larger, what they'd be doing if they weren't drinking coffee right there where they were, he said: "Oh, jus' drinkin' coffee someplace else, I guess."

They were both the same age, Edgar and Bob, had been friends as boys, had graduated from high school together and grown-up together. Bob farmed 500 acres - still does, though he calls it "small in these parts" - and Edgar around 200 - "because I'm supposed to be retired now; trouble is, moment I stop, folks can't stand it and they find me something to do."

He didn't take the hint to tell me his age and it took a while to overcome a natural suspicion of strangers asking questions. But he recollected with warmth the evenings he and his family used to listen to the last great days of American radio and listed his favourite shows.

"But we couldn't listen all evening because the batteries'd go flat."

I asked what there was for young people to do nowadays and he said most of them had moved away to the cities. When I said that I meant those of school age, he said: "Watch television, mainly."

On the face of it, this is little different in principle from spending your evenings listening to the radio, but he was quick to enlarge...

"I had brothers and sisters and we used to spend our evenings playing cards and talking and, yes, listening to the radio. But television's changed all that. It ain't the same."

The fields across much of Kansas look empty, a result of having just so much space but also of the CRP - crop rotation programme - predecessor of land set-aside now operated in Europe. But those fields have something that European fields don't, and that's nodding-donkey oil pumps, usually one to a field. The farmer receives a fee for access to the land, an indemnity against any damage, and a three-sixteenths royalty on the value of the oil extracted.

"You see a farmer round here with a big car or a new combine and you see someone with oil on his land," Bill laughed. "Ain't always like that but generally that's the case."

The man from the cave

2006-06-19T20:31:00.001+02:00

Loyd is 89, looks ten years younger. One ear works and the other doesn't but apart from that and some recent surgery that doesn't slow him down much, he's fine.

Which is as well because Loyd spends his time down his cave - a great network of caverns and passageways - shovelling rocks by hand, laying pathways, fitting railings and reaching high behind rock formations to install hidden wiring for lights.

"Not too bad for a man of 89", he says, his voice bubbling with understated modesty and enthusiasm. "Not when you consider most men of my age couldn't even get down here, let alone do all the work.

"Always been healthy. Been blessed that way. Maybe it comes from being down here so much where the temperature is always the same and there aren't any allergies in the air. My wife's 87 and she's down here even more than I am, so there must be something in it."

You'd never call the cave commercial. There's a truly commercial one - the never-knowingly understated Fantastic Cave - just a little further on. Loyd is not impressed.

"They charge you four times as much and drive you round in a car. It's like a four-lane highway down there. And moments later, you're back out again.

"I'm proud of my cave. We have all sorts of scientists and archaeologists down here because there are things here they can't explain."

His knowledge of formations and crystals is humbling and made all the more appealing by his persistent references to "stagmites" and "stagtites".

The cave, he said, had been bought years ago by an Englishman from Brighton, who'd come to work in the area but found the caves more fun. Before him, they had been home for around 150 years to the Osage Indian tribe, who had lived - and died - underground presumably because it was more convenient and a great deal cooler than being up on the surface.

Before then there had been another tribe, known as the Mountainbuilders, "but we don't know a great deal about them and there's a good deal of guess-and-make-up in their history. I've been down the public library to find out more but they don't have a whole lot."

The Osages buried at least their leaders and their wives down in the cave. You need clever eyes to see the markings they scratched in the roof as markers to the tombs. That's difficult even with electric lighting but with the pale and smoky fires that were all the Osages had, the feat is extraordinary.

The Osages obviously hunted with bows because they made arrowheads from the churt that stripes the rock.

"Make them myself, too," Loyd said in the wooden shack and shop at the entrance. He pointed to a cabinet on the floor, a cabinet that exactly matched the theme of a museum, office and bric-a-brac store. It'd take an Osage eye to spot the display among the old magazines, chinaware and what was proudly called a collection of presidential plates but consisted in fact of just one plate of Richard Nixon. Maybe the collection had never grown any larger; perhaps it had but Richard Nixon was the only president nobody wanted.

"Yep, I sit here and make arrowheads when things are quiet. Usually there's a school group coming round but sometimes there's nobody because we don't advertise. So I work down the cave and I make arrowheads. Big ones are the hardest to do. Some reason, the churt don't make up into big ones."

He has no idea how far his caves reach. He recently disc0vered a whole extra chamber, even prettier than the others, after sticking his shovel into a hole to see what happened.

"I was the first man ever to see this," he says proudly. "Looks attractive now I got the lighting in but you can imagine how difficult that was with all those stagmites and stagtites in the dark when all I had was my little flashlight.

Loyd charges $9 a person for a personal tour. If he's down his hole, you just have to wait until he's finished work or until the previous tour has been completed. Tours take as long as anyone wants and he's not hurried - "see something different every time I'm down here".

And the Indians who used to live there?

"Well, the government gave them land some place else and they were all cleared outta the land they'd lived on for centuries and made to live someplace else. The route those families took, that's become known now as the Trail of Tears.

"Kinda sums it up, don't it?"

An awful vision of Hell (2)

2006-06-19T20:31:00.000+02:00

Oh to heck with their embarrassment.

It was Carbondale, Illinois.

Life in America (6)

2006-06-12T00:48:00.000+02:00

The scene: a rural camp site.

The cast: a woman of maybe 22, all chequer shirt, freckles and big smile

The setting: straight out of Huckleberry Finn.

The quote: "Well now, you guys need enn'thin' else, you jus' holler. I'll be right up that tree there, a-pickin' cherries."

Emergency, 9/11

2006-06-12T00:33:00.000+02:00

I met Mel when I left my bike against the drive-through window of what I have learned to call a "gas station". Cyclists don't need gas but they need coffee and sticky buns and gas stations are where you get them.

Mel came looking for the owner of the bike and found him in the shade of a tree. He pointed out the error of my ways, then went back to his porch and his rocking chair. And there he rocked as though he were pumping up the national electricity supply and he contemplated nothing much in particular behind a coffee cup printed with the image of a dollar note.

"Don't do much else these days," he said. "Used to have that store over there by the gas station. Had it 17 years, right up to three years back. Had to stop then, 'cause I hurt my arm real bad and doctors ain't been able to put it right."

He pulled back a sleeve to show a long scar inside his elbow.

"Heart ain't too good either." He tapped his chest to remind me where his heart would be.

"Used to live in Arizona, then came over this place, where I was born, when my dad got real poorly. Course, he's gone a whiles now but I'm still here." He pointed at the single-storey wooden house behind the fenced verandah where he sat and I wondered if he'd ever noticed how similar it looked to his old store.

"Prettiest place in the country, this state," he said, and when it came to south-eastern Missouri, I was prone to agree.

"But things ain't been the same with the business since I passed it to my son. Not his fault, though I'm glad I got out. Takings are right down since 9/11. Down a third. Everywhere's the same. Seems people just ain't got the money any more, or leastways don't want to spend it."

He pointed across the road at a car dealership.

"Been the same over there at Lady Queen. Same ever'where. People just aren't spending. Knocked the confidence out of the country, I guess. Never thought it could last this long, but it has. Course, there's been a bunch of other things as well, like New Orleans. But it seems that just generally the economy's down and staying down.

"I ain't got an answer for it. Heck, just wish I did."

An awful vision of Hell

2006-06-12T00:18:00.000+02:00

The other day we passed a church which had one of those signs that the parson can change by moving transparent plastic letters. There are signs like that all over the place here. To tell someone "It's just beyond the church" would be useless because sometimes there are nothing but churches.

Anyway, this sign said: "Come Redemption, where will you be seated: smoking or non-smoking" and I thought it rather clever.

I've never been sure there's a Hell and so I smiled and rode on. That evening I found that Hell exists.

I won't add further to the town's tears by naming it. Let's just call it Hell.

The road through Hell is a six-lane divided highway - a dual-carriageway if you're British - with a service road running parallel on each side. The service road fronts all those neon-lit, primary-colour, flag-and-glitter places that no American town can do without. But in this case the town has gone for it in a big way. A Big Way. It was a glory of soulless, spend-your-money-and-go consumerism. You didn't even need to get out of your car; it was quicker and cheaper to keep you in your car, let you poke your credit card into a machine that beeped and flashed, then send you on your way with your money left behind you.

And so all these people had to be instructed, guided, corrected and cajoled. Every 50 metres there was the tearing noise one side of car tyres on cement and, on the other, yet another metallic, sing-song voice saying "Move to pump six, hun" and "Bay three, your service is ready" and "That'll be an extra three dollars fifty, sir". Horrible voices from hard, faceless people sitting in central control booths and directing the lives of others through two-inch loudspeakers.

One day, it will be like that for all of us. All of those whose lives have placed them in Smoking, anyway.

Miss Sourit, the smiling state

2006-06-07T18:18:00.000+02:00

We are now in Missouri, the prettiest state yet. Part of that could be that it is reminiscent of south-western France, with its green fields, winding roads and wooded hillsides. The rest may be that it is so clean. It's not as prosperous as Virginia - I expect few places are - but, again unlike Virginia, there's no litter. Don't ask me why but people here no longer throw drink bottles and the fried-chicken wrappings out of their car window.

On a bike you appreciate that: it gets depressing to have a rubbish-filled ditch on your right for hours on end.

Now, I forget how far we got. I seem to remember that the last time I caught up was to say that we were about to pass into Kentucky and that the locals had warned of wild dogs, depressing poverty and the people who have to uncross their eyes before they speak.

Well, there was none of that. There was poverty, yes, but only of the sort that I'd find in any community dependent on agriculture for its wages. I have seen worse in England, in the Fens for instance. And as for the dogs and tales that nobody got across the state without a dozen tins of Mace to fend them off... yes, more dogs than usual but hardly drip-fanged monsters eager to tear the flesh from your carves.

We crossed from Kentucky to Illinois on a ferry across the Ohio. Funny thing it was too, this ferry, because it amounted to a barge with the nose of a tug-boat joined to by hinge halfway down its length. It's as though two neighbours found that one owned a barge and the other a tug and pooled their resources. To cross the river, the tug sails straight ahead with the barge hanging off its bows. When it approaches the bank, the tug swings out sideways and pushes the barge crabwise to the shore, when experience ensures it meets up with the ramp left there for it.

Anywhere else, a river crossing would be a tourist trap. But in Kentucky there was nothing and on the Illinois side there was just an apologetic village whose idea of a good time was a night at a brick building that called itself the Little Opry in the hope of reflected glory from the Grand Old Opry in Nashville.

Things never got better. The next village should have been a gem. The wide rippling water was beautiful and the place should have been full of visitors. As it was, other than a small hotel which looked as though it was doing all right, the village looked as though in another 30 years it could just crumble to dust.

It's unfair to expect places to be more than they are, just for your sake. It's good when they make an effort but sometimes even that can make you smile. Our last town in our brief crossing of Illinois was Chester. You can't escape its boast that it is the home town of Popeye, the cartoon character. There is a Popeye museum - "cute little place, takes all of three minutes to visit" - and Popeye and Olive Oyl figures through which you can poke your head and have your photo taken. And the last thing before crossing into Missouri is a bronze statue of Popeye beside the road.

But the sad thing is that, while the cartoonist who drew Popeye was born in Chester, he never lived there when he created the cartoons. Popeye first appeared in the theatre at Chester and he was based on a real-life Mississipi sailor - a "scrapper" - but Popeye himself began his inky life in California, to which the artist was presumably pleased to move to escape Chester.

Anyway, the Mississipi bridge has taken us into Missouri and the Ozark mountains. Not mountains by any normal standards but plenty high enough and, in keeping with the cleanliness of the state, crossed by a succession of sparkling streams. The peace of one of which was seriously disturbed yesterday by a flotilla of noisy cyclists in canoes.

Drunk men don't cut grass

2006-06-01T22:27:00.000+02:00

America should pray that lawn-cutting will become an Olympic sport. No country is more in training. Barely a mile passes without the sound of yet another portly man in long shorts (it's always a man and always long shorts) driving a little garden tractor as the cuttings shoot everywhere.

It helps that, as I've said before, that Americans have huge and unobstructed lawns. In that they are wise. As any European could tell them, it is tricky to let rip with a mower when there are tulips and fish ponds in the way. And American houses have neither tulips nor fish ponds.

What they do have, round here and in throat-irritating proportions, is fake animals. No states are better provided than Kentucky and Illinois (into which we passed the other day thanks to a ferry across the Ohio) when it comes to models of deer, small bears and anything else the owner fancies. If it's not a cuddly animal, it is a miniature jockey in racing colours. Why? It's beyond me.

The garden animals are fairly realistic. Or they would be if the plastic base that supports the legs were buried in soil. That way, the paws or hooves would stand on the ground. As it is, most people just drop them on the grass, where they look like giant versions of the model sheep and cows you probably had as a child.

Buried or not, they provide a lawn-cutting obstacle and it would be best to be sober when whipping round them with your mower.

And sobriety is a feature of this part of the world. There are runs of counties that are Dry, where alcohol can't be bought.

Why? Well according to the man who runs the crossroads store near Harrodsburg, the immediate reason was religion but the actual reason was the soldiers at Fort Knox. I don't know why soldiers guarding America's gold reserves 50 miles away should have chosen Harrodsburg for a night on the razz but that, it seems, is what they did.

And according to Donald: "They created such Cain back in 1943 that the town decided it wasn't going to happen again and they banned alcohol there and then."

Donald is 74 and he started the shop 45 years ago. "Sold it to my son right over there two years ago an' I jus' help out here now."

"Helping out" didn't go so far as putting on fresh coffee for us but ther sight of hanging, yellow and parched tongues eventually gave him the hint.

He'd been a farmer back then, he said, and he'd had a corner of land he couldn't use and he built the shop.

"And there's enough traffic on this road to run a store?"

"Is when you're right nexx to a dry county. Jus' up there, tha's dry. And folks, they come here, first store over the border an' they stock up on what they can't get at home." He waved at the floor-straining stocks of beer cans and spirit bottles and admitted that somewhere among them there was probably also a tube of toothpaste or a can of soup that non-drinkers could find useful.

"In the next county," I asked, "do they look down on you as sinners?"

"Some sure do. Some. But there's plenty more, they're all religious when they're at home but they're real happy to come over here and be sinners on the other side of the border."

About half the counties in Kentucky were dry, he said.

"Religion, mainly. They've been dry over there since 1943. The mil'try from over Fort Knox use to come over and raise hell, so they went ahead and banned alcohol.

I asked what there was to see at Fort Knox. "Not rightly much," he said. "Can't get real close to it. Moment you turn on to the road, there's soldiers out to stop you. Can't get closer to it than that house over there," and he pointed to a corner of a window visible through the beer crates and a building that stood several hundred metres further on,

"Now that's all changed. They're in a dry county over there but they can drink, see, because that's Federal."

Some states have gone back to being wet, Donald said. "And once they go wet, they don't go dry again. They realise the taxation they're missing. That can count higher than religion even in these here parts."

Life in America (5)

2006-06-01T22:21:00.000+02:00

"Saturday morning, a drunken stranger stood on the bank corner and tore up two 10-dollar bills and a 20-dollar bill and tossed the scraps to the four winds. Sheriff Chinn, who happened to be passing by, took him in charge and sent for Chief Smith, who placed him in the lockup to sober up.

"On being searched, $95 in currency was found in his pocket. When he had slept off the effects of the whisky he was fined $1 and turned loose and immediately got drunk again. The chief then notified him that he must leave town on the first train. He begged hard to be permitted to remain here two or three days, but this the chief refused and the man left Sunday at noon.

"He gave the name of W. H. Petty, and Nashville as his home. He refused to say anything further about himself, but it is believed he is a picture salesman. He begged that nothing be published about his escapade, as he did not want his father to know that he had turned such a 'blamed fool.'

"The pieces of money were gathered up and pasted together."

- The Harrodsburg Journal, June 15, 1905

Praise the Lord

2006-05-24T18:26:00.000+02:00

I did my laundry this morning. I've done it other days as well but this morning I did it with a Bible quotation pinned to the wall. "Have Faith", it started.

Usually laundromat messages say "No oily clothing" or "Leave room for the water". But this is Kentucky and in Kentucky you get inspiring messages on the wall and a copy of the Bible among the back-numbers of Big Truck Driver and Appalachian Bluegrass Music Monthly.

For a supposedly secular nation, America is a nest of contradictions. The state is neither for or against religion but the money is marked "In God We Trust". A few days back I passed a school which proclaimed "We Believe We Care", which was either a tribute to modesty or a sign of what happens when you forget a comma.

The people of Kentucky believe God is on their side. It used to be here, as in other states, that motorcyclists had to wear helmets. Then lobbyists complained the law went against the constitution's insistence on freedom and the laws were repealed. The consequence is that overweight Easyriders roar about bare and often bald-headed, wearing red neck scarves, a look of unbearable superiority and the floppy moustaches you thought nobody had grown since 1976.

As one of my partners on this ride, Tim Hewitt, said: "There's nothing in the Bible about racing about on a motorbike without a helmet but there's plenty about drinking alcohol, so we go day after day through one dry county after another while medical costs for crippled and brain-damaged motorcyclists go up and up."

We are in a dry county right now. We are in Berea, pronounced Berry-er, on a camp site for Americans who drive ocean liners along the interstates and tow cars behind them to use in town. Such is the frustration of some of us that we plan to drive into neighbouring Lexington and be damned by the Lord for the beer we bring back.

As for more general religious belief, I heard yesterday of a church in Kentucky that once proclaimed the startling news that rattlesnakes were an excellent guide to piety. If you believed hard enough, God would instruct the rattlesnake to sleep in your hands. On the other hand, sinners would have the critter going for the jugular and - like bare-headed motorcyclists - they'd be justifying themselves before their maker sooner than they expected.

Sadly, the rattlesnake-fondling congregation grew steadily smaller. They are now united, sinners all, in some leafy graveyard. The serpents of sin slither on above their unnoticing eyes.

Life in America (4)

2006-05-20T19:34:00.000+02:00

Quote from Paul and Marie, two Dutch cyclists encountered on the way:

"Americans don't like fruit and vegetables. I can buy 58 types of cola and two dozen varieties of Pringles, but I can never get an apple or a potato."

Trouble with cows

2006-05-20T19:14:00.000+02:00

American villages aren't villages. Not as we know them in Europe, anyway. Or - to satisfy lawyers - villages in these parts aren't as they are at home. Instead of a centre and a feel of community, they are a collection of isolated homes which, becaause the habit isn't to build fences or grow hedges around them, look as though they've been dropped into a huge and especially well cared-for football field. It is easy to ride through without realising.

It was that that I had on my mind when I rode into Elk Garden yesterday lunchtime. We were to stop there, camping in the grounds of a church which also called itself a Bike Hostel. And I wasn't sure if I'd passed it.

I knocked at the door of an isolated house and was greeted by a slightly stooped man of seemingly advanced age and a great enthusiasm to meet sweaty men in Lycra. Especially lost and foreign ones.

"Jus' you come on in now," he said. "Can I fix yah a drink or en'thing?"

The room was heated to near-sauna proportions and every available surface was covered by china figurines. Girls with parasols, cats, dawgs, that sort of thing.

"Tha's my wife does that," my host explained, adding: "She's an Avon Lady" as if that somehow explained things.

It didn't take long for the conversation to jump on in a series of non-sequiturs until it bumped into the unforgettable line:

"See, I lost my intelligence to cows."

Eh?

"I used to work on a dairy farm, jus' up there a bit." He waved the way I was going and named the farm's owner and asked if I knew him. I said I didn't. He seemed surprised. "Anyhows, I worked there since I was a boy and I milked them cows an' then one day, 1973 that was, they got a disease." And he named the disease, although he might not have bothered because I wouldn't have known what he meant even if I'd understood the accent, which was as thick as a nun's knickers.

Does "wheat disease" or something like that mean anything to you?

"So the cows got sick and then I breathed their breath and I got sick too. And that took away my intelligence. An' for years I were jus' like a baby. All I spoke was gibberish and nobody understand me. No, sir."

Then little by little his words returned and, in his own assessment: "I unnerstand everything I'm saying to yah right now and that all make sense. I can tell you how to get to your church. But you give me them same directions, an' I understand what you say but the moment you said them, I forgot them. That's why I need this here." And he pointed to paper and pen beside his telephone.

This poor old man looked at me through a lined face that had a big soft lump the size of a generous toadstool above one eye. "Started as a mole an' jus' got bigger. Got another one here, see?" and he showed me the side of his neck.

I said he was doing well for a man of his age. And I asked what that age was. I'd have said 87. "I'm 64," he said. And in the moment that I began thinking of polite words to cover my blunder - he was only five years older than me, after all - he came out with the meeting's second classic line.

"An' I lost my daddy to a bull."

You did?

"Yep, he were working on the same farm. A while back now, an' he was takin' a drink o' summat and this bull charged him an' he were dead on the spot.

"So I lost my daddy to a bull and my intelligence to the cows."

On the Blue Ridge mountains, etc

2006-05-18T18:28:00.000+02:00

I heard today that it's 31 degrees at home. It's not here. I can't tell you how different it is because everyone uses Fahrenheit here and I've forgotten what the numbers mean. But I can put it more graphically: at some time, I have been wearing every item of warm clothing that I have with the exception of my ear muffs. And twice I have slept fully clothed inside my sleeping bag.

I don't want to suggest it's freezing. But at times it's been only a handful of degrees above that, and wet with it, and when people tell me it's been a cold spring and that by rights we should all be in shorts and T-shirts, I both believe them and wait for news that it's going to change. Which it will, but not for a while yet.

I am in a town called Damascus, having ridden yesterday from Wytheville over two minor mountains that each topped 1,000 metres. The Appalachians are junior versions of the Pyrenees, or perhaps more like the Massif Central. But they are easier than both. If the hills are steep - and they can get to 15 per cent in stretches - then they are short. If they are long, as yesterday, they can be ridden on the middle ring, even with camping gear, with occasional if lengthy drops to the 30-ring.

For non-bikies who consider all this to be technical gibberish, I apologise.

Anyway, the Appalachians are a series of ridges with valleys between them. We have cleared two of them - the Blue Ridge a couple of days ago and Mount Rogers yesterday - and word has it that we're in for a tough time tomorrow before heading into the descending foothills that lead to Kentucky.

By then, we will have spent close on two weeks crossing Virginia, which is longer from west to east than from north to south. Or, if it isn't, it seems that way.

The countryside has turned more to farmland and forest and, while there is still some ribbon development along the lanes (although the houses are generously spaced), I am in the sort of rural surroundings that I know.

Something else that has changed is the prosperity. Closer to the coast, and especially south from Washington, the place had the air of the richest regions of Switzerland, as though everything had been mown and no two blades of grass left to the wrong length, that the houses had been freshly painted and the cars newly polished. And that done, all the people had gone inside and hidden so they wouldn't turn up in the pictures that their creations begged tourists to take.

Now, heading west, the houses are smaller, the farms scruffier, the vehicles more likely to be pick-ups than saloons. Now and then I have ridden past places with gardens full of thrown-out refrigerators and partly dissected cars. I am longing to find a place piled high with rusting junk and boasting one of the frequent calls for God to bless America.

Those who know the geography better say this is all preparation for Kentucky. We are about to ride into a land of marked poverty, where few olocals have left the county let alone the country, where culture goes no deeper than Jerry Springer and NASCAR racing. It'll be fascinating to see if it turns out to be true.

Another thing that has changed has been the number of American flags. For American friends, I should point out that flying the French flag outside your house would be considered extremely odd. To the point that you would become the talking point of the area. To fly the Union Jack in Britain would suggest you're one of those people who look daily through the papers to see if they've got India back. And to fly the English flag - the red cross on a white background - is such a symbol of white supremacy that most would feel happy doing it only during international soccer tournaments. And soccer is hardly a sport for lisping, bleeding-heart liberals with leather patches on their sleeves.

In America, on the other hand, flags are everywhere. In fact a woman that I met a few days back said she felt such social pressure to join the neighbours in flying one that "my husband and I had to talk it through, because we didn't want a flag but we were afraid our neighbours would think we weren't patriotic enough." Why do Americans feel such a need to stress their patriotism? It would be an interesting study for anyone who goes with the theory that there is something suspect about people who protest too loudly.

The most flags I've counted in a day is 127. That was on the 160km hike from Ashland to Williamsburg. I've been keeping a total since the ride started and I'd hoped the number would rise rapidly. But now we're further west, the flags have thinned out. Near Washington, they were averaging one for every 300 metres, which considering I often rode through rural areas was saying something. On the day to Williamsburg, the average was still close to one flag per kilometre. Now I am down to one flag every two kilometres.

The question is: will rural, red-neck Kentucky (as it's been portrayed to me) be more likely to fly the flag, or less?

I'll keep the count going and let you know.

Life in America (3)

2006-05-18T17:15:00.000+02:00

Charlie Hicks never thought of himself as a forgetful man. A little absent-minded, maybe. The sort who'd put something down and then forget where he'd put it. But who hasn't done that once in a while?

So, he told the judge, maybe he had a lapse of memory. How was he supposed to remember in the joy of the day he married his sixth wife that he was still actually married to his fifth?

If he was expected to remember that sort of thing, he'd never have gone on the Dr Phil television show. And then no interfering girlfriend's sister would have called the TV station and the police and started all that trouble for him.

Surely, Charlie thought, he should be regarded not as a creator of his own misfortunes but a victim of them.

The court tried to be as sympathetic. Hicks' lawyer did his best to persuade the judge that the bigamous marriage was just an oversight. What made his argument less convincing was that of Hicks' seven marriages, not just one but two were while he was married to someone else.

The prosecutor called Charlie a predator and two of the former Mrs Hickses said Charlie had left them deeply in debt and emotionally wounded.. Wife No 6 said Charlie had deceived her about everything including his age (which is now 62).

The serial Romeo can expect 10 years in jail.

Meeting the Cookie Lady

2006-05-18T16:59:00.001+02:00

There is a legend in America called the Cookie Lady. Thirty years ago, when thousands of cyclists followed this route for the first time to mark the bicentennial of the United States, she was outside her house in Afton, Virginia, in time to be asked for water.

"I asked this fellow where he was going and he said Oregon. I thought that was just a dumb answer to a dumb question. But then others all said the same thing, including one young man who was in a really terrible condition", is the way that Cookie Lady remembers events.

She took him into her house, near the top of a steep hill that leads to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and gave him not just water but cookies, the only food she could offer. In time, tales of her hospitality spread through the thousands riding and more and more stopped to see her over the years. She became a legend. So much that she has had to move out of her house.

Why?

Because it is full of the souvenirs, letters, post cards, newspaper cuttings and gifts that cyclists have sent from all over the world. She started by pinning them to the wall of one room, then filled that room, moved on to the next, then filled a third. The whole downstairs is a shrine to the cyclists who have met or perhaps simply heard of her.

She is 85 now, June Curry, and white-haired and a little frail. But with a helper she still cooks meals for anyone who passes and offers her house and her garden for them to stay in. No price asked. And the more she does it, the more they send their thanks and the more her house fills up. There's no room left on the walls and so the messages are added to boxes and files and general heaps. They are everywhere.

Some just pass and sign their names. They come from all over the world. Some leave cards or messages for others. One said: "To the group following us, please hurry up and catch us because my riding partner is boring the hell out of me and I'm willing to trade."

June Curry told me: "Cyclists are my family. That first ride came at a difficult time when I was losing my mother and soon after that I lost my husband. Now I know all these cyclists from all over the world and many have told me their life stories and some, believe me, have had a really hard time. I've had cyclists coming through here who have recovered from a life of crime or from addiction to drugs, and I know it's cycling that's done that for them. I don't always remember the names of everyone who comes back another time but it's rare that I forget a face."

The legend of the Cookie Lady extends beyond cycling. That next night we stayed at a simple, rural camp site run by a bearded man called Ronny, who also farmed 300 acres with only 18 cows to put in them.

"I charge cyclists who camp here," he said, "but I don't keep any of that money. I give it all to the Cookie Lady because I know she doesn't have a whole lot of money. I never bin a cyclist but I admire what she's doing."

Life in America (2)

2006-05-18T16:52:00.000+02:00

In the hills of the Appalachians is a little town called Wytheville. It was on the morning we left there that I knew I was in for a jour sans. Coffee and sticky cakes were the only answer, and as quickly as possible.

I found them in what I have learned to call a gas station, where I shared a table with old boys talking of times passed. The story was of a mayor who, all his life, had waved at everyone he saw. He spotted a half-recognised face, he waved. He saw a stranger, he waved. A friend... he waved. He became the Waving Man.

When he died a few years back, the police turned out to line the path into the cemetery at his burial. Normally, said one of the old boys, "them police, they'da snapped t'attention as the coffin passed, an' maybe they'da saluted. But this time, they all came t'attention and when that coffin passed, they all lift their hats an' they jus' waved and waved."

Farewell to the Waving Man, and would that there were more of them.

Darn it, I ain't ever seen a train crash!

2006-05-15T21:18:00.000+02:00

At the foot of the first ridge of the Appalachians is the improbably named village of Vesuvius. It's not use telling Americans that Vesuvius ought to be the top of the mountain and that the mountain ought to be a volcano because, frankly, they wouldn't listen. So we'll have to accept simply that it's called Vesuvius, otherwise I shall never get on with the story.

Across the top of the Appalachians is the Blue Ridge Parkway, the old Indian road that Laurel and Hardy were singing about when they were on the trail of the lonesome pine. Vesuvius is at the bottom of the fast, snaking drop that we took to get down to a sensible height.

At the foot of the drop is a level crossing and on the level crossing was a freight train. Beyond that train, but not overlapping the road, was a second train. And neither showed any sign of moving. We discussed it, a little group of Hell's Angels and I, then other people joined in and we were quite a little happy if puzzled band which only eventually decided to send someone down the tracks to see what had happened. And the news the messenger brought back was that the train had a saloon car pinned to its buffers.

This was going to be not only a gruesome wait but a lengthy one and I turned back up the village and waited on the grass outside a church until the others arrived. And since it was sunny, I lay first on my back and then, because otherwise it is hard for cyclists to get the backs of their legs brown, on my stomach.

Clearly it is not every day that religious leaders look out of their windows to see a brightly coloured, Lycra-clad cyclist spreadeagled on the lawn and so out came a fresh-faced man in glasses to see if I was still alive.

I assured him I was, apologised for making an exhibition of myself in his garden, and explained that I was awaiting the outcome of a train crash.

"A train crash?" he said with almost indecent enthusiasm. "You kidding?"

I said I wasn't, that the train had hit a car rather than another train, but that it had been a train and it had been in a crash and so "train crash" didn't seem to be stretching terms too much.

"Well, darn it!" he said, almost resentfully. "Twenny-seven years ah lived here an' I ain't never seen a train crash. Gotta go an' see that." And he got in his bright red car and drove down to add to the confusion at the level crossing.

When I rode down there myself, it was in time to meet a rural traffic cop sent to see what help he could give the local sheriff. The help didn't amount to an awful lot and so he and I spent most of the next hour just chatting, outside an abandoned store with faded advertisements for Coca-Cola still on its woodwork. Together we marvelled as the car was towed back up the road in front of us, barely damaged.

"Well, shoot!" the policeman said as his head turned to inspect just how little damage a car can sustain when pushed 500 metres down a railway line. "That's what I gonna ask for for my next patrol car, a good German car, a BMDubya. Iddy-biddy American car'd have fallen to bits, Ah reckon. Well, shoot!"

He told me the train driver had seen the car driver and his wife approach the crossing, that the car driver had looked to the right and seen a stationary train and seen no reason to stop for it. What he hadn't seen, as he zig-zagged through the half-barriers, was the second train coming from the left. It hit him at 15mph and the enormous load of iron rods that it carried had taken 500 metres to bring to a halt.

"Seems there's a reggalation says trains have to slow down to 15mph when they cross," the policeman said. "Otherwise he'd have bin goin' at 45 mahles an hour. That's what saved the driver, I reckon. Bet he's not gonna do that again." And then, as an afterthought: "Bet he ain't heard the last from his wife, either."

I never did get my policeman's name. He said he used to work on the drugs squad in Richmond, the nearest big town. "Far too hectic," he said.

He then applied to be a traffic cop in the quietest rural sector he knew of. "Perfect day for me, suh, thass a day when I don't do nuttin' at all."

At which, as if by deliberate irony, he got a call to drive out to the Interstate to attend a mobile home that had caught fire. I felt sorry for him. Another perfect day ruined.

A dip in the ocean

2006-05-11T16:42:00.000+02:00

We're at the foot of the first mountain range, the Appalachians. We could see them, or at any rate the foothills, as we rode through increasingly hillier countryside yesterday,towards Charlottesville. That's where I am now, having a rest day, a welcome one because the beginnings of fatigue are there.

You can't do a ride like this without dipping your wheels into the oceam. That's what we did, riding from Williamsburg to the smaller but equally attractive Yorktown, right by the sea. Well, I say it's equally attractive but some planner had a rush of blood and thought what the lovely white and wooden colonial houses needed to set them off was a whopping concrete bridge which skimmed their roofs before going over the river. Close your eyes to that, however, and it's lovely.

The Atlantic, of course, is familiar. Apart from six hours flying over it to get here, I have spent all my life close to it or one of its associated seas. The Pacific is unknown. I imagine it as warm and peopled by millionaires and swaying bronzed girls in grass skirts. That and strutting beach boys. But apparently the Pacific is colder than the Atlantic, which means another misperception squashed.

The first two days weren't special. The ride out of Williamsburg was down a single road lined by trees, which meant something close to tunnel vision all day. And on the second, it rained. It rained all day and it got colder and colder. We're sharing cooking duties and that night I was due to cook with a retired surgeon called Bob (joke: he would deal with the meat and I'd do the vegetables). I fact it got so miserable and there was such a lack of shelter for cooking that we sent out for takeaway pizzas. Hardly the spirit but a lot more practical.

Tomorrow, the first mountains. I gather the Appalachians are harder than the Rockies but shorter. I'm imagining something like the Pyrenees, although never beyond the tree line. We shall see. After that, we are into remoter, more pick-up-and-gas-station America. I will report back from there!

Getting sexier by the hour

2006-05-05T21:20:00.000+02:00

The other night, just north of Richmond, I stayed at a cheap motel. There was no breakfast in the morning and so I crossed the road, swallowed the guilt of cultural objection, and went into MacDonalds. And there I asked for a coffee.

"Senior coffee, sir?"

I didn't know what to say. You can't order anything to eat in America without being given a list of options as long as a stopping-train timetable. So I went for the direct question.

"What's that?"

"Well, sir," the woman said, "we're pleased to offer half-price caaahfee to all our guests over 55."

Oh, NO!

I covered my face in mock frustration and shame and knew I'd been rumbled.

"Sir," the woman said, worried I was some crazy case off the streets or perhaps just having a fit, "we're simply trying to save you folks some money."

I explained my shame. I told her I was no older than 35 and had been for a long time. Whatever she saw to the contrary, she was to ignore it. I'd be happy to spend the extra 55 cents and rescue my pride.

Maybe because she wasn't that young herself, she could see my point.

"Well, sir," she tried again, "how about's I call this a Hot Chick coffee and offer it to you at half price as well?"

The commotion attracted four Regular Old Boys at a round table. One, like an older version of Bill Clinton but with a short silver beard, said "Where you comin' from, my friend?" And when I told him where I was comin' from, he turned to his friends and said "Ah told you so"without going into what he'd told them.

We chatted and he waved one by one at the others.

"That there's Jim an' he was in the Korean war, so he's gotta be in his late seventies now. And this here is Bahb, an' Bahb used to be a Mountie, dincha Bahb?"

Bob, his expression making it clear it wasn't the first time he'd heard the claim, pointed out it wasn't so. He wasn't Canadian, he didn't have a broad-brimmed hat and he'd never ridden a haaahce. What he had once done was drive a police car.

Pappy Clinton said that he himself was 65, making him the youngest of the group, but that he still worked in retirement and treated MacDonald's as his office. "Folks know I get in here and that's how I git my work."

And what was that work?

"I'm a stump-grinder and that there's my truck right out back." He gestured through the window at the parked cars.

Unfortunately, stump-grinders don't occupy that great a length in the French Yellow Pages and my ignorance and his strong southern accent led me to believe he was a stunt-rider. I'd have been impressed in any circumstances but at 65 it seemed remarkable. Only later did I realise that a stump-grinder is a man you call to remove what's left of a felled tree.

When someone has an accent for you, of course, it means you must have an accent to him. That afternoon I stopped to buy a picnic lunch at one of those garage supermarkets that it is all Virginia has to offer as a village shop.

The woman behind the counter had a bright, lively personality and a face that, although tired, matched it perfectly. After asking where I was coming from, she said: "Hun, you just keep on talking like that. I could listen to that accent all day. That's just so sexy!"

In five hours, I had progressed from weary pensioner to Lycra superstud.

Church of the litter-day saints

2006-05-05T20:56:00.000+02:00

No nation is perfect. You travel to observe, to enjoy but rarely to criticise.

All the same, I've been disappointed by the amount of litter beside country lanes. It is a constant presence, at least something every pace of an everyday stride.

When I noticed it, I thought what I saw must be the result of a rubbish bag left for collection, a bag that a fox or a cat had opened and searched without thought for the feelings of those who would follow. But the more I looked, the more I knew that wasn't so. Because the litter beside the roads is exclusively drink cans, bottles and takeaway food wrappings. It is the evidence of years of drivers tucking in as they go, then throwing what they no longer need out of the window. And there it lies until it rots, which would take centuries, or until someone collects it, which looks like taking just as long.

By contrast, signs every so often warn that the penalty for litter is some colossal fine or three months in jail or both. The trouble is that nobody cares.

And something else I noticed, happier this time...

All along my route, I have been passing blue signs telling me my road has been sponsored. Sometimes it's by a company but more usually it's but some society or club like the American Veterans of Foreign Wars (one of whose branches I passed, leading me to wonder - the Civil War apart - what unforeign wars America had fought). But as often as not, the road is sponsored by "the McFadden family" or by "Jim and Tracy and Jim Jr".

What difference it makes, I don't know. Every metre seemed sponsored by somebody or other and there were no unsponsored stretches to show the consequences of civic indifference.

And still on signs, it seemsVirginia drivers can choose any number they wish for their car. Outside a post office, I found TEAAT4 parked next to CURVZ4U.

TEAAT4 told me she had picked up the habit of afternoon tea while living in England with her husband, who was an "an American facility" there. CURVZ4U said she owned a chain of fitness gyms called Curves and was benefitting from the free publicity. But best of all was that she was eight months pregnant and her tight white T-shirt made it clear she had CURZ4HER as well.

Into virgin territory

2006-05-05T20:23:00.000+02:00

It is always a disappointment to find your friends' knowledge of history doesn't match your own. Many, therefore, must have been those who raised eyebrows in despair at my ignorance of the American Civil War.

For not only did I not know that Virginia was in the South - it looks a long way north on the map - but I also hadn't a clue that Richmond, the largest city, was the Confederate capital. Again, it is a long way north and, on a map, surprisingly close to Washington. Things even got to the state where oldGeorge could look out of his windows and see Confederate flags on the other side of the Potomac river.

In those days, Washington to Richmond was a long way on a horse. And it feels the same on a bike. After three days of 130, 90 and 160km, I have now reached Chesapeake Bay, even futher south geographically and still further historically, because it was here that the British founded the first colonial settlements and eventually ran off with Pocahontas. Indeed, outside in the streets of Williamsburg, the era is gracefully recreated with reconstructed old buildings and guides wearing flowing skirts and large ribboned bonnets. It may not be the real thing but it's a long way from Disney.

Virginia is an unusual place. After escaping the grip of Washington airport, I have been riding as much as I can on country back roads. And they are lovely... except that they are rarely in the country. Instead, they are more like those lanes in Surrey in England where trees and wild flowers beside the road give a first impression of rural peace but where the reality of posh houses and their burglar alarms and ostentatiously parked big cars are just behind.

There are no hedges or gardens in Virginia because that is not American taste. Houses in the open are planted in the middle of flowerless gardens large enough to be fields. They stand there naked, like houses that have dropped off a Monopoly board. Those behind trees betray their presence by roadside letter boxes shaped like cottage loaves and mounted on poles. The posher the house - and there is a strong leaning to the Gone With The Wind style - the more Anglo-Saxon the names on the mail box. People are called Elliott and Smith and Williams. Not once did I see a Grodzinski or a Bungelberg.

And so it has been almost all the way here, neither countryside nor suburbia. Just urbia. With posh names and impossibly long street numbers.

There's something else, too, that gives a feeling of never quite being anywhere. Unlike in Europe, where even the smallest country crossroads is likely to offer a range of destinations, in Virginia there are no signposts at all. Not to anywhere.

Well, to be fair, there are signs when you cross a big national highway, but anywhere else you navigate by street names and road numbers. You "take a left on Pool Road, then a right on County Line Street", and so on.

And villages don't exist in the way that Europeans know them. The density of housing may be briefly higher, or there could be a sparkling white church with a message from Jesus posted in detachable plastic characters, but that is it. No sign to tell you where you are, none to explain where you've been, nothing to say where you're headed.

The people, however, cannot be faulted. Their friendliness is beyond belief. Any roadside stop of longer than nose-scratching length has brought the inquiry "Sir, may I be of help?"

It has been hot here - I can't say for sure how hot because they use Fahrenheit - and on the first afternoon I sat and soon lay on grass beneath a tree. My eyes closed, I heard footsteps. A large and elderly black woman who walked like a sailor in a storm waved and smiled (even though I was, in fact, trespassing on the unfenced edge of her garden).

"Sir," she said, "I saw you lyin' there an' I reckon as you could do with a pitcher of cold water."

And that's what she held out for me. As she urged me to 'be sure you have a good day, OK?", she turned and hesitated. Looking back, she gestured into the distance and called: "I live just over there apiece. Anything you need, now, you jus' be sure to come right over and say."

Life in America (1)

2006-04-29T08:22:00.000+02:00

If you want a picture of a country, buy the local paper. But look not at distant wars or preening politicians but the small stuff down by the tractor sales and changes of ownership at the lawnmower shop. That’s where a country bares its soul.

I’d been looking forward to that when a friend called Peter Nye beat me to it. He has just returned from Whalan, in Minnesota.

"The sign on the road informs motorists that the population is 64," he said. "Whalan’s on a meandering bank of the Root River, in a picturesque valley. On weekends the population surges past 100 residents, many fishing for trout. Since Whalan’s too small to hold a holiday parade, they celebrate with a Standstill Parade. Musicians and people on floats, including Miss Minnesota, are stationary and wave to spectators who visit and walk around the parade."

It’s on the third Saturday of each May. It also turns out that the town has 63 residents - according to a web site about the Root River Trail, anyway - which shows the dubious value of giving precise population figures on signposts. Not without using stick-on numbers, anyway.

All this reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s lovely story from Lake Wobegon, "where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and all the children are above average."

Lake Wobegon may be fictional but the radio series that spawned it, the Prairie Home Companion, began in Minnesota in the very real town of St Paul. There, Keillor told of stolid and bickering residents who did their best to make their lives more interesting while being burdened by war between what the humorist Frank Muir summed up as "the strict, low church of the Protestants - the young author and his family belonged to a particularly bleak sect called the Brethren - and the much jollier and more colourful religion of the Catholics."

The division went deep.

"In Lake Wobegon," Keillor intoned, "car ownership is a matter of faith. Lutherans drive Fords, bought from Bunsen Motors, the Lutheran car dealer, and Catholics drive Chevies from Main Garage, owned by the Kreugers… Pastor Tommerdahl knew for a fact that the Kreugers spent a share of their Chevy profits to purchase Asian babies and make them Catholics."

To bring joy to this argumentative community, someone decided to create a Living Flag. Everybody would be given a red, white or blue cap and be organised so that, from above, they would look like the Stars and Stripes. The essential words, however, were "from above" and those who were under rather than over the caps could see nothing of the marvel they had created.

Solving this conundrum wasn’t easy. When someone suggested a mirror above the assembly, all that happened was that everyone looked up at the same time and saw nothing but their faces looking back down at them. Instead, they had to take it in turn to run up the stairs of a neighbouring building, look down and then hurry back to the ranks and let the next man run up.

All this, naturally, took time and even the most stolid Lutherans grew cross. The day was not rated a success.

Well, you may think life never gets that good. Except that the story is true. The idea, anyway. In 1917 thousands of American soldiers were lined up on a sports field to form the Liberty Bell. And that done - as photographs show - other crowds created the American flag, the Statue of Liberty and even the face of the president, Warren G. Harding.

I do hope it happens again. I shall be reading the local papers of America with enthusiastic attention.

Le coin-coin du coin

2006-04-26T17:02:00.000+02:00

Life is not blessed for cyclists. I mean, it is from the point of view of the cyclist - he thinks looking like a cyclist is the most desirable thing in the world - but society finds cyclists odd.

But then you would, wouldn’t you? Who other than a fetishist would spend all day in Lycra? Who would cover himself in advertising for faraway companies of which he knows little? Who would suffer a tan that, brown to mid-arm and mid-leg, makes you look as though you’ve crawled through brown paint?

Who would think it normal to have that bulge in his shorts (most of it padding, I’m afraid) that my mother could bring herself to say only that it was "cheeky"?

And who else would walk like a duck?

That’s what cyclists do, walk like a duck. Their stiff-soled shoes have no heel but a great wedge of plastic beneath the sole that clicks on the pedals. For cycling, they are perfect: you glide like a duck through water. For walking, they are disastrous: you become a duck that walks.

Bernard Menou knows about that. Bernard doesn’t sell cycling shoes but he does sell shoes, from shops in the Pyrenean town of Jurançon. Except that he’s not selling them right now because, a handful of days ahead of me, he too is crossing America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Bernard and I have met only once but we have become friends through e-mail. And a curious thing has happened: between us we have acquired a pond of fellow ducks. None has met all the others and I am the only one to have corresponded with the rest. Nevertheless, we shall meet and spend several days together.

Now, you’ll have to follow this carefully.

I have a friend in Seattle called Rick, who edited a book I wrote decades ago for American cyclists. By chance, also in Seattle, I have a friend called Mark. I have never met Mark but we have been writing since he asked a question on the internet about French trains. Mark is a cyclist and he has ridden a lot of the Transamerica Trail. When Bernard needed information, it was Mark’s e-mail address that I gave him. They have been in touch ever since.

Rick doesn’t know Mark but Mark knows where Rick lives and Rick used to pass Mark’s house on the way to sessions as an Irish fiddler.

Neither Rick nor Mark nor Bernard, know Bill.

Bill is Californian. I haven’t met him either but, again, we’ve been in e-mail touch about cycling and the world and its problems. Clearly, my insights thrilled him because he is flying from California to join the rest of us in Seattle.

Bill knows a man called Jim who runs a bike shop in Tacoma, in southern Seattle. I will stay with Jim before going on to stay with Rick. I will be giving a talk at his shop. I don’t know whether Jim will join the rest of us - Mark’s wife Lindi, Bill’s wife Carol and Bernard’s wife Hélène will all also be there - but it’s going to be a crowd if he does.

One reason Bill and I get on is that we both like trains. So when I leave Seattle on the train for Chicago, Bill and Carol will come part of the way. They don’t know where to yet but that doesn’t matter. Not to a cyclist.

When you walk like a duck, dress like a fetishist and have a tan like an army tank, getting halfway across America with no clear plan what to do next is nothing.

(Le coin-coin du coin: the neighbourhood quack-quack)

We name the guilty men

2006-04-05T10:07:00.000+02:00

WE NAME THE GUILTY MEN! And underneath, in the Sunday newspapers of my youth, would be photos of people I had never heard of, still less met, who had fallen foul of the editor’s moral rectitude.

And so it is that I look at my own unknowns, convicts of the road, members of the chain gang. Seven Americans, an Australian, a Dutchman, a Canadian, a Belgian and another Brit, although this time from London.

They have the random oddness of those lost at sea. Who and what are Nigel Backwith, Oris V. Barber (American; no European would use his middle initial), Wil Friesen (why no second L?), Tim Hewitt, Richard McCluskey, James Meyer, Toni Romp-Friesen, Helen Sandilands, E. Van Schoonveld (just an initial) and Jacques van der Eecken?

Had it not been that both have an address which starts "konacoffee@..." I wouldn’t have spotted that Wil Friesen and Toni Romp-Friesen were a couple. I have three months to find out why "konacoffee".

Something I got with the names was the maps. Adventure Cycling has wonderful maps that are, literally, a line. Each section is the shape and size of a hand, held horizontally, and you ride from one edge to the other before moving to the next map. Each town or village is shown with its potential for bike shops, cake shops, camp sites, libraries and what Americans coyly call "rest rooms".

Americans have such trouble with lavatories. Other nations may complain about squatting over an open hole, à la Turque, but Americans have trouble even with the name.

They can’t say "lavatory" and they don’t even like "toilet". They pile euphemism on euphemism and prefer "bathroom". When an American asks for your bathroom, he is astonished to be led to a room with a tub. Some go still further and describe their petits coins as "rest rooms". That is how they are marked on my maps, something possible only of a nation that has never known à la Turque.

Here in France, you get off your bike and pee where you wish, with or without discretion. To get to the women’s lavatory, you pass men pissing into urinals. French women know what men look like when they’re having a pee and it doesn’t bring the nation to revolution.

In America, these things are differently ordered. "Rest rooms" are indicated from sea to shining sea because, I suppose, Americans can’t bring themselves to widdle en plein air. Which reminds me how a French magazine recounted the experience of a group riding what remains of Route 66.

Overwhelmed by the water they were drinking in the desert, they let rip with only the silent dusty mountains to see them. Except that along came the only police car within a thousand kilometres. The boredom of the endless sands must have been no less for the policemen and they rushed from their car and wondered how to arrest a dozen Frenchmen convincingly. Convincingly in the sense that a dozen Frenchmen are a lot to get into a single patrol car.

"Happily", the magazine reported as it sniggered at the prudery of American policemen, "there was an Englishman in the group who, speaking his own language, could explain that such things were not considered a major crime in France, that the culprits apologised and that they promised never to do it again."

At which, the custodians of public safety turned their bellies back to their cars and went off to fight crime elsewhere.

Anyway, no doubt all this will be useful, and I am grateful. Less useful, perhaps, will be the maps of Kansas which, so far as I can see, are just a succession of single straight roads. Now and then there are slight bends but usually they are ruler-straight. On Map 7, twelve successive panels say simply "straight on". Just as well. There isn’t anywhere else to go anyway. Kansas is like that.

United we, er, sort of stand

2006-03-21T07:21:00.000+01:00

Isn’t travel mind-broadening?

Take those TV screens in airport departure lounges, for instance. As you watch the "delayed" signs slide up and down, do you ever wonder why so many people where you are feel they’d be better off somewhere else? And are there people at that very moment watching TV screens in Riga or Plovdiv or Quezon City and hoping for speedy news on getting to you?

And will they be equally disappointed when they get there?

All this is prompted by my discovery that I have been booked out of Toulouse on United Airlines. This will surprise you if you know that United Airlines doesn’t fly to Toulouse. Or from it.

When I got my ticket, it said I was travelling United but I’d actually be flying Lufthansa. To be exact, from Toulouse to Munich, then on to Washington, followed by the return from Chicago to Munich and Toulouse. All on Lufthansa. Not a United flight in sight.

Well, I want to take a bike. Airlines have different rules and so it seemed best to phone the airline I was going with and which would actually be at the airport. I phoned Lufthansa.

Lufthansa is German but when you phone Lufthansa in France, a recorded announcement asks you to choose between speaking French or English. Not German. Well, no problem: I don’t speak German anyway and I was getting tired and irritable so I pressed the button for English rather than French. When it was answered, it was in French. I began to wish I was German, just to be a nuisance.

The Lufthansa lady was helpful but hindered by my not being on her list of passengers. Yes, she agreed, I’d be flying Lufthansa but really I was flying United, because my ticket said so, so Lufthansa wouldn’t know about me.

She gave me United’s number and I called next morning. It was Saturday. United gave me the choice of English or French and again I chose English. Instantly, an immensely enthusiastic American thanked me for calling United, assured me my call was important to United, that United was one of the world’s largest airlines… but that it was shut for the weekend. Then he started again: "Thank you for calling United…"

On Monday I tried again. This time I got a pleasant woman happy to do what she could. She even found me on her list. I asked where she was. From her accent I’d have said a United glass-and-aluminium shed somewhere in America. She said she was in India.

So, if you ring United in France, you’re told it’s closed for the weekend. But India presumably doesn’t take calls only from France, dutifully taking off French national holidays and weekends like the rest of us. It must be the world reservations centre.

Not only do I bet that doesn’t close at weekends but… think about it. If you call India first thing from Europe, it’s already midday in India. But it’s still yesterday evening in America. So if, from America, you called United’s French number on Friday, you’d be told it was Saturday and therefore they weren’t there. If you called from Australia on Monday, it would be Sunday in France and still it wouldn’t be open.

But phone the French office on Sunday evening from America and it would still be closed (early morning in France, you see), even though it’s Monday morning in India, where they actually answer the phones. Yet odder still is that, clearly, United doesn’t have a reservations centre in France. It’s in India. If it wasn’t in India, you wouldn’t be put through there, would you? So how can something that doesn’t exist tell you it’s not open? And in a choice of languages, what's more.

Well, I have been booked on an airline that doesn’t fly from Toulouse by an office that doesn’t exist in France, on an aircraft that will be operated by Germans who don’t speak German and know nothing about me anyway.

At least the lady in India said the bike would be OK. I just hope it’s not the weekend when I call to say there’s a problem…

Nathaniel in the lion's den

2006-03-09T18:49:00.000+01:00

Going back to the visa business, the man I felt sorry for was my Jamaican neighbour. Intellectually, he'd agree, he was no god. But as a man who wants nothing but a living for his wife and kid and to do a good job for the money, I don't think he could have been bettered.

The odd thing, as we agreed (although I don't think he had worked out the philosophy), was that if he'd waited another year and taken the UK nationality that was his virtually by right through being married to a British citizen, he wouldn't have needed a visa at all. He could have gone for 90 days like any other EU citizen.

And yet, what would be the difference between Nathaniel today and Nathaniel in a year's time? He would be the same man who walked the same way to work and slept on the same side of the bed and still had the same colour front door. The only difference would be that he had British nationality.

But what makes it all the dafter is that he would still, of course, have his Jamaican nationality as well. So, as the same man with the same plans, America would turn him down as a Jamaican but welcome him as British.

It just shows how ridiculous is the whole issue of nationality, borders and passports, doesn't it? Plus the insanity of making it hard for honest people to get in while dishonest ones would just forge documents anyway.

The twist is even more ridiculous, however. From now on, Nathaniel will have to answer on his US visa application that he has previously been turned down. But only if he wants to be Jamaican that day. If he is British, he won't have to answer the question because he doesn't have to fill in the form.

But even if he goes to America as a Brit, a check at the frontier will show he was once turned down... as a Jamaican. Even though that day he is a Brit, he could be expelled because a year earlier he'd been Jamaican.

Have you ever noticed how odd the world can be?

How to make frogs hop

2006-03-08T07:52:00.000+01:00

I don’t suppose you’ve been lying awake worrying about this passport business, but I've found out more.

You’ll remember the American embassy was so swamped by visa applicants that the first interview wasn’t for months. I said it was because many French people had old-fashioned passports that couldn’t be read by machine and that America insisted their holders have visas they didn’t previously need.

That turns out only partly true because it is in fact - and it’s never unenjoyable to see officialdom on the hook - due to a government cock-up in Paris.

The newest form of passport has not just those computer numbers on the photo page but something described as a "digitalised" picture and a microchip. The picture makes you look as startled as usual but the chip contains information that only a computer can read. And since only a computer can read it, you can’t change it and go about claiming you’re the Duke of Edinburgh when you’re not.

It seems the world agreed to these new passports, perhaps at America’s urging, and that France said "oui" along with the others (making allowance that - pedants kindly note - the Germans would have said "ja", and so on).

And that’s where the cock-up started.

The government wants to contract to whoever most impresses with prices and quality. And it gave the job to a private company. All went well until the state printing works displayed a contract which said it was they who printed passports and not some outfit down the road with a John Bull printing set.

By then the ink was drying on the other people’s contract as well. The job had been given to two people. Something Had To Be Done.

That’s what the Americans thought as well. They waved France's agreement to have the printing presses running by now. And they announced that any passport issued after the deadline for new passports - the thousands issued in the old style when they should have been in the new style - wouldn’t be recognised: their holders would have to wait months for an appointment and go to Paris for an interview and, with luck, a visa.

It became a scandal in France and created friction between Paris and Washington when things had only just settled down after Iraq. Now, the interior minister has told the state printers to get going and says he'll sort out the consequences. Everyone who needs one will have a new passport within five weeks.

That’s no consolation for people who’ve had to abandon their trip or wait months for a visa, but at least the waiting date at the embassy has stabilised at mid-June.

Le jour de gloire est arrivé.

Why there are no American saints

2006-03-07T07:23:00.000+01:00

I ought to start this at the end and work backwards. So, here's the answer:

I got the visa.

I see now why there are no American saints, however. They wouldn't have the patience. When America says you have an appointment for 10:30, the nation is good enough (no irony intended) to add that it may be four hours before you walk back out of the embassy. It is equally good to say not to arrive more than 30 minutes early because space in the building is limited and waiting room with it.

What happens in fact is that you arrive at 10 for 10:30 and you find two lines of other people, one the length of the wide front of the building and the other half that length. Both snake round the corner. Nothing moves. The spirit is resigned and frustrated. These are people who have waited a long time for an appointment, perhaps travelled many hours. In short, once on the pavement between the rows of security fencing, they have no further choice. And so they - we, I - wait. And wait.

London in early March is cold. Yesterday was below freezing, with a harsh wind. Today we are luckier: nothing freezes in the chemical sense but it is still cold. There is no chance to walk about and keep warm. There is nowhere to shelter, no warm drinks, nowhere to sit. We console ourselves that it isn't raining because few people would have thought to bring industrial weatherproofs.

And so we stand, outside in the cold, for two and a quarter hours. In that time we move 50 metres, watched by policemen carrying what I'd call sub-machine guns. It amuses us that of all the people in London having a worse time than us, they are head of a very short list. They have nothing to do. They can walk a few paces, it's true, but otherwise their job is to wait for a riot, an attack, that doesn't happen.

You look around in these circumstances. You notice that the Polish embassy on another side of Grosvenor Square is smaller than the buildings on each side, as though invaders have nibbled a bit off that over the centuries just as they have taken lumps out of the homeland. We can't quite see the Italian embassy but that looks as quiet as Poland's.

What we really notice, though, is a snapshot of the world situation. Grosvenor Square is just that, a big London square of wonderful houses built by Lord Grosvenor on the edge of the city. There is a park in the middle with a war memorial and some trees and worn grass and a giant statue of Franklin Roosevelt with a pigeon on his head.

The American embassy occupies all one side. The parallel road holds the Canadian embassy, with its Italian neighbours. The Canadians have an older building than the Americans but not that much smaller. But that's where the similarities end.

Look out the American embassy and you see first the bomb-proof windows, then the narrow roadway round the building. Then comes a row of concrete tank-blocks well disguised as something less threatening, and beyond them a low wall of heavy concrete blocks lowered in place by the contracting company whose phone number still appears on the side.

Then comes a metal fence with at its foot, a further, shallower fence constructed in box form by what, if they were to restrict sheep, you'd call hurdles. The public pavement is on the other side of that and that's where you stand to wait. But to call it "public" overstates the case because the road past the embassy has long been closed to traffic. It is blocked off, as are other nearby streets, by continuous concrete barriers. A further metal fence runs much of their length.

The once glorious front of the embassy, surmounted by its spectacular golden eagle, looks long abandoned. The only person who stands now on the steps leading to the land of the free and the home of the brave is a policeman wearing a flak jacket and carrying a machine gun. He looks out over the rows of security fencing at colleagues also carrying machine guns but free, at least, to send each other for coffee now and then.

And why all this?

Because on the Canadian side, there is nothing at all. Canada doesn't even post a man on the door. You want to walk into Canada (the embassy is foreign soil, after all), you just push the door and stroll in.

There's not much more to this story because it doesn't take long to describe hours of waiting. A bit after noon, we get into the embassy for our 10:30am appointment. It's warm, we're dealt with pleasantly if neutrally, there are chairs and coffee and we sit, hundreds of us, watching giant TV screens which tell us who's due to go to which interview window. It's like playing bingo, in that same all-engrossing, mind-numbing way, and almost welcome because there's nothing else to do and because the numbers come up at close to random. You're straight in for a few moments of checking and taking the documents that you've brought, and then you sit and listen to the numbers for another two hours, exchanging war stories with neighbours.

I'm next to a Jamaican guy in his late 20s. His wife is British and he and their daughter want to visit America for a week to see their relatives. We get on well and he tells me that he works on building sites, paid by the day as a fixer. There's a formal word but that's what he is: he fixes jammed locks, squeaking doors, windows that won't quite close, that sort of thing.

Nathaniel, his name is. He needs a visa for a week's visit because he's Jamaican. He's entitled to British nationality, thanks to his wife, but only after three years' marriage. Those three years aren't yet quite up, so he needs a visa while his wife doesn't.

I make encouraging sounds but I have doubts. Knowing the immigration officers are more concerned about illegal immigrants than terrorists, I suspect they'll see Nathaniel as a prime target. Yes, he has a home in Britain, but he's not a British national. Yes, he has regular work, but by the day and with no commitments on either side. The sort of guy who'd be welcome on any building site... including an American one.

Worse, though he hasn't realised it, he has said he wants to visit relatives. Saying you have relatives in America is clearly, from the questions on the form, not necessarily a Good Thing.

Nathaniel goes in ahead of me, even though he has a higher number. Moments later he is back, to shake my hand and say goodbye. We have become friends. He smiles, he takes my hand and says "No luck, I'm afraid" and just as I start to sympathise, he turns and walks off. I've no idea whether he had the motives that the interviewer suspected but he is too upset to talk. Just asking for a visa has cost him a day's wages. Waiting for it has cost him another. Nathaniel isn't the kind of man to afford that easily.

When my own time comes, it's obvious that I'm in. A little, pregnant woman in glasses tells me by the smile on her face. It's the one smile I've had all day, other than Nathaniel's smile of bitterness. Moments later I'm back out on the street, four and a half hours after I first got there.

The twist to this is that America has kept my passport, to sort out the right stamps and send it on to me. Which means I had no passport to get back to France. Well, Toulouse was going through a security exercise when I got there and a male and a female soldier were standing in front of the border desk, each in battle dress and carrying the sort of gun the London policemen had had. And with that same bored expression.

I told the border policeman that I had been to London and that the Americans had kept my pasport. I offered him other identity instead.

"Tell me again," he said, mystified. "Where's your passport?"

"The Americans have kept it at the embassy", I say.

He hesitates, makes a "pfff" noise, the problems with passports being well known to people who make their living from them. He says nothing but pushes his eyebrows suddenly up and makes a sharp backwards nod.

It didn't need words. The gesture said it all.

"Americans, hein?"

Waiting, just waiting

2006-03-03T16:51:00.000+01:00

This wasn't the original idea. The original was to ride across Europe, a shorter trip but more than one country: from the French Atlantic to the Black Sea of Romania. From there, there was the option of continuing by road through Bulgaria to the gates of Asia in Istanbul, or to make the same trip by ferry from Romania and ride back to Bucarest for the train to Paris.

It was a ride I'd planned for more than a year, since meeting a Romanian girl at evening classes in England. Before then, I'd known little of the country and couldn't have found it on a map. But as time got nearer, it became obvious Steph perhaps wouldn't be fit enough to do it.

So why America instead? Because by chance I readthat the magazine of the American organisation, Adventure Cycling, was a good read. I joined for the magazine. When it arrived - and it was a good read if poke-in-the-eye American at times - it came with a brochure of organised tours. I looked, I dreamed... and I said nothing.

A day later, Steph asked which ride I wanted to do.

"Right across America doesn't appeal, I suppose?", I said pathetically. And it didn't. But that wasn't going to stop her enthusiasm and I was ordered to enrol straight away.

So far, so easy.

The problems came with the visa. Going to the USA for fewer than 90 days doesn't need one. More than 90 days does. And while this ride could be accomplished in fewer, the timetable was 93 days. With time at either end, that would be 120.

In the Good Old Days, a longer visa meant little more than a form and a cheque. No more. Now it means an interview at an embassy, finger-printing and a five-day wait. Worse, because the US now insists people need visas even for fewer than 90 days if they have passports that can't be read by machine - and a lot of people in France have those - the Paris embassy's first date was mid-May. That was in February and the trip started at the end of April. A couple of weeks later, the delay had jumped to mid-June. It is probably now Christmas 2007.

London, fortunately, was less chaotic and, writing this on March 3, it's where I plan to fly on Sunday for an interview the next morning.

And it's not about terrorism, by the way. It's about illegal immigration. All interviews will be on the assumption that you will become an illegal immigrant, the embassy warns.

But... if you wanted to stay in America against the law, would you:

1. Say you were going for less than 90 days and save the expense of a visa and an interview?

or:

2. Offer to pay £62, travel 2,000km for an interview and have your picture and fingerprints put on file?