As I passed the 2,000-mile mark, I kept my eyes open for someone to record the historic moment on my camera.

I approached a guy on a bicycle - a rare sight round these parts, and surely a kindred spirit - but he just uttered a string of nonsense sounds, said 'No, no' and wobbled off.

Then I saw a couple in an SUV switching drivers, and went over to them. She wound up her window, and he wagged his finger reprovingly at me as if to say whatever it is you want, we're not interested. But I persisted, and soon we were chatting away; they were on a thousand-mile journey to Macon, Georgia, so at least we had something in common.

I thought back to the day I reached 1,000 miles: October 6, all the way back in Murray, Kentucky. It feels like only yesterday, but excluding my three-week Christmas break it was thirteen weeks ago. I'm not sure, but I reckon I've got about another 1,300 miles to walk.

The next milestone, which I probably won't quite reach before I head off to New Orleans on Thursday, is crossing the New Mexico state line and entering another timezone. After that I'll be making my way southwest to El Paso, which is actually back in Texas and on the Mexican border.

Kinky Friedman, a 62-year-old Jewish cowboy turned singer and thriller writer, is one of Texas' most famous and colourful figures. He has a string of hit songs to his credit, including They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Any More. In 2006 he stood as an independent in the election for governor, and came fourth with 13% of the vote.

I speed-read his book of essays, Texas Hold-'Em, in the library today. I thought you might enjoy the following adapted extract.

You know you're from Texas if

• Your TV has 897 channels, but you don't have indoor plumbing
• You allow your 12-year-old daughter to smoke at the dinner table, in front of her kids
• You mow your grass and find three cars
• You've been married and divorced five times, but you still have the same in-laws
  
• You have to take a packed lunch when you drive to your roadside mailbox
• Your nearest neighbour is in a different timezone
• You encounter four other cars on a 200-mile stretch of highway and complain about the traffic jam
• Your dog can keep his balance while perched atop a toolbox in the back of a pickup truck going 70 mph in a hailstorm.

[Click below for another new entry]

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that cross-country walkers are two a penny.

Sometimes, newspapers and TV stations have politely told me they're not interested in my story because they're often contacted by people like me, and I've thought they're exaggerating. But now I'm not so sure.

The Lamesa Press-Reporter published an interview with me today, and beside it was a piece about someone else doing exactly the same thing, though the journalist (who wrote both articles) never mentioned him to me.

Dan Lyons is walking from Florida to California, raising money for a homeless shelter and rehabilitation centre in Oregon. He's about ten days ahead of me. This is his fourth coast-to-coast walk, and I can see why he should want to do it so many times - for all its ups and downs, it's very addictive.

I've also recently been in email contact with Matt Gregory, who's heading in the opposite direction and, like me, raising money for cancer research. He's currently in Arizona, and we're hoping to meet for a few beers somewhere along the way.

As always, I read the paper avidly from cover to cover. In the age of satellite TV and the internet, newspapers are still the lifeblood of every small American town, and for an outsider like me they provide a unique barometer of what's on local people's minds.

This being cotton country, today's Press-Reporter has all the latest on the white fluffy stuff that blows snow-like across the highways and byways of Texas.

This week, an estimated 2,051 bales of Dawson county cotton have been ginned, bring the total for the season to 161,191. The average leaf grade for the week has been 3.04, and the average mike 3.81 - I looked this up, and it's short for micronaire, meaning the fineness of a fibre as measured by its airflow resistance.

In a region where water is a particularly precious commodity, the paper has a two-page, large-scale map of Lamesa showing every well and the amount by which its water level rose or fell during 2006.

And in a topic close to everyone's heart, the paper devotes 25 column inches to details of this week's menus at local schools and old people's homes.

This is my second rest day, and with a bitter north wind blowing there's little incentive to venture outside. But I did pay a visit to the excellent local library, and came away knowing twice as much about Texas as when I went in.

Here are some of the things I learned.

1. To be elected in Texas, one must believe in a supreme being.
2. Texas is not the biggest state; that honour belongs to Alaska. Nor is it the most populous; California is home to far more people. But it is 773 miles from the western tip near El Paso to the Sabine river, which marks its eastern boundary, and that's basically about the distance I'll have covered if I make it to the other side.
   
3. Barbed wire (they call it 'bob wahr') was introduced to Texas by a Yankee, John W. Gates. He arrived in San Antonio in 1876, and demonstrated the product's virtues by fencing in a herd of longhorn cows in the city centre. They stampeded, but the fence held easily, and local ranchers were deeply impressed. It was barbed wire that tamed Texas, chopping the state up to make it easier to settle and allowing ranchers to improve their stock by selectively breeding and penning cattle.
4. The state dish, chili, is not Mexican, but was invented in San Antonio in the 1880s. Beans are unacceptable in proper chili.
5. Less than 10 percent of Texas is true desert.
6. Dr Pepper, America's fifth most popular soft drink, was invented in Waco in 1885 by Charles Alderton, who named it after a doctor in Rural Retreat, Virginia.
   
7. The roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus, is a species of ground cuckoo. It can fly, but not very high or for very long, preferring to run at speeds of up to 17 mph. Its common name derives from the fact that when it sees a car coming, it runs away down the road.
8. Texas is the only state that permits residents to cast absentee ballots from space, thanks to NASA in Houston.
9. Despite its rightwing reputation, Texas is one of the most politically apathetic of all states. Forty-three percent of the voting-age population turned out for the 2000 presidential election; only Arizona and Hawaii were more lethargic. It must be something to do with all that sunshine.
   
10. The state flying mammal is the Mexican free-tailed bat.
    

I'm spending a few days in this pleasant little town of 10,000 souls, adrift in a 35,000-square-mile sea of grass known as the Llano Estacado.

I set up base camp here, leaving piles of food, unwashed socks and computer paraphernalia strewn all over the floor of room 128 at the Westerner Motel, and then hitched back along the road on two successive days to complete the 63-mile walk from Snyder, the nearest town to the east.

I knew that one day the terrain I walked through would start to resemble the picture at the top of this page, and so it has: arid, empty, seemingly endless.

Yesterday there was nothing whatsoever to obstruct the setting sun - no buildings, no trees, no mountains - and it just slipped below the horizon in a quick, quiet, matter-of-fact kind of way. But this is still not desert, and there are still plenty of cottonfields, their neatly drawn dark red furrows stretching away to infinity.

Now, probably as a result of the increased distances I've been walking, I have another bout of shinsplints. It's not nearly as bad as the episode that slowed me to a crawl back in Pennsylvania, but I'm taking a couple of days' rest. By the time I set off from the motel, it will feel like leaving home.

I have two more breaks to look forward to soon.

February is Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, and I have an important job to do. Pam belongs to the Krewe du Vieux (croo de voo), one of the many krewes, or carnival clubs, and I've volunteered to help pull her float on the 3rd. So I'll be going there for a long weekend, and then returning for the week leading up to the 20th, which is the climax of the carnival.

I'm reading a biography of that other great British explorer, Captain Scott, at the moment, and I can't help being struck by the slight differences in approach between him and me.

It's hard to imagine him looking at his watch as he and his team stumbled their weary way across the polar ice shelf and saying: 'Okay chaps, time to pack up for the day. Now, where's the nearest Holiday Inn Express?'

This is the last picture of Jayne I have on this computer, and I'm posting it here now because Thursday is the first anniversary of her death. I took it in London's Kew Gardens in July 2004. It seems like only yesterday that she died.

I'm pleased with the way things are going at the moment. The increased distances between towns are forcing me to plan more, and be more disciplined; sometimes I even leave my motel before the 11 am checking-out time. Yesterday I covered twenty-eight miles, the longest distance yet, simply by getting up early.

My feet are also behaving themselves, and I haven't had any pain or blisters for a long time. Even the stroller is being surprisingly docile, having covered around 175 miles with barely a murmur of complaint, though a friend said I should have a sweepstake as to when the first wheel falls off.

Another friend suggested I have a competition to give the stroller a name, but I think that's a bit tacky, and besides it doesn't fit with my buddha-like renunciation of affection for material objects. Like everything else travelling with me, if it doesn't pull its weight, out it goes. But if it does get me all the way to California, I might buy it a drink.

As you'll know by now, it seems that all the people who pass me on this desolate road do one of two things: offer me a ride, or dial 911. The owner of last night's motel said I'd make it into the local paper because it lists every 911 call the police have received during the past week, and promised to send me a copy. I said I'd treasure it more than any of the other newspaper articles that have been written about me.

I've also been turning the offers of rides to my advantage. Today, the walk from Roby to Snyder was 33 miles, which is at the top end of what's feasible in one day. Fortunately, someone stopped for me at about 5 pm and brought me to Snyder, so once again I'll have to hitch back to where he picked me up and walk the remaining 21 miles tomorrow. This has the added bonus of allowing me to book a motel room for two nights - an exquisite luxury for me.

When I got into the car, I introduced myself and asked what the driver's name was. 'Jesus', he said, quick as a flash, and pulled a gun on me. Fortunately, he was only joking. His name was Wayne.

This morning, I was jolted from my slumbers by a woman yelling: "Get outta there!" and firing two gunshots. At first I thought it was because I was camping on her land without permission, but I peeked outside and she was nowhere to be seen, so she was probably scaring birds or something.

It was the first time I'd used my tent since August. Then, it had been hot and humid, so I'd left the flap open and spent hours batting away mosquitoes; last night it was a couple of degrees below freezing and I was wrapped in every item of clothing I had. But it turned out to be a surprisingly good night's sleep.

As I continued along US 180, I saw an unexpected sight: someone else walking. I knew as soon as he appeared over the brow of the hill that it was going to be an interesting encounter, and so it proved to be.


Seventy-year-old South Korean Ahn Yong Min (left) is walking from Los Angeles to Washington DC to express the friendship between his country and the United States and hold Christian missionary events. He set off last October in the company of his wife Park Sungja, 67, and support car driver Lee Yung Ho, 64, and plans to reach the capital on July 4.

Ahn is a larger-than-life character. A former national TV news anchor, Vietnam war reporter and manager of South Korea's archery team, he's already walked 1,600 miles from Shanghai to Seoul, and spent two months in 2002 visiting all of his country's world cup soccer venues on foot.

I walked through Funston. There's precious little fun to be had in this dilapidated and largely abandoned village of half a dozen houses and a church. It should be renamed Junkston and rebranded as a tourist attraction: the world's largest free yard sale.

It's de rigueur in large parts of this country to have in your front yard the rusting remains of every car your family has owned for the past four generations and, for some reason, an old school bus. However, the people of Funston seem to have taken this preoccupation to new heights, perhaps in some act of collective psychosis.

Every square inch of the village is littered with decaying cars, tractors, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, school furniture, books, toys, lawnmowers, and filing cabinets.

I pictured it slowly disappearing under mountains of junk, the inhabitants pathologically unable to throw anything away, until at last a vanload of white-coated, needle-brandishing psychiatrists arrived in the small hours of the morning to take them to a place of safety.

Anson, where I am now, is not much better. Parts of it remind me of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, and I wondered whether it had been hit by a tornado, but it doesn't appear to have been.

I've also crossed off another item in the I-Spy Book of Texas Clichés: my first tumbleweed. All I need now for a full house is a Mexican with a moustache and sombrero dozing beneath a stovepipe cactus, and a roadrunner beep-beeping along in a cloud of dust.

I'm sure the people of Shackelford county are good, upright citizens, but they're also a bit trigger-happy when it comes to making 911 calls.

No fewer than four of them called the police about me today, oblivious of the fact that neither under state nor federal law is it an offence to walk along a road or push a stroller.

Still, dialling 911 was probably the most exciting thing they'd done for years, so who was I to deny them the simple pleasure of wasting the emergency services' time? I once called the fire brigade and told them my school was burning down, so I'm a fine one to talk.

When the fifth police car stopped by (he was just passing and making sure I was OK), my patience was wearing thin. Couldn't he put out a message to say stop harrassing this guy, he's trying to raise money for cancer and he's not doing anything wrong? So he very obligingly did.

When I went to the restaurant down the road for dinner, they asked if I was the guy who was doing the walk. I told them I was, and asked where they'd heard about me. On the radio, they said. Which radio? The police scanner, which everyone listens to round here. Then they told me that dinner was on the house. It was a good end to a frustrating day.

We had more ice storms on Sunday. Although the results can be deadly - the nearby town of Abilene has had over a hundred car accidents in the past 24 hours - they're also beautiful. Trees develop extra-long 'branches' reaching almost to the ground, and when the weight of ice becomes too much, the real boughs snap off.

One side effect of the freezing weather has been the sympathy factor. Normally, when I'm in the countryside, about one person a day offers me a ride. In the past day and a half, the sight of my frost-covered figure tramping through the gloom has inspired no fewer than fifteen people to stop.

I'm getting to like my stroller: it's easy to push, I no longer have to keep shifting my backpack around to stay comfortable, and it's dramatically increased the speed of my walking. Well, I say dramatically: it's gone up from about 3.2 to 3.7 miles an hour, which may not sound very much in the great scheme of things, but this can make a big difference to my arrival time in the evenings.

On the downside, around half of the people who stop ask if I have a baby in my stroller. This is because my backpack has a fold-out rain hood which covers it in bad weather, turning it into a large, unidentifiable rectangular parcel-like object.

I'm tempted to give a sarcastic answer - if it were a baby, it would be dead from hypothermia or suffocation by now - but I maintain my usual smiling politeness.

Today, I saw another landmark reminding me that I'm actually covering some distance. In the past there's been things like the first cottonfield, the first oilwell and the first time-zone change; the latest is huge expanses of prickly pear cactus.

The landscape is at last starting to metamorphose into something closer to the Texas stereotype: grass bleached almost white by sun and drought; long, low mesas beside the road, thorny mesquite bushes, and scrub oak and cedar in ever-dwindling numbers.

It's also becoming very, very empty. I walked 26 miles on Sunday, which is my record, before hitching a ride for another 24 miles to the next motel. Call me a wimp, but I'm still trying to stave off the day when I have to use my tent in sub-freezing temperatures. And don't worry, I shall be hitching back today to complete the stretch I didn't walk.

I was going to take a picture of myself for the blog this afternoon, but the camera battery died at the crucial moment. It was probably the best missed photo opportunity of the trip so far. So let me paint a picture not in pixels, but in paragraphs of perfectly punctuated prose.

Imagine Phil Goddard standing just outside a little town in Texas. He's a colourful sight: coated in frost from head to foot, and with a bright yellow scarf and a bright red nose, he could easily be mistaken for a lanky middle-aged snowman. His vision is obscured by the quarter-inch layer of ice on his glasses which reforms as fast as he can scrape it off, and his clothes have frozen solid so that he crackles as he walks.

Phil has just experienced his first ice storm. His teeth chatter as he stands beside the green roadsign with white lettering, but he has a grin on his face. The sign, with its tasseled fringe of inch-long icicles, reads: "Cool, Texas. Pop. 280".

I experienced my second arctic blast today (that's the technical term that all the meteorologists use); this time, the temperature plummeted from a humid 67F to a frigid 47F in less than two minutes, and then it poured, I mean POURED. My motel is now flooded, and to get to reception I have to walk through six inches of water. Tomorrow's forecast is for ice storms - I've never experienced one of those before.

I love the sheer drama of the weather here, even when I hate the weather itself. I also love the way everyone is so obsessed by it, and the way it makes headlines, just like at home.

On a warmer note, the article in the AICR magazine has now generated well over £21,000, taking my total to £31,226 ($61,100). Thank you all so much. And if you're an AICR supporter who's new to this site, please jump right in and get involved by leaving a comment or message, or at least have a go at the multimillion-dollar Picking up Pennies sweepstake. It could change your life, though it probably won't.

You may have noticed the appearance of a couple of new pages on this site.

One, which I haven't got round to writing yet, is called How to Walk Across America, and is for the many people who've emailed asking for hints for real or imaginary journeys.

The other is entitled Picking up Pennies.

I'm earning a healthy little income from walking across America. It's rather less than the federal minimum wage, but it helps to fund the occasional splurge, like ordering a double espresso instead of a single, or giving my clothes an extra five minutes in the laundromat tumble drier.

Ever since those first tentative steps down Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, I've picked up every single coin I've walked past on the ground, unless it's been rendered unrecognisable by the wheels of a thousand trucks or permanently melted into the asphalt by the broiling Texas sun.

What's more, I've kept a record of the total, which is where you come in.

I'd like you to guess how much I'll have collected by the time I reach LA (or die in the attempt), and the person who comes closest gets all the money. It doesn't matter if you're a friend or relative; just visit the Picking up Pennies page, record your guess, and wait with bated breath until I finish. I don't get to see your entries, so it will be just as much of a surprise to me.

Judge's decision is final. Only one entry per person. No purchase necessary. No correspondence will be entered into. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up with your payments. The price of investments can go down as well as up.

I'm writing this for the benefit of the next lonely, homesick expat Brit who Googles "English pub Fort Worth".

I spotted one while I was looking for a hotel this evening, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen it, so I looked it up.

In fact I'm neither lonely nor homesick, but I just fancied the idea of downing a couple of pints of London Pride, snacking on some pork scratchings and discussing Man United's prospects for the coming season with the barman.

The Fox and Hound English Pub and Grille at 604 Main Street is a cynical, shameless piece of corporate fraud (it's part of a chain, apparently) that should be prosecuted for misrepresentation. The use of the singular rather than the plural in 'hound' should have given the game away right from the start.

This place is as English as the college basketball booming from the nineteen TV screens, the Coors, Budweiser and Miller Lite dispensed by smiling bartenders with perfect teeth, and the menu of blackened mahi-mahi, grilled quesadillas and Philly cheese steak.

Amid all the Texas razzmatazz, there was just one tiny concession to America's friend and ally across the water: my food was served on a photocopy of an old London newspaper.

This was the third English pub I'd been to in this country. The first, just outside Cincinnati, was someone's idea of what a pub should look like, with bar furnishings imported from England, Strongbow cider on tap, and bangers and mash on the menu.

It wasn't quite right, like one of those sci-fi films where the aliens try to replicate human beings but give themselves away with one tiny incorrect detail, like having six fingers on each hand. The air conditioning and table service were out of place (in any British pub worth its salt, you fight your way to the bar through a miasma of cigarette smoke and try to catch the staff's attention), but at least they'd tried.

The second, the British-owned Crown and Anchor in New Orleans, was just like the real thing, right down to the Walkers cheese and onion crisps and Crunchies behind the bar.

But the Fox and Hound English Pub and Grille couldn't even be bothered to try. And if they can't be bothered to try, I don't think we lonely, homesick expats should bother to give them our custom.

This is my first day back on the road after the rather generous three-week Christmas break I awarded myself.

The last part of it was spent at Pam's home in New Orleans, the pleasure of being together tainted somewhat by the fact that her dog Callie had disappeared on new year's eve. A thoughtless neighbour left the gate open, there were fireworks exploding everywhere, and she just melted away into the night.

We put lots of fliers up, and the effect on the neighbours was really touching. A guy walked past as I sat on the steps, stopped to read it, and then crossed himself in silent prayer. There's a kid who comes and plays with Callie, and I heard him calling for her, so I went outside to break the news and ask him to keep a look out. He just sat there on his bicycle looking stunned, his eyes brimming with tears.

If you sit on the steps for any time, you're also made very much aware of the sheer old-fashioned friendliness and courtesy of people not only in New Orleans, but throughout the South.

You can't walk a hundred yards without a complete stranger saying how ya doin'; taxi rides are an opportunity to exchange life histories with the driver, long pre-Christmas supermarket lines a time to joke with your fellow customers rather than look at your watch and make tutting noises like you would back home.

And yet this is also a violent city, made more so by increased poverty and stretched police resources post-Katrina. It's January 9 today, and there's been one murder for every day so far this year.

Anyway, I'm now halfway between Dallas and its sister city, Fort Worth, on Texas route 180. This is the road that I'll be following for six hundred miles to El Paso.

As is so often the case, the landscape is not at all like I expected. The high-rises ended abruptly at the Trinity river, a disappointing brown trickle scarcely worthy of this great city, and then I found myself marching through what must be the world's biggest concentration of used car lots: hundreds of them lining the road for ten miles or more.

Talking of things with wheels, I've known ever since I first thought of this walk that at some stage I'd have to acquire something to carry several days' food and water. The towns thin out drastically in West Texas, and become even further and fewer between in New Mexico and Arizona.

I was sitting outside a gas station today when I spotted the answer to my prayers: a stroller (that's a pushchair or baby buggy back home) abandoned on the grass down a side street. It was covered in mud, but in good condition, so I helped myself.

I still feel a bit selfconscious pushing it, and it can be a real pain sometimes, but I've got to get used to the idea. What's more, if I use it to carry my backpack, I can walk much faster - I just have to avoid the temptation to hop in and freewheel down every hill between here and Venice Beach.

I've decided that's where I'm aiming for, by the way. I have a print on my wall at home by the British artist Sir Peter Blake called Madonna on Venice Beach, and Jayne and I always used to say we'd go there one day.

Pam and I have just come back from a really enjoyable few days in Miami Beach, the highlight of which was new year's eve.

I was constantly reminded of the same evening last year, when Jayne was very ill and we sat at home on our own watching the London fireworks on TV and feeling miserable.

So much has happened since then, and I still think and talk about her every day. But I feel life has started to move on, and I count myself incredibly fortunate to have met so many wonderful people, the latest being Pam.

At midnight, we went for a walk along the beach with huge crowds of fellow revellers, champagne bottle in hand. It was a typically sultry south Florida night, and the clouds had parted to reveal a starry sky. As we walked back to our hotel, we heard a man's voice from a balcony overhead.

'Hey, man, your wife is gorgeous,' he shouted, and threw down a plastic lei to go round her neck. I turned to look up at him and his friends.

'Thanks,' I grinned, overlooking his misunderstanding of my marital status. 'You're the third complete stranger to tell me that in the past twenty-four hours.'