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.