...Michelle St Clair, of Cincinnati, OH, who with uncanny accuracy guessed that I would pick up $19.99 in change from the road. The actual figure was $20.35.

Not exactly the life-changing sum that I jokingly implied, but it's still 2,035 pennies, and it illustrates one of the many lessons I learned from my walk. A lot of pennies can add up to a tidy sum, just as many small donations can add up to a healthy £40,000, and a lot of steps for a lot of days can add up to 3,000 miles.

These are some of the other things I learned. Well, 'learned' is not the right word, because I already knew a lot of them in theory, but they were brought home to me in tangible form by the walk.

• Walking, as Hippocrates said two thousand years ago, is indeed life's best medicine. I'm a whole lot happier than when I started, fifteen pounds lighter, and fitter than I've ever been in my life.
• Religion is a hugely powerful force in people's lives here. A large proportion of the people I met were regular churchgoers, and only three people professed themselves to be non-believers.
• People are afraid of other people. Their friends and neighbours are OK, but they don't trust the people in the next block or the next town down the road. This is true of most places I've travelled to, not just the US.
  
• We think of Americans as loud. It's not them that are loud, but us that are quiet. They're effective communicators; we mumble.
  
• Every time I come to the US, I worry that it will have stopped being the friendliest nation in the world. But it hasn't. Anyone I ever met who'd been to England said they'd received a warm welcome, but I still find it hard to believe it could be as warm as the one I've received here.
• The United States is sunny most of the time.
• There's no point worrying. Most of our fears are never realised. I rarely knew where I was going to be staying the next night, and I didn't care.
  
• The country is not just a collection of big cities joined by a tangled mass of freeways. Lots of Americans live in sleepy little towns. Some of these are beautiful, and others are so derelict they look like a bomb has hit them.
  
• For all its faults, the British health system is better than the American one.
• Huge numbers of Americans, many of them with all the trappings of prosperity, are living from one paycheck to the next.
• Huge numbers of Americans have houses piled to the ceiling with junk.
• People in the South say hallo to strangers they walk past in the street.
• 'Have a nice day' actually means that. It's not just something that McDonalds employees are told to say. I've started saying it too, because I like it.
• The other speech habit I've adopted is saying 'You're welcome'. I like this too.
• All you need to walk across America is a healthy pair of legs and the will to do so. A bit of money helps too, though my friend Matt has managed with almost none.
• Within reason, you should never turn down an invitation.
  
• Most people are good.
  

This is my last post, and I'd like to thank you for reading it. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped me on my way with anything from a little smile to a big donation. I'm grateful to Jayne for eighteen happy years and being the inspiration for my walk, and to Pam for being so tolerant of the fact that I still talk about her all the time.

This blog has meant a huge amount to me, I've enjoyed writing it, and I've really appreciated all the feedback, so I'm going to write another one. It's called An Englishman in New Orleans. There's nothing there at the moment, but stay tuned.

'He must of stopped off for quite a while after meeting his new bird as ten months to walk 3000 miles is quite slow. Well done to him anyway!'
JK2007, a visitor to the Sun newspaper's website

Well, yes, JK2007, I couldn't agree more. It's not just quite slow, it's painfully, tortuously, paint-dryingly slow: only 9.3 miles a day.

Apologies to those of you who've heard this story before, but when I went for my visa interview at the heavily guarded fortress that is the US embassy in London, I pleaded with the woman behind the counter to let me have more than the standard six months.

I could just about manage the walk in that time, I told her, but it would be a route march: twenty miles a day, six days a week. I needed longer if I was really to savour the delights of this country and its people.

She listened impassively as I argued my case, and then was silent for a moment.

I vividly remember her exact words. 'Well, we can't have you rushing something like that, can we?' she said, and stamped my passport November 2007.

If it hadn't been for the bulletproof glass screen between myself and this anonymous functionary, I'd have leaned over and planted a kiss on her cheek.

Eighteen months in the United States is a privilege that many people would give their right arm for, and all along the way I've been determined not to squander it.

I've kept steadfastly to my rule of never declining an invitation, and spent time with countless people - not just my bird. When beautiful places beckon, I've succumbed to their enticements rather than just snapping a couple of pictures, looking at my watch and hurrying on. If there's one thing I've learned from this journey, it's that slow is good.

I finally emptied my backpack over the living-room floor yesterday, and it made me very sad. Most of the contents already belong to the past. My four Coast to Coast t-shirts are too worn and faded to keep. I'm unlikely ever to use my Terra Nova ultra-lightweight one-person tent or my Rand McNally map of California again. And my boots are in such a toxic state that I need to drop them down a very deep mineshaft, fill it with heavily reinforced concrete and affix it with skull-and-crossbone signs reading 'Do not open for 10,000 years'.

But the sense of anticlimax is partly offset by pleasurable anticipation. I'm planning to spend my remaining time here doing more volunteer work, translating, and exploring this extraordinary city.

New Orleans has a quite different feel to my last visit a couple of months ago: summer is here now, and the air drips with heat and the heady scent of sweet olive and southern magnolia. Every waking moment is spent doing battle with swarming termites, scuttling cockroaches and whining mosquitoes - and I exaggerate only slightly. But I think I'm going to enjoy my stay.

Walking by numbers

Smallest number of miles walked in one day, rest days excluded: 3
Magazine articles about me: 3
Unpleasant people encountered: 3 (One was a woman in Pennsylvania whom I asked for directions. She looked down her nose at me from the wheel of her SUV, wound up the window and drove away. Another was the woman who stole my phone in New Orleans and yelled abuse at me when I asked for it back. And the third was the anonymous driver of a white pickup in Kentucky who sped off without stopping after hitting me. This is not a bad record considering that I met thousands of nice people.)
Radio interviews: 6
TV interviews: 11
States walked through: 13 (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California)
Average daily mileage, rest days excluded: 17
Largest daily mileage: 32
Nights in tent: 33
Nights in the homes of people I met, nearly all of them in the eastern half of the country: 35
Consumption of Subway footlong Veggie Delites on wheat bread with pepperjack cheese, all the veggies and lite mayonnaise (Do you care any more? No, I'm not sure I do either. I emailed Subway's PR department to see if they wanted to use my story, but they didn't reply): 40
Newspaper articles: 40
Nights in hotels: 224
Miles walked: 3,091

PS: I'll let you know in the next couple of days who won a life-changing sum of money in the Picking Up Pennies competition.

By Pam

Well, boys and girls, I've recovered sufficiently from the blisters of that last 29 miles to return to New Orleans. It seems odd that I've been waiting all this time to claim my love from his adventure, and now I have to wait a little longer for him. He's off to San Diego to give a talk and I have pressing obligations at home. It's for a good cause so I'll fly alone.
It's been a whirlwind ride, these last 6 days.I really thought I do enough walking to not have it be a task but BOY, was I WRONG!! I rarely wear my sneakers and it showed. Phil has a plan for us to walk everyday and from the finish-line photo, you can see it'll be a good idea for my chubby self!
In other news, while I'm not of the same caliber of Jacqui and Richard in the press corps, I do manage to promote my man and this good cause.
Just yesterday, Shirley Maclaine and I nearly bumped into each other in the lobby of the Fabulous Marriott overlooking Marina Del Ray where we were staying and she was meeting with some obvious Hollywood types. I looked her staight in the eye and instantly knew she was the approachable type, so I stalked her and waited outside the loo, Phil's Coast-to-Coast card in hand. I must admit to being a little rattled, as I just said," Hey, would you do me a favor and check out this website?" I went on to briefly explain about the walk, the reason for it, and of course, said something about being his girlfriend. She responded with something along the lines of ," He should write a story!"
This, I felt gave me carte blanche later in the evening to thrust a couple of more cards in front of the Hollywood types, aforementioned, and tell them that Miss Maclaine found it interesting... hopefully they won't call her to check up on the validity of my assertion...

Yesterday Jack, Pam and I went to see where some of your money goes. We visited the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and met Gerry Weinmaster and Brendan D'Souza, who are carrying out an AICR-funded project investigating notch signalling, a form of communication between cells which can cause cancers and other diseases when it goes wrong.

It was difficult for us as non-scientists to understand the intricacies of this extremely complex subject, which is why AICR grant applications have to be peer-reviewed.

But one thing really impressed me, and that was Gerry's and Brendan's sheer passion for what they were doing: they often work fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, and I'm really grateful to them for fitting us in and being so patient.

Talking of gratitude, I also owe a huge thank you to Murray Lowe and David Siguaw of the Marriott Marina del Rey, who gave us two free rooms for three nights. This is the third time I've been on the receiving end of hospitality from Marriott hotels, and I think it reflects well on the chain as a whole that they're so open to helping out with something like my walk.

Today we finally got round to making a pilgrimage to the spot on the boardwalk where, in 1995, Sir Peter Blake painted the picture Jayne and I had on our wall. This is the picture, Madonna of Venice Beach, California IV:


And this is the reality:



Just a few hundred yards along from here is a string of stunning post-modernist houses. This one is by Frank Gehry, and dates from 1986. It belongs to a Hollywood scriptwriter, who does his writing in the lookout pod at the front.



If I owned this house (and I've never coveted a piece of real estate so avidly before) I'd never get a stroke of work done; I'd be fixated on the mirror-blue sea, the palms and the ever-changing cavalcade of humanity that walks, runs and skates past the front door.


Thanks to Richard and Jacqui, the walk ended with a bang rather than a whimper. They flew here from Florida and spent most of the couple of days they were here churning out press releases and liaising with the media.

I was on ABC in Los Angeles, and also received coverage from several national papers in the UK. One of these, the Mirror, lifted large quantities of text and pictures from my blog without permission and passed the result off as an "exclusive" - British tabloid journalism at its best. The reporter also seems to be under the impression that Florida is somewhere in the middle of the United States. Here is the result:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/showbiz/yourlife/sexandhealth/tm_method=full&objectid=19061320&siteid=89520-name_page.html

The other pieces are in The Times and The Sun:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1760426.ece
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007210185,00.html

Pam also met someone interesting today, but I'll let her describe the encounter in her own words.

Friday was our first day's walking together, and what a delight it was. Pam managed to turn it into an extended shopping expedition - we have an agreement that if we go past a thrift (charity) shop that's open, we go in - and spent half the day walking with three rolls of fabric over her shoulder. They were a huge bargain, so she's going to mail them home. We must have presented a bizarre spectacle.

The other thing she's carrying is some sprigs of eucalyptus which she picked. Like me she's obsessed with all the exotic trees and plants here in California, and we have to subject every garden we pass to intensive critical analysis. This makes for a slow journey, but we only have to do ten miles a day.

Jack is joining us on the walk today, and we're really looking forward to seeing him.

The first thing I saw on my left as I crossed the San Gabriel river into El Monte was an oval track with people walking round it. Some were power-walking and dressed in athletics gear; others were pushing children in strollers or walking their dogs.

It seemed a terrible exercise in futility, walking round and round in circles (or ovals) just to burn off calories.

Los Angeles is the world's least pedestrian-friendly city, and all I remember from my last visit, decades ago, is speeding cars and tangled freeways.

But, as I've realised on this walk, LA and every other big city in this country have existed for much longer than the freeways. They have parks, shopping streets with proper sidewalks, hiking trails, and long stretches of tree-shaded country road.

I felt like standing in the middle of the track and telling people there's more to life than this, get out of this rat race and explore. But I didn't.

I'm now 29 miles from Venice Beach, and I'm waiting for Pam to arrive and walk the rest of the way with me. The welcoming committee has now expanded to include sister Jacqui and brother-in-law Richard, who are flying in from Florida and then have to go straight back to England to renew the journalists' visas on which they've spent the last five years in this country. They're going to be very, very jetlagged by the time all this is over, but it's going to be quite a little party.

Some of the best discoveries on this journey have been towns that I knew nothing about beforehand, just serendipitous names on the map.

The place that stands out most in my mind is Jefferson, Texas, where I spent my birthday last December. It was everything a small country town should be, the kind of place where oldtimers sat gossiping on benches and shops were actually full of customers, rather than dying on their feet.

Another was Riverside, which I walked through today: a place with a real pride in its history. The outskirts were just typical southern Californian sprawl, but the downtown area had a real buzz. I sat opposite the Mission Inn, a nineteenth-century phantasmagoria of columns, domes and flying buttresses, sipped on a coffee, and watched the world go by.

Two children, waiting for their mother in a parked SUV a few feet away from me, hurled a crisp packet out of the window. It looked so out of place in the tidy street that I strode over, picked up, and thrust it back through the window. The children looked taken aback, and pointed accusingly at me when the mother returned, but the litter stayed in the car where it belonged.

The road out of town was lined with huge mature palms and clapboard houses, and I realised what a long time it had been since I last saw traditional American residential architecture.

Many larger towns and cities in this country lack any real heart. The most striking example I've seen recently has been Phoenix, which tries hard but whose downtown area consists of a few lacklustre shopping malls and empty streets that you can explore in twenty minutes; Dallas is another depressing example. So it's nice to see somewhere that bucks the trend.