It’s not the first time I’ve driven on the other side of the road. The first time was in Caen, in Normandy, in 2006, in a little grey Opel. A manual car, and I hadn’t driven a manual transmission for about thirty years.

I not only had a new car to learn, but a new country, a new town, a new side of the road and a new method of changing gears. Which I did frequently, usually when I was puzzling out how to negotiate an intersection full of locals whipping through it, while a queue of their compatriots built up behind me, keen for some whipping. I swore and sweated a lot, and when an opening arrived, planted my foot on the gas and stalled out.

So driving in America after a few more European and US roadtrips was no hassle. I put on a spritz of antiperspirant and got loaded up on coffee.

What was a hassle was getting the phones to work.

Far too often, I’ve set my phone to international roaming and come home to a phone bill that approximates my grocery spending for a year. A bit of email, a few peeks at BookCrossing.com, an emergency use of Google Maps. And the odd phone call.

A friend of mine who works in telecommunications suggested buying throwaway phones that could be easily reloaded. Just buy ‘em from a supermarket.

So this time, when I wandered down to the Marina Safeway for my fix of the best supermarket in the universe, I scooped up five cellphones. Futurecat suggested the sort with lots of buttons on the front, hoping to be able to use it back home in New Zealand. They were like twenty dollars each, and I got five twenty dollar credit refills for them, so it was a bit of a hit in the hip pocket, but I figured that we’d be able to communicate with each other and call the locals.

I had this dread of one or two of us getting separated and all the trouble and delay it would cause before we were all linked up again. Having a phone each would fix this, and I wouldn’t worry too much. Peace of mind is worth a lot.

Taking the phones through the checkout along with the root beer and candy turned out to be the wrong approach. It worked, but only after the manager had been summoned, and the line of angry customers behind us had built up to an alarming, grumbling, fidgeting degree.

It’s still the best supermarket ever. Armistead Maupin rated it highly in his Tales of the City series, and I’ve loved it ever since. I joined the loyalty club then and there.

And then. Oh boy! Back at the hostel I sat down to activate the phones and load them up. Talk about a fiddly procedure, especially when doing it for the first time! I dragged out my laptop and got onto the network’s website and created an account and gradually got everything hooked up. But there was a lot of navigating through menus via tiny buttons and entering codes on tiny buttons, and squinting at the screen through rapidly-aging eyes.

It was a struggle and it took some time, and our precious evening was wasting away. In hindsight, I should just have given the stack of boxes to K-J-H, who is good with technology, and told him that I’d buy him dinner if he could get these things going.

Anyway, the phones worked, more or less. Sparkles discovered that if you get a friend in Australia to phone you so you aren’t paying for the call, Net-10 charges you for receiving an international call and your credit is drained anyway.

And my phone decided it wasn’t going to play ball after a few days. For two weeks I waited for it to come good, and then I tried switching it off and on again – or maybe the battery drained out, I can’t remember. Anyway, that worked.

But for the time being, we had working phones, and we used them to good effect the next day, when we split up to explore San Francisco. Had a fantastic day and night, and the next morning we left early to get on the freeway south.

A friend had suggested that we drop in at San Jose on the way through, and this turned out not to be possible, so I rang her at the last moment to let her know that the GPS had sent us another way, and maybe we’d catch her on the way back in a month’s time, and possibly the cake she’d baked could be wrapped up and frozen?

“Or eaten by the dog,” she huffily replied. She asked which roads we were taking, and I told her the name of the highway. Or rather the number. American highways are all numbered, apart from Missouri, where they have letters. Very confusing, and it’s all too easy to take the wrong ramp if you mix (say) the speed limit with the highway number. We were driving along Route 65 a lot of the time.

“Be careful there,” she warned. “The radio says there’s some nut driving the wrong way.”

“Hell,” I replied, “There’s hundreds of them!”

The BCinDC 10th Birthday BookCrossing convention was superb in every way. Apart from the weather, and on the Saturday it was damp, to say the least. Look at Sherlockfan in her gossamer raincoat there.

Saturday’s morning experience, amongst a great many roll-yer-own adventures, was for me the Museum teaser tour. A rush along the Mall, looking at one item in all of the many great Smithsonians and museums. KateKintail, here shown highlighting the fact that the Yellow train had been relabelled “Blue” in her honour, had timed this sprint a few times and reckoned we could get through every museum and still be in time for lunch.

I don’t know – I’ve seen bookCrossers in action. They dawdle along instead of sprinting, they release books, they stop to take photographs, they make detours off the script to look at something interesting, they convert others to BookCrossing by thrusting armloads of books at them…

And if there was ever a place for interesting diversions, it’s the Smithsonians! Every one of them presented opportunities to get lost for weeks at a time, let alone the few seconds Kate had thoughtfully set aside for personal exploring.

But we did it. For me, it was a great help that I’d looked through some of these places in 2005, on my first big overseas trip, when I’d had a week to myself in DC while Kerri attended a government conference. For the others, well, it was a teaser and they’d have to come back later.

We saw so much in flickering moments. Sculpture, exhibits, historical markers, grand views, security checkpoints, puddles. And each other. I love being in the company of fellow BookCrossers on a romp through a city with bags of books.

One of my personal favorites is Washington in the garb of a Roman emperor. So ridiculous! So American! I guess he is entitled to be lionised in heroic pose, but he just seems a trifle out of place in time and place.

In the Air and Space Museum, I got to touch my third piece of moon rock in a week, after visits to Houston and Canaveral. That was a thrill.

And I saw the famous ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. That was cool.

Kate made sure that those of us who were participating in the scavenger hunt were led to the exhibits where the answers could be found. She didn’t go so far as to point at the answer with her umbrella, but you kind of knew where to look.

One question we had to answer was the age of the Natural History Museum’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. I struck out on my own here and asked a cleaner who was mopping up the puddles of rainwater dripping from our clothing.

“Exactly how old is that big dinosaur there?” I asked, pen poised over the answer sheet.

“Oh,” he mused, looking up at the great head full of teeth like steak knives, “He’s sixty-eight million and nine years, four months and a few days old.”

Well, I know that dating technology is getting better all the time, so I asked him, as he swung his mop, how he could be so sure. Had they run a recent test, found some documentary evidence, maybe gone back in time on a field visit?

“Nah. I started working here at the beginning of 2002, and he was sixty-eight million years old then.”

The Midwest was not the home of high style. The roadhouses had whole aisles devoted to beef jerky, some places you could assemble your own hot dog or taco, and although the pour-your-own coffee sections often had cappuccino machines, they had several spouts, labelled “Vanilla Capuccino”, “Caramel Capuccino” or “Chocolate Capuccino”. I began to suspect that they did not conceal an espresso machine inside!

Coffee was a continuing problem. At home, I can walk into Artoven in Manuka, ask for a “super-ginormous family size slender latte” and get exactly what I want. But they know me there.

In the USA, I had not only my accent cloaking my desires, but the varied interpretations of what the coffeefolk thought I’d said, filtered through whatever technology they had available. One “slender latte” from a McCafe in Iowa turned out to be filter coffee with some very dubious milk pumped in. I’m not entirely sure it was liquid milk.

Then there was the time I was served an iced coffee. Heavy on the milk, so I guess it was a latte of some sort.

Top marks for a “slender latte” went to an Oklahoma Starbucks, who produced a latte, possibly made with low-fat milk, topped with whipped cream and caramel syrup.

“Uh, you want Splenda in your latte?” asked one barista. Discoverylover cracked up and I repeated “slender, please!” as I sucked in my gut.

Discoverylover became my interpreter after a while, and my coffees became less random. And not quite as much fun.

I’ll talk about the food another time, but let’s just say that rural America was pretty rural.

We hit Kansas City late one night after a whole day of Midwest, and I was determined to find some style. Somewhere. Anywhere.

We’d booked into the Raphael, which was an indulgence on my part, but was a pretty classy joint, right across from the Plaza. We spotted a restaurant/bar opening off the lobby and went in for a nightcap after a day on the road.

It was really nice. Dim light, a piano player, bar staff in formal clothes. Instead of my usual beer, I ordered a martini, and sat there sipping it, basking in the glow.

The piano player was quite an entertainer. Believe it or not, he had a pet monkey, and he talked to it and it did tricks as part of the act. Sat on his shoulder, reached down and tinkled a few keys, waved to the audience.

The musician took a few requests and was rattling out some good tunes. “Piano Man!” someone asked, and he gave us a great version, rolling his eyes and voice in over-the-top Billy Joel.

The monkey hammed it up for a while and then went visiting, jumping up on tables, begging for pretzels and nuts. It came to us, squatted over my drink, and then to my astonishment and horror dangled its testicles into the glass.

“Get away out of it, yer filthy little bastard!” I snarled, and it scampered back to its master.

I followed, fuming, and the piano man looked up at me as his monkey sought refuge on his shoulder.

“Do you know your monkey dunked his nuts in my martini?”

“Uh no,” he replied, “but if you hum a few bars I’ll pick it up.”

My life

Twice a night I get to chat with one of the late night service station console operators. I go in at midnight to fill up and again at the end of a shift to top up the tank and clean the car. Usually it’s just a few words as I run the card through the machine and grab the docket.

“How’s your night going? Wet out there! Time to go home!” Just a few words.

Poor old operators. They have to keep the shop tidy and stocked up, hose down the forecourt, keep the windscreen wash buckets full and fresh, coil up the vacuum hose neatly, empty the litter bins and about a million other things.

Oh yeah. And serve the customers coming in for gas and late night snacks. They rarely get a moment to scratch themselves, even in the wee small hours.

Occasionally I’ll pull in and one of the operators will be sitting down outside, well away from the bowsers, having a quiet fag. His moment of rest and he’s got to get up and turn the pump on for me.

I get out and go over to him and chat until he’s finished his smoke. A minute out of my night mostly spent waiting for things to happen is nothing compared to the sweet indulgence of an unbroken cigarette for a console jockey.

We were sitting there, just enjoying the still, when a man comes running in from the darkness, smack into the automatic door, which of course was locked while the operator was outside. He looked around, and my companion sighed, got up, handed me the cigarette.

“He wants a packet of smokes,” I smiled. These late night cravings hit the nicotine addict hard.

I watched as the customer was served and made a quick exit, running away into the night.

“That was quick,” I said, as the console guy retrieved his smoke. “He needed his tobacco, yeah?”

“Nah, condoms.”

OK. This one’s a little trite, but I forgive it for the pun at the end:

I thought about the 30 year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a Blackberry that played music, took videos, pictures and communicated with Facebook and Twitter..

I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grandkids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.

My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything.

I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.

The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it's red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife as everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. Seems I have to take my hearing aid out to use it and I got a little loud.

I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, “Re-calc-ul-ating” You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then when I would make a right turn instead, it was not good.

When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.

To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house.. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven’t figured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.

The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden “Paper or Plastic?” every time I check out just knocks me for a loop.

I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused but I never remember to take them in with me.

Now I toss it back to them.. When they ask me, “Paper or Plastic?”

I just say, “Doesn’t matter to me.. I am bi-sacksual..” Then it’s their turn to stare at me with a blank look.

This one’s a scream!