I love flying out of Sydney. I get to use the awesome Qantas First lounge. Even if it’s only a cup of coffee, sitting away up there with the huge windows, the smiling staff, and the art on the froth of my latte sets me off on the right foot. I glide down the hall and float onto the plane.

Not this time. I’ve dropped down to Gold, so it’s just the normal lounge, and although I’m allowed a guest, I’m travelling with three companions, so two would have to wait outside. Which means that we are not going into any lounge.

DD will feel this most keenly. Twice I’ve taken her into the First lounge, and she snuggles up like a cat in the comfort and love that Qantas gives to elite flyers.

We both eye the sign saying “Lounges” and sigh dramatically.

There are other pleasures. Duty-Free shopping is something I usually gloss over. The savings in Australia just aren’t there, except for alcohol. And then there’s the hassle of actually carrying the stuff aboard and making sure it stays secure under your seat or in the overhead locker. And I’m not that much of a drinker, anyway. I’ll glance at the electronics, but generally stuff will be cheaper where I’m going to, although I will sometimes buy something just for the pleasure of fiddling with it during the flight.

But the kids went wild in the Duty-Free precinct. They saw the prices for grog, the girls experimented with the free testers for perfume, they just browsed and browsed. DS had a happy smile when he picked up a jumbo bottle of Jim Beam at a very agreeable price. I think he had plans to make the flight a very enjoyable one indeed!

We had lunch in the food court. Overpriced rubbish, mostly, and consumed with other travellers jostling past. I sighed again.

The usual delays as we waited to board the plane. Security checks, a long walk to the western end of the terminal – I made my usual joke to some random travellers, “Geez, I didn’t think we’d have to walk to San Francisco!”, and they dutifully smiled.

And then we were patting the hull of the jumbo, smiling at the cabin crew, arranging ourselves in our seats. The flight to San Francisco doesn’t have a First service, so Business passengers get the First seatbeds (and Business service), Premium Economy get the Business seats, and a lucky few Economy passengers get the Premium Economy seats (and Economy service). Somehow I’d managed to retain enough eliteness to score four of the Premium Economy seats on our discounted Economy tickets, so that was a big plus. I even felt chipper enough to give up my allocated window seat to my son, accepting an aisle in the centre section. He hadn’t flown over the Pacific previously, whereas I’ve lost count.

Pushback, taxi, and takeoff. I love these bits, and I’m usually hanging out of the window to experience the unusual situation of the comforting solid land tilt and dwindle and disappear, leaving us in a realm of air and clouds which we are quite unevolved for. It’s a kind of magic, and my spirits always lift along with the Boeing.

Dinner was served as we raced towards twilight. “Portuguese Style Beef and Chorizo Hot Pot with Pilaf Rice”, according to the menu. It was okay, but nowadays I’m inclined to see economy food as an inconvenience, cluttering up my tray table and setting uncomfortably in my stomach. I selected a red wine to go with my meal, but it was sour and unsatisfactory to the last drop. The best part of the meal was the glass of Mr and Mrs T’s Bloody Mary mix. Spiced tomato juice makes me happy.

And then the long night. On a thirteen hour flight over the Pacific, you’re going to get a big chunk of darkness however you cut it. I watched a movie, but unusually for Qantas, the selection of viewing wasn’t as broad and as satisfactory as I like, and after a while I cranked the seat back and slept. Premium Economy gives me enough room to find sleep, instead of fitful catnaps. I got up a few times to use the facilities and wander through the rear cabin – the rare joy of an aisle seat.

Dawn and breakfast arrived, and my excitement level soared again. I opted for the hot breakfast, my nose twitching at every savoury waft from the galley before my tray was plopped down in front of me. OJ, Melon salad, scrambled eggs with bacon, sausage and mushrooms, and a new attraction of “Mango and Vanilla Pain De Me”, which was enjoyable, despite the disturbing name.

Washed down with hot coffee.

I caught glimpses out the distant window as we came in over the Golden Gate and turned to land with the rising sun at our backs. I love San Francisco, and even if it’s just an airport, with bleak expanses of concrete and long immigration halls, there’s always a smile on my face.

Immigration was painless – we actually got out ahead of most passengers – and before too long we were rumbling a trolley or two into the arrivals hall, where we were to meet FutureCat, flying in on Air New Zealand from Auckland. We had an hour before her flight landed, so we found a coffee shop and I shouted drinks and snacks for the group. My daughter needs her caffeine in the morning, and what with the jump in body clocks, the need was very keenly felt at this time.

There was another customer at the coffee kiosk. A blind man with a seeing-eye dog was waiting patiently, sipping his drink while his dog contentedly licked itself. The very picture of happiness all round.

I nudged my son, pointing at the dog. “You know, I’ve always wished I could do that.”

“Well, Dad,” he replied. “Now’s your chance. It’s not as if the owner’s going to see what you’re doing, eh?”

Now you go through Saint Louis,
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.
You see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Don’t forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernandino.

We ticked them off, one by one, aiming to get a photo of the town sign for proof. Not sure we got St Louis, but we got plenty of that famous arch. As compensation, we nabbed Shrewsbury on the way west, as we sucked up the last dregs of a Ted Drewe’s frozen custard, carefully posing my BBC Radio Shropshire bear against the sign. He’s been around the world seven times – and a few halves – since I was given him in Shrewsbury at Easter 2006 by the marvellous BBC presenter Jim Hawkins.

This day was a highlight, from the moment we woke up in Tucumcari and realised it was snowing outside. We had at least nine hours of driving ahead, before our booked accommodation at the Grand Canyon, so we wanted to travel fast.

But first, we needed a photo of a “Historic Route 66″ sign. “Collect the whole set,” has always been my motto, to the despair of my wife in a house full of clutter, and I wasn’t going to miss out on the New Mexico version. We found a bunch of banners along the main street, but they weren’t the genuine article.

Somewhere out in the wild and wind we found a sign. Generally they mark the old highway after an intersection, when there is some doubt as to the correct way to turn. Finding one with room to pull over and a generous supply of light on the sign was sometimes a bit tricky, but here the light under the overcast sky was generally dismal and if we hugged each other for the shot, it was for warmth!

The temperature dropped and the snowflakes got thicker as we lifted ourselves up over Sandia into Albuquerque. 28° F outside, and the snow was making patterns on the road surface in the wakes of the speeding semitrailers on the Interstate.

Gallup, New Mexico wasn’t too hard. The sun was beginning to smile around the clouds, and we found a couple of big signs, obviously intended for Route 66 junkies like us. We didn’t even bother to get out of the warm car – just aimed the cameras out of the window.

We found a bit of Route 66 here and there, pausing for a photo or two as the sunlight turned back on, lighting up a landscape straight out of Cars, with huge rock formations poking into the valley like the bonnets of old automobiles. We even found a close approximation of the “Wheel Well” cavern just over the Arizona line.

The “Welcome to…” state signs were another collection. We were ticking them off against the list, and sometimes our visit to a state would be just a quick duck over the border, grab a snap, and turn around. We went through three states in five minutes sometimes.

Into Arizona, and there was one place I was determined to stop. That famous corner from the Eagles song, with a flatbed Ford and “a girl, my Lord!”. Another tourist trap, but very sweetly done. Unfortunately the souvenir shop alongside was closed for the Sunday night, but after a bit of hunting we found a diner that was happy to serve us supper. I got a large serve of roast beef, apparently made of cardboard, chips that had seen service in the Korean War, and green beans that had been pickled last week for re-use next week.

It was well and truly dark by the time we hit Winona. Going by the song, I’d imagined it to be west of Flagstaff, but no, the sign appeared suddenly and I pulled over to get a shot, stopping awkwardly in a deserted intersection, the headlights positioned to illuminate it. Take a flash shot of a road sign, and all you get is a brilliant reflection, mostly. A deserted intersection to begin with, but as I fiddled with the camera, pickup trucks appeared from everywhere, politely weaving around the van parked fair in the middle.

I was hoping for better, actually, and I followed the road into town. After about ten minutes of desolation, Discoverylover began prodding me. “Sure we’re going the right way? Maybe we should stop and look at the map?”

I turned around and discovered that there was no town of Winona. Just a Shell service station and a few houses. No big welcoming sign for the tourists. As usual, Discoverylover needed the bathroom, and we pulled in. Not even a big roadhouse, this one. I poked around, looking for something I could buy, just to be polite. To tell the truth, there wasn’t a real lot I wanted. Flagstaff wasn’t too far off, and I knew I could likely find a late night Starbucks for an actual espresso coffee. A few souvenirs, but I had a van full of souvenirs after stopping at Clines Corner that morning.

I chatted distractedly with the chap behind the counter, who seemed at perfect home in this deserted servo.

“Ah, you’ve lived here all your life?”

“Nope,” he replied. “Not yet.”

Discoverylover appeared and got down to business. “We need a ‘Winona’ sign,” she demanded.

“Here yuh go.”

He hauled out a bumper sticker and posed for us. “The sweetest little place you’ll find on Route 66,” he said.

And then he handed the bumper sticker to Discoverylover, who smiled happily. “No charge!” he said.

We had discovered the sweetest bloke along Route 66.

You can’t drive Route 66 any more. Anybody who says they’ve done it, Lake Michigan to Santa Monica Pier is lying.

Historic Route 66 is out there, sure enough, and there are any number of websites and guidebooks offering turn by turn instructions. But every now and then they direct you onto I-40 or some other road. The simple fact is that in many places Route 66 no longer exists. It’s buried under the Interstate, it has been overgrown by trees, it runs across private land. For miles and miles you can see where the old road used to be, and still is, the Portland cement surface easily identifiable. But it’s broken up into short stretches, it’s fenced off, it goes nowhere, or it’s just plain unsafe to drive on.

In fact, a lot of the old highway alignment is a dirt track, where it exists at all. I’d estimate that if you drove the whole way, religiously following every possible chance to follow the old road, maybe 30% of it would be the original surface and much of that very difficult going.

And, to be honest, this is a good thing. The old prewar road was narrow, full of blind corners and difficult grades, few overtaking opportunities, running through towns and crossing rivers on skinny bridges, the trusses just a few inches away. When it was full of traffic, it must have been a struggle to survive, every approaching truck a challenge, every curve and crest a surprise.

Driving a family of bored kids through a summer holiday can’t have been fun when cars had no airconditioning, sweaty vinyl seats, manual gearshifts and scratchy AM radios. No cruise control, no power windows, no seatbelts or airbags.

Driver fatigue would have been a big killer, and it’s no wonder they closed the old Chain of Rocks bridge that carried Route 66 across the Mississippi just east of St Louis. With a bend in the middle, driver after weary driver must have clipped the side or run into the oncoming lane.

The long desert stretches presented their own challenges. The heat and the lack of water must have challenged both car and driver. Running out of gas on one of these desolate flats would have been a disaster, with refuelling opportunities sparse.

Many times the modern Route 66 driver is faced with a choice of alignments. Do you follow the 1920s dirt, the 40s cement, or the 60s fourlane blackop? And just how much history is there when you’re driving along (say) State Highway 66 through Oklahoma, with only the sketchiest geographical kinship to the Mother Road?

So we didn’t feel too much guilt whenever we bypassed the old road. If darkness or bad weather overtook us, we switched to the Interstate. We wanted to arrive safe, not poke our way along a treacherous road in dark and snow. And if all we saw was what was under our headlights, then how much fun was that?

And often we had to make up time to meet a friend or to get to booked accommodation at a reasonable hour. If all Route 66 was was a frontage road for I-40, and we could see it just a few metres away, then why spend time poking along the old road when we could engage cruise control for an extra twenty or thirty miles per hour on the Interstate?

But we spent a lot of time on the old road, and it was a lot of fun. The little cafes and gift shops were far more fascinating than a clutch of burger chains. Roadside ruins, corny tourist traps, a few ancient motels struggling on – the colour might be faded, but the thrill is just as real.

And towards the end, crossing the Arizona and California desert sections, traffic was very light indeed. We drove by ourselves for mile after mile, alone from horizon to horizon.

I remember one car we passed. For a long time it was visible ahead travelling just a few miles per hour below our cruise control setting, first a dot, then a shape in the haze, then finally an old Mercury, the grey-haired driver leaning way back in their seat.

I pulled out to overtake – no oncoming traffic for at least ten miles ahead – and glanced to my right as I passed. I could hardly believe my eyes. Alone in the car, an old lady was passing the time by knitting. She must have been steering with her knees.

Appalled, I slowed, wound down the window and bellowed at her, “You bloody idiot! Get your hands on the wheel!”

She looked at me and I yelled at her at the top of my lungs, “Pull over, yer mug galah!”

She cranked down her window and shouted back, her expression full of scorn, “You damn fool, it’s a scarf!”

New Orleans was perfect. We’d planned our visit for Saturday night after another long day of driving when we could use a little relaxation. Halfway through our eastbound crossing of America, New Orleans was our chance to let our hair down, sample the fabled delights of the South, get wild and hungover.

The one black mark was that I couldn’t find a hotel that was within walking distance of Bourbon Street, reasonably rated, and remotely affordable. We ended up near the airport in a chain motel of which I now have zero memory.

Seems that there was some festival going on that night and people had flocked in to enjoy the evening. The best accommodation had long since been snapped up. But we followed the GPS voice into the central area. Parking wasn’t too difficult once I’d swallowed the cost, and we found Bourbon Street easily enough – just follow the noise and the crowds!

It was everything I’d hoped for and more. I could have spent the whole night just leaning on any Bourbon Street corner watching the people. Folk of every age, colour, shape and origin flowed past, all happy and excited, smiling and talking, snatches of song and dance animating their progress.

Bourbon Street itself was a lane lined with bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and entertainment venues, brightly lit under verandahs filled with partying people. Music came from out of the air, and pretty women magically scored chains of beads, generously supplied by the folk leaning over the balconies above.

I loved it. Every odd detail. The couple walking a miniature horse. The guy on a mobile phone, bent double with a finger jammed in his free ear against the noise. The street church, praying for the souls of the sinners. The line of mounted police, the horses suffering their noses to be stroked by the tipsy and curious. A diner named Desire where we sat down for some Cajun cooking and stood up for enveloping hugs from the hostess. Gumbo, crawfish, local beer, dishes we couldn’t pronounce but licked clean.

We had a bourbon on Bourbon Street. They came in a rack of five test tubes and we conducted our own experiments, snorting them down and stamping our feet. Alcohol was cheap and plentiful, but really just the atmosphere was enough to intoxicate.

We straggled along, looking and photographing and enjoying the night. Amazingly we all kept together and eventually found ourselves in an open air jazz bar, where we listened to the band pumping out golden notes, consumed the local sweet pastries called beignets, and immersed ourselves in New Orleans.

I sat down beside a young lady at the bar, about my age. She smiled at me and I offered to buy her a drink. Hearing my faint Australian accent she asked, in a delightful Southern music, who I was and how was I here.

“I’m a taxidriver in Canberra,” I said. “I drive politicians to Parliament, public servants to the airport, veterans to the War Memorial, drunks home from the pub. I keep my limousine shining, I play jazz for the passengers, I offer them Minties, I laugh at their jokes. And as I drive around the parks and avenues of the national capital, I dream of travelling to exotic places full of fascinating people. Like yourself, right here.”

I subtly waggled my eyebrows at her, and she smiled.

“You know what I dream of?” she replied. “Women. All night and all day. I wake up in the morning and I think of women. I get up and go to work and I look at the women on the bus and the street. I dream of women all day long. I go out at night and look for women. I’m a lesbian, honey.”

She raised her glass at me and sauntered off. Two more ladies sat down as I thoughtfully sipped my Sam Adams. They were low-cleavaged under strings of beads, and they twinkled at me in a charming manner.

“G’day!” I smiled. What a night!

“Ooooh, listen to him! Where you from, big boy? What you doing here all alone?”

“I’m Peter, from Australia.” I mimed a kangaroo bounding through the bush. “You know? I’m a lesbian.”

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.”

The talk was of tornadoes that day in Joplin. A massive outbreak had hit the US over the preceding few days, and here we were in tornado territory.

We were back on Route 66 after taking a few days off to see friends in Kansas City and to attend a Sister Hazel concert in Columbia, and we’d had a packed day so far, with more to come before my optimistic destination of Tulsa.

After a planned meet at the Missouri Welcome Centre just shy of the Oklahoma line fell through – closed for repairs and the off-ramp blocked – we rescheduled for Starbucks in Joplin. Discoverylover, who had helped with the navigation by slumbering in the passenger seat, a happy Sister Hazel grin on her face, now found the right location on the GPS and we headed back up I-40, going backwards at one point when our driver missed the exit.

We were hours late, the light was fading fast, but I was determined to snap that Joplin sign. You can’t do Route 66 without Joplin, Missouri!

KSReader and her BookCrossing daughter KSKid lit up the Starbucks carpark when our dusty van pulled up beside them. It was good to see these two, whom we had last seen at the Kansas City BookCrossing convention in 2009. KSReader had been one of the organising crew, and KSKid had helped Discoverylover launch a book into a fountain one evening.

Anyway, we hugged, smiled, chatted, swapped books and grinned at each other. BookCrossing is like that – a global community of happy people sharing books, quirkiness, generosity and love. I suggested getting a group shot by the sign a couple of hundred metres away, and although KSReader suggested driving, I said I needed the exercise after lunching at Lambert’s Cafe in Sprinfield.

America is not set up for pedestrians. It must have taken the best part of half an hour to struggle across the road get the shot, walk back along the grassy verges and collapse into Starbucks for a round of hot drinks and some more bookswapping.

And then we made our goodbye hugs, said we’d be glad to see them in Australia and/or New Zealand, and hit the road. There’s a long stretch of Route 66 running through town, and we followed it out into the last few miles of Missouri, and over the border into Kansas. Not much of the old road in Kansas, but we made the most of the thirteen miles over several night hours. But that’s another story, the story of the mailbox in the middle of the road.

Joplin was fine when we left it, but like a visit to pre-war Hiroshima, we should have taken more time and photographs. On 23 May 2011, Joplin was hit by a huge tornado, destroying about half of the town, including our Starbucks, and killing more than a hundred people. Poor Joplin! That happy hour in my memory will now be forever tinged by sadness.

A city and a river. Surely not New Orleans already? I raised my eyebrows at DD. “Baton Rouge”, she replied. I shrugged. Another hour to go.

FutureCat looked around from the front passenger seat. “The Mississippi!” she exulted.

I smiled. It was exciting. The first time I crossed the Mighty Miss, I did it three times in five minutes, due to Discoverylover’s need to take photographs of the Missouri and illinois state welcome signs.

To anybody raised on a childhood diet of Mark Twain, it was exciting. A river on the far side of the world and it could make one’s heart pound. I was certainly laughing like a schoolboy the first time.

We had begun the day in San Antonio, awake early after a midnight stroll around the Alamo and along the Riverwalk. We had the light breakfast our hotel offered, and as soon as we found a likely gas station, stopped for gigantic coffees and junk snacks. It’s still an experience to enter a shop where an entire aisle is devoted to beef jerky. Makes one’s stomach pound.

We plugged Houston into the GPS and hit the interstate east, listening to Mary Roach’s offbeat and intimate exploration of space travel, “Packing for Mars”. She left no stone unturned: sex, alcohol, faeces, chimps, vomit and dandruff all came under her eye. It’s rare to find a laugh-out-loud book about space, let alone a work of non-fiction, but here it is.

We chuckled all the way to the Johnson Space Centre Visitor Centre, where for $20 we got free run of the touristy bits. Probably best to grab a meal outside, is my advice, rather than fork over a tiny fortune for a plate of munchies and noodles at the “Moon Wok” or other stalls feeding the captive market.

At least it wasn’t genuine space food, which Mary Roach had managed to link to bears, vomit and veterinarians.

DS and I opted for the Spaceship hall in what seemed like a giant space playground full of rides, handson learning stations and cute simulations. Here were genuine pieces of space hardware: the “Faith 7″ Mercury capsule, a console from Mission Control, spacesuits and space food.

The piece of hardware that moved me most – and as a schoolboy I’d travelled vicariously with Neil Armstrong as much as Huckleberry Finn – was an article that had never left the ground. A lectern with a presidential seal, from which John F Kennedy had launched his nation to the moon.

JFK’s spirit was living here, infusing the piece of moon rock, the Gemini and Apollo capsules, the photographs, the mission patches. He had his human flaws, but he touched the stars.

I reveled in the hardware, the moon rover simulations, the mock-up Skylab, the kids piloting the Space Shuttle “Adventure” in for a safe landing. And at the gift shop I bought a bunch of stuff, including a bumper sticker to add to the growing collection on the rear of the van.

Marked as tourists for all to see, we got back on the interstate east and east. The freeway interchanges around Houston had been suitably heroic, making my heart race every bit as much as baseball-capped Texans in ugly huge pickup trucks, but here it was just a long slug over terrain increasingly swampy.

At one point I noticed a truck hauling what looked like a huge piece of modern sculpture. Two semitrailers long, it was slender and gracefully tapered. I looked it in puzzlement until it slotted into my recognition as a blade from one of the thousands of windmills in West Texas. Sure enough, two more followed.

A surreal moment in a good day that was about to finish up perfect.

Much as I appreciate a three day weekend – and the probability of further extensions until the cab is repaired – I am in sore need of money to fund my upcoming trip, and the pleasure of leisure is balanced by the the sad thought of my bank balance.

I’ve been reasonably discreet with the news, but I was involved in yet another cab crash on Friday morning. Just after midnight, on the way in to the Alinga Street rank with the city centre full of young folk and the prospect of three hours of work, a young lady made a right turn across traffic, imagining that the green light freed her from the duty of giving way to oncoming traffic – me.

To be fair to her, it’s a confusing intersection, and the traffic lights control the pedestrian crossing, not the intersection, but still, she suddenly appeared in front of me and I was unable to stop in time. No injuries, but both cars had to be towed away.

The insurance will pay for the repairs, but the loss of income over the busy weekend, and likely the busy week with Parliament’s imminent return, will severely disadvantage the cab owner, the weekend driver, the day driver and me.

I’m getting rather cheesed off with this side of cabdriving. In the four years of cabbing, I’ve had more accidents than I ever did in the thirty-some years since I first got a learner’s permit. Nothing major, and one or two were my fault, especially that whole backing into a tree thing, but still it’s not good for the soul. Or the bank balance.

The job itself is a lot of fun. Long hours and short pay, but I get to read books and watch movies and surf the net between fares, and the people I carry are generally interesting. I collected a young lady from the airport the other night, a former Australian of the Year, and she was a total delight. In the middle of summer, she was carrying a heavy coat, and explained that she was off to Canada in a day or two. We talked about travel and Route 66 and the underground culture of generosity and service. There are so many people around who donate time and money to making the world a better place, and it delights me to hear of them. This lady was one, and knew many more.

Famous authors, leading public figures, artists – the list goes on and on. You never know who will jump into the cab. Or the ordinary people who will never make the papers, but delight me with their jokes or their good humour or their companionship in the night. A few days ago, I picked up four young people from a house in the suburbs, heading off for an evening at a nearby tavern. I looked at them, selected CD 1 which is Michael Jackson, and as “Billie Jean” thumped through the speakers, the three in the back seat began doing Mexican waves. I could see the hands rising and falling in the rear mirror, and I giggled happily at the sight. For some reason, we cabbies are supposed to be hard, crusty, unsmiling men, bitter at life and closed up in emotion. Not me. Something amuses me, I laugh.

I like the job. It suits me.

But the long hours and low pay aren’t sustainable.

In the meantime, I’ve got leisure to write, and to declutter. I went through my cupboards and put some stuff up on eBay. I’ll try to clear out a bit each day – the result should be a house less full of junk, and a bank that smiles at me.