Road trip San Francisco to Madison

So this is the road trip, nine days, 2,551 miles , 45 hours driving, and eight motels across most of the width of North America. Through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, and finally Wisconsin.

I’d recommend it! It’s such a different way of experiencing life and space. By day amazing landscapes that are amazing partly because

they are so vast in scale with hardly a dozen vehicles an hour. Overnight knowing there’ll be a comfortable room and a lottery of a breakfast. Sights on the way that are sometimes glorious, sometimes very weird.

Hours and hours of driving in the same vast landscape is the thing. It’s not boring because it is changing in subtle ways, it’s like travelling slowly through a painting. I’ll let the pictures do the talking, and mention just a few highlights.

Thunder Mountain historic monument is in Nevada, 100 yards from the Interstate highway but nothing else in sight across a flat scrub plain with hills in the distance. It was a family house, out-buildings, walls, and decoration, created in a grand Gaudi-like vision over a decade in the 1960s and 1970s, but using junk . It’s a statement about the waste of white man's society from the perspective of an

artist-architect of Native American background, who took the name Thunder Mountain. One of his sons owns it now and got the State of Nevada to declare it a protected site.

Not one but two highlights in little-known Elko Nevada. The Hotel Star is one of several Basque restaurants – maybe from 19th century miner immigration. It gives families and parties and travellers a tureen of soup followed by vegetables with choice of meat, fish, or other main. And bread and butter pudding. A delicious change from burger, tacos or pizza.

And the Western Folk Life Centre, also in Elko, a museum to cowboy culture. We’re not at the right time for their annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering that features music and song but poetry is the headline. It’s in winter when there is less to do on the farm. The museum has beautifully intricate leather and metal tools of the cattle trade, saddles, spurs, bridles, reins and the like. The poetry is down to earth rhythmic rhyming, about half by women which tend to be more interesting and challenging.

Under an overpass for one night only in Salt Lake City in Utah, our night, we watched a performance of women aerialists from the local college. Not anywhere near Becky’s Skinning The Cat standards but great to be there.

A Sunday flea-market in Big Cottonwood Canyon an hour outside Salt

Lake City where I picked up a furry jacket, and Merle some jewellery. We walked I and had my first Dirty Chai: chai tea with a shot of coffee.

In passing, Lamoille Canyon Nevada; a Whale in a roundabout in Salt Lake City Utah; the Whisk building in Casper Wyoming.

Custer State Park in South Dakota has herds of bison like nowhere else, along with elk and wild donkeys and more, in lush green hills that contrasted with the dry before and after it. On the same day, the Badlands, a geological wonder of volcanic mud hills and crags that nothing grows on (because any water sinks through the soft rock?). ‘Badlands’ because it’s hard to survive in them. There was a petrol station at Interior, and the painting on a horse outside is as close as we got to the Mount Rushmore presidential sculptures.

Wall Drug in the town of Wall in South Dakota, is a family store that grew into a whole block of tourist shopping, penny-in-the-slot machines, museum rooms, recreations of old-town scenes, a piano-playing ape, 12-foot jackalope, and an animated dinosaur. It’s become a thing to put up billboards to Wall Drug. Half the billboards in the twenty miles approach and in the town are to the store. And there are billboards across the United States and in other countries as a homage to the store. It is fun and must employ a lot of Wall.

We did a detour north having phoned the Sitting Bull College visitor centre to check they were open, but found it closed after all. Then went further north on a tipoff for the Museum at Bismarck in North Dakota, but it’s nothing to write home about. We would learned a lot if the Native American Voices tour that I’d put out names down for, had not been cancelled because of some kind of scheduling problems. It's a tour guided by Native Americans, of current social movements. Next

time if I'm allowed back in.

And on the final morning, the Spam Museum, one of Yosemite guide Chris’s suggestions. A lot like Wall Drug, it has to be seen to be believed, and you leave reeling wondering at the variety of entertainment in this world. It’s a promotion for Hormel Foods Corp, proudly announcing their latest acquisition, of Hunters peanuts. But the museum is strictly Spam. It has production games, WWII history (Khrushchev's autobiography praised the US entering WWII and delivering spam to help keep the Red Army going), excerpts from Monty Python sketches, masses of information about the 15 flavours, and samples every half hour. Outside is a cartoon of a Spam tin saying ‘Why doesn’t anyone answer my emails?’.

And here’s a language lesson. The UK is used to sidewalks and cookies. I’ve mentioned blacktop before, which is one of many literally descriptive alternatives: shiftstick for gear lever, crosswalk for zebra crossing, line for queue. Here’s a useful one: fanny is bum, so you can have fannies both sides. Gallons and pints are different too, but I haven’t got the hang of it. I think a US gallon is also 8 pints as in the UK, but the pints have only 16 ounces rather than 20. The ounces are nearly the same, but not quite. So a pint of beer and a gallon of petrol are definitely less than you expect. Given cookies are biscuits, what are

biscuits? They’re a soft savoury scone that is common for breakfast with biscuit gravy: white sauce with specks of sausage in it. The Red Lobster chain of seafood restaurants serves up good ones without gravy.

Talking of breakfasts, there should be an app that tells you what each motel has included in the price, because it seems to be arranged by the individual motel even for the big chains. In about a third of places it was really good with most of: cereals and yoghurt, juice and coffee, omelette and sausage, biscuits and gravy, French toast, toast and jams. At the other end of the scale, one place had a grab-bag of juice carton, a packaged Danish pastry, and a cereal bar. OK, with coffee available. And another sent us to a café with a voucher for one item, not even coffee. I had French toast which came sprinkled with maple syrup and icing sugar, and a big dollop of cream. No wonder…

And how did we spend the days apart from driving? Well, Merle and I both survived, know each other still better than we did and maybe recognise we’re more alike than we thought. We agree that absolutely everyone should have regular counselling. And we got through audiobooks, including the ten episodes of ‘Mother Country Radicals’, a podcast on the Weather Underground, the White armed group arising from sixties student radical campaigning, that linked up closely with the Black Liberation Army that survived the Black Panthers. It’s fascinating, seems a very good history made by Zaid Dohrn who was born in the underground to the leader of the Weather Underground. The final episode is the next generation looking back at what they felt about their parents attempts at an armed revolutionary organisation. I thought it answered the questions of ‘how did it impact on me?’ with an inspiring vision of individuals’ places in a history that outlasts them. The whole thing was well worth listening to. Thanks Merle for finding and downloading it.

Now we're in Madison, Nancy and Mariamne's town, in a fabulous riverside rented place for the last two weeks. Merle's made internet friends and off on her own trip. I'm looking for long-sleeved shirts to last me a decade. The weather is in the mid-20s, not what it's supposed to be at the start of October.

There may be one more chapter, maybe not! Maybe there'll be several more... For months before I left, people thought I'd already gone. Now I'm thinking do I need to go back? I could go on. I've got a flight booked that get's back on 20th October.