We went to Robin Gibb's mansion in Miami Beach yesterday and told the secret serviceman on the gate (the guy in the light blue shirt) that we were friends of Tony and Cherie's. But for some reason he wouldn't let us in. Oh, well, their loss, not ours.

The time has come for you all to know the shocking truth about my family - or at least that part of it currently residing in Florida. This is what they look like: mother Shirley, father John, sister Jacqui and brother-in-law Andy Capp, sorry, Richard.


I took this picture on Tuesday at Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami, one of my favourite gardens in all the world. They had a display of glass art by Dale Chihuly, whose work was featured at London's Kew Gardens last year; his strange organic forms make a perfect foil for the luxuriant, exotic vegetation. In this picture, an ibis surveys a boatload of his work.

Oh, I almost forgot - the other member of the family, Willow, the world's most expensive cat.

Since her arrival in Florida four years ago, she's notched up medical bills of some $20,000, including two furballectomies and enough Valium to keep Woody Allen neurosis-free for a decade. Coral Springs Animal Hospital is currently building a new wing, which we believe should be named after Willow because her treatment probably paid for most of it.

She's a lovely cat, but she can be thoroughly bad-tempered when she wants to. Last time Jacqui and Richard took her in, they warned the vet that she was in particularly vicious mood, scratching and biting at the slightest provocation. 'Don't worry, I've had girlfriends worse than that,' he replied.

The feature in Progress, the AICR supporters' magazine, is starting to bear fruit - my donations have jumped by some $3,000 ($6,000) in the past week or so, and I've increased my target yet again. Thank you so much, and please keep it coming!

Meanwhile, a very happy Christmas and new year to all of you. Thanks for all your contributions to this blog. I'm glad it's now a forum, not a monologue. That rhymes!

Things I love about America, no. 2,477
Whole streets of houses with ridiculously over-the-top Christmas decorations in their front gardens

Today's guest blogger is top New Orleans chef Pam Dean.

Hello All, I thought some of you might like to know more about Phil, the man, not just this wonderful, philanthropic human being. As I'm sure a few might have surmised, I'm a bit taken with Mr. Goddard and was very much looking forward to spending more time together.

The plan was to meet after Christmas for a little R & R. Being in Florida, meeting his family, taking a break from New Orleans and the mental strain it requires to live here these days, well, those were just icing for the cake!

Life has been a series of challenges of late and I was beginning to feel the weight of them. To top things off, Phil was not his usual, somewhat predictable self. He's not an early riser (one common denominator between us), so when I phoned on Tuesday morning and his phone went automatically to voicemail, I thought, "Well, that's odd".

Next, I rang his room in Dallas directly and got no answer. It clicked over to the operator to leave a message. I said something about trying to reach Phil and the operator informed me that he had checked out. Well, it's only 9 AM, more odd behavior. I was transferred to the front desk only to find that not only had Mr. Goddard checked out, but he had done so at 7 AM!!! I KNEW this had to be wrong. All this, and I can't reach him on his cell phone... the wheels are not just turning, they're racing!

I forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago, Phil had informed me that he found a Christmas present for me and it was going to be sent here. He told me that it was quite large, ("To add to this clutter I'm already trying to reduce?") but he was fairly certain that I would like it. He also told me that it was expensive and he'd prefer that I be home when it arrived. I thought he was being sweet, just wanting for my "package" to make it into my home and not be left on the porch for someone to make off with or to be damaged or rained on.

The last time I spoke to him, he said that he had made arrangements for my gift to be delivered around lunchtime, would I be available to accept it? Well, of course...like a girl's not gonna be home to see what her present is, especially when you don't have to wait to unwrap it!

Since I couldn't leave the house 'til after noon, I should do something productive. I know, I'll take care of some of this handwashing that needs to be done.

No Woolite, well, Rite-Aide is just on the corner, I've got time to walk over and be back before noon.Purchases made, I'm headed back to the house.

Wow, there's a guy with a backpack, like Phil's...
Wait a minute...
that guy LOOKS like Philip!

There I stood, on the sidewalk, at Louisiana and St. Charles, hollering, "Philip Goddard" seeing this handsome face turn toward me, that big, beautiful smile that I've missed, crossing back to stand in front of me. He wrapped me in his arms and said" Well, I thought there's a 98% chance that she'll be glad to see me."

I think my reply was "Shut up and kiss me!"

Well, getting into Dallas was much less painful than I expected.

I'm now on the 24th floor of the Adams Mark hotel, with a dramatic view out across the city and - luxury of luxuries - I don't have to check out at 11 am tomorrow. I've got a pile of sightseeing and translating to do for the next couple of days.

Someone said to me this morning: 'How do you prove you've been to all the places you say you've been to?' Well, I don't. I could be sitting in a luxury beachside apartment in San Diego sipping gin and tonics and making all this up. But here, at least, is proof that I've been to Dallas.

It wasn't me that knocked over the 'No pedestrians' sign, though I often feel like doing so - they're absolutely everywhere, and no one pays a blind bit of attention to them.

I'm now in the outer suburbs of Dallas, and hope to be downtown by Saturday evening. US 80, the route I've been following westwards from Arkansas, has metamorphosed from a sleepy country road into a major highway teeming with traffic, but fortunately today there's been a frontage road that allows me to follow it from a safe distance.

This city is no place for pedestrians, and it's daunting just looking at the tangle of freeways on the map. I'm still not sure how I'm going to get through Dallas and Fort Worth and out the other side, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

This is almost the end of my journey for this year, as next week I'm off to Florida to spend Christmas and new year at Jacqui and Richard's. My parents are also over here, and I haven't seen them since June, so I'm really looking forward to a family Christmas in the sunshine. Pam is joining us for part of the time, and I'm coming back to Dallas, via her place in New Orleans, early in the new year.

Sorry, this is starting to sound like a Christmas round robin. Here's a picture I took after a truck shed its load of fried eggs.

There are two sounds that encapsulate everything I love about this country, and which will always bring back memories of my walk.

One is the ubiquitous and incessant chirp of the cicada, and the other is the unearthly moan of the train horn echoing out across the countryside. If you don?t know what either sounds like, both have been captured in this evocative recording.

I hear train horns almost every day because I?m never far from a railroad track, and I?m often woken by them at night as well. But I don?t begrudge this any more than I resent the sound of the cicadas. To me, as an outsider, the horns are utterly strange yet reassuringly familiar, which is precisely how this country feels.

Sometimes it's a major chord, sometimes minor; always it's more spine-tingling the closer you are to the train. No two horns are the same, and drivers' styles vary too: the one in the recording is using a soft, gentle touch, as though trying to avoid waking anyone from their slumbers.

Ideally, the horn should be accompanied by the ding-ding-ding percussion of the railroad crossing bell, and best of all is when the driver waves at me.

Some people mount train horns on their pickups and travel the country making recordings and attending conventions of fellow enthusiasts. I can completely understand their passion for this strange, primeval music.

I haven't been very good about sharing my press coverage with you, but this has been a good week for publicity.

I've had my first national coverage, in the women's magazine the National Examiner (circulation 100,000, available in all good supermarkets, and not to be confused with the National Enquirer, which makes up its news stories).

There was also a really good piece in today's Tyler Morning Telegraph (Tyler being a town just to the south of here). It disregards the "who what why when where" rule - tell your readers everything they need to know in the first paragraph - and instead tells a story that gets people wanting to know what happens next.

And the Association for International Cancer Research, which I'm walking for, has done a feature on me in its supporters' magazine. I imagined a print run of a few tens of thousands but Jack, my contact at AICR, tells me it goes out to a quarter of a million people. I'm hopeful that this will give a big boost to the money we've raised so far.

If you're interested in following the newspaper coverage - and I hope I'm not blowing my own trumpet too much - you could try entering my name on Google Alerts, which is quite good at picking up even very small titles.

Walking by numbers

Times signature checked on debit card: 0 (I've just noticed that I forgot to sign it. It's been used about twice a day for over five months. I'm going to see if I can make it all the way to LA without anyone noticing)
Times hit by cars: 1
Car crashes witnessed: 1
Canine fatalities witnessed: 2 [that's enough mayhem - ed]
Nights in homeless shelter: 2
Times walked illegally on interstate: 3
TV interviews: 6
Radio interviews: 6
States walked through: 10 (NY, NJ, PA, MD, WV, OH, KY, TN, AR, TX)
Nights in tent: 10
Consumption of Subway footlong Veggie Delites on wheat bread with pepper jack cheese, all the veggies and lite mayonnaise: 23
Newspaper interviews: 33
Nights in people's homes (excluding Jacqui and Richard's): 39
Nights in hotels: 123
Steps taken (approx): 3,751,200
Stars in the known universe: 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

As I walked west out of Longview, the first nodding-donkey oil rigs appeared. They were everywhere, quietly wheezing away in fields, front yards, even the grounds of a church. I pictured the announcements during the Sunday morning service: 'Friends, you'll be pleased to hear that this week, we received $17.94 from the collection plate and $13 billion in oil revenues. Praise the Lord!'

But what I didn't know was that oil is not the only precious liquid pumped from deep beneath the fertile soils of northeast Texas. You learn something new every day.

Today, just as it was starting to get dark and cold, a pickup stopped beside me. 'I was going to offer you a ride, but I can see you're walking,' said the driver, whose name was Dana Moon. We chatted for a while, I asked how far we were from Longview, my destination for the day, and then we said goodbye.

Twenty minutes later, he reappeared. 'I've just driven into town to measure it for you,' he said. 'It's exactly five miles.' And he handed me a steaming cup of hot chocolate.

That's the kind of person you meet when you're walking across America.

Talking of miles, I seem to have done rather a lot of them. I don't know how many I will have covered if I make it to the Pacific, but I'm guessing that it will be about 3,000, plus or minus a couple of hundred, which means I'm now halfway there.

And that seems like a good opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who's helped to speed me on my way so far: all the providers of money, meals, accommodation, equipment, moral support, conversation. I can't even begin to express my gratitude for all this, which has made my walk into a team effort rather than an individual enterprise.

I'd also like to extend a special message of gratitude to George W. Bush for making such a spectacular mess of the economy, bringing the currency to its knees, and thus turning the United States into a bargain basement for long-distance walkers from London, England.

So many of the small towns I've walked through seem to have had the life sucked out of them by strip malls and out-of-town Wal-Marts. The streets are empty, the sidewalks cracked and weed-infested, many of the shops boarded up.

Jefferson has bucked this trend: it's the kind of place where the locals still sit on benches in the sunshine, share the latest gossip and watch the world go by.

In the 19th century it was a large, thriving, cotton-rich riverport on Big Cypress Bayou, with access to the Mississippi, and thanks to a natural log dam the water was deep enough for steamboats. But in 1871, for some misguided reason, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up the dam, and that was the beginning of Jefferson's decline as a port.

But the town has picked itself up, and shows a real sense of pride in its heritage. You can see it in details like vases of fresh flowers on stop signs, and vintage cars festooned with Christmas lights. It's a friendly place, too: I took a day off from walking and went for a wander, and before long it seemed like I'd met half the 2,000 population. I also did an interview with the most bizarrely named newspaper of the trip so far, the Jefferson Jimplecute.

I'd like to thank the following:

• Jerry and Martha Harp for putting me up for the night and all sorts of other help
• Hugh Lewis and Darla McCorkle for letting me stay for two nights, free of charge, in their historic B&B, and baking me a suprise birthday cake
• Terri Richardson of the Texarkana Gazette, for making a 100-mile round trip to deliver a replacement for my phone, which fell victim to last week's heavy rain.

And I also want to sent my very best wishes to fellow cross-country walker Stuart Hamilton. He and Dave are taking a well-earned break in the UK and returning to the States next spring. In one of those extraordinarily ill-timed quirks of fate, just before they left for home, Stu was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He's had surgery, they caught it early, and it has a 95% cure rate. If he's like me, he'll be worrying about anything that could get in the way of finishing the walk - so good luck, Stu.

I needed to get some printing done this afternoon, so I looked up a company in the phone book and went to see them.

When I went in the main entrance and said what I wanted, the receptionist said: 'Oh, you want our printing department. You need to get back in your car and drive to the other end of the building, and it's the last door on the right.'

I know the length of my steps from my pedometer, so I worked out the distance to the printing department as I walked. It was 29 yards.