Coast To Coast

And the winner is...

2007-05-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

...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.

New Orleans.

2007-05-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

'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.

Venice Beach.

2007-05-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

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...

Venice Beach, May 8

2007-05-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Venice Beach, California. 3,091 miles.

2007-05-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

Culver City, California. 3,084 miles.

2007-05-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

A day in the life

May 5, 2007

11 am. Cesar Chavez St, Boyle Heights.

Jack meets us at our hotel, and we discuss our plans for the day over a drink.

Noon Crossing the Los Angeles river on 4th Street.

1 pm. S. Central Avenue, Los Angeles.

Taiko drummers at a Japanese festival.

2 pm. Downtown Los Angeles.

These legs were made for walking.

3 pm. Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Jack goes for a test drive at a Nissan dealership. We calculate that the money I've raised would fund one of these for him and one for us, but on reflection decide that it could be better spent.

4 pm. Washington Boulevard.

Another day, another thrift shop, another armful of clothes.

5 pm. Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles.

I've turned my last corner, and this road leads all the way to the Pacific.

Boyle Heights, California. 3,071 miles.

2007-05-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

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.

El Monte, California. 3,061 miles.

2007-05-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Glen Avon, California. 3,043 miles.

2007-04-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Banning, California. 3,004 miles.

2007-04-27T23:56:00.000-07:00

Floating in a pool and gazing at the palm trees doesn't always come cheap in southern California, and by the time I'd spent three days at the Desert Shadows Inn, eating in their restaurant and drinking at their bar, I'd run up a hefty bill. But when the final reckoning came, they waved my debit card away - it was all on the house. So a huge thank you to Laura and Doug for their warm and generous hospitality.

Talking of warmth, today was the hottest day of my walk so far at 102F (39C), easily topping last summer's 99F (37C). A scorched smell hung in the air, and the pure white sand along the road north out of Palm Springs was dazzling. Fortunately there were plenty of water sources along the way, because I was gulping it down at two litres an hour.

I spent a large part of the day walking through the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm. Put three turbines on a hilltop in Britain, and all you'll generate is harrumphing from retired colonels worried about the effect on property prices. But no such concerns prevail here, where 4,000 turbines power the whole of Palm Springs and the Coachella valley, exploiting winds of up to 70 mph that are sucked in through the narrow pass each morning as the air warms and rises.

I did a TV interview this morning, which I think may have ended up on whatever is the digital equivalent of the cutting-room floor. It took place outside these houses in Palm Springs, and I decided that of all the tens of thousands I'd wallked past, these were the ones I'd most like to live in. Not everyone's cup of tea, I know, but I thought they were beautiful homes in a beautiful city.

I've been so focused on the end of the walk that I'd almost forgotten another important landmark. I was sitting beside the road in a place called Cabazon, changing my socks, as you do, when I suddenly realised this was about the 3,000-mile mark. Inspiration deserted me, so I simply took a picture of myself to mark the occasion. The tired, frazzled look is the result of three late nights rather than 3,000 miles of walking.

Palm Springs

2007-04-27T01:39:00.000-07:00

I've finally got round to writing my 'How to walk across America' page - better late than never.

I've had quite a lot of emails from other people thinking of doing something similar and asking for advice, and I hope it will be helpful. But I also hope it will appeal to armchair travellers.

Palm Springs, California. 2,983 miles.

2007-04-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States - Jayne and I had long planned to come here, and it's lived up to expectations. It sits at the foot of 10,800-ft Mt San Jacinto, and is ringed by bare, rocky mountains, some so close that boulders must occasionally come crashing through people's roofs.

The beauty is manmade as well as natural. As a fan of modernist architecture, I've never seen so many houses I've wanted to live in, and even prosaic buildings like car showrooms and doctors' surgeries are works of art in their own right.

The streets have been a pleasure too, jam-packed with colourful desert flora. This is the kind of walking I've enjoyed most on the trip - give me a choice between dusty desert and neat suburbs, and I'm almost ashamed to say the suburbs win out any day.

The only problem has been the heat. I walked nine miles to get to the hotel I'm now staying in and, figuring it wasn't very far and I'd be able to buy drinks along the way, I filled only one of my one-litre water bottles. By the time I arrived, I was parched.

I've been living the life of a lotus eater for three days now, lying on a floating mattress, gazing up at the palms and the eternally azure sky and thinking about nothing in particular. Word has got round my fellow guests about what I'm doing, and they've all been really friendly.

I'm leaving tomorrow with about eighteen miles to my next destination. With a forecast high of 100F (38C), my water supply will be rather more copious this time.

Indio, California. 2,958 miles.

2007-04-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

Future plans first: I'm aiming to walk into the sea at Venice Beach on May 6, eighteen years to the day after Jayne and I got married. She set a lot of store by anniversaries, and she would have approved of this one.

It also means I can polish off the last 140-odd miles in very leisurely fashion and spend time indulging one of my favourite occupations: lounging beside swimming pools.

Pam is coming to join me for the last three days of the walk, and I'm also delighted that genial Jack Cumming of AICR is flying out to meet me. He has obtained generous commercial sponsorship so that he doesn't have to draw on the charity's funds to come here.

Final item from the good news department: around the time that I finish, Dave Toolan and Stuart Hamilton will be resuming their even more epic (ie longer and more uncomfortable) trek across America.

So when the lights go off at Nytola Towers and the door creaks shut for the final time, you'll be able to stroll across the road to walkingthestates.com for your daily fix.

And as the icing on the cake (if that's not mixing my metaphors too much), Dave and Stu have decided to do the second part of their walk for AICR.

The five-day journey here across largely empty desert from Ehrenberg, AZ was an ordeal, but not an unpleasant one.

Once again I had to carry a lot of extra water - fortunately the weather wasn't too scorching - and manage on the minimum of food. At one stage I managed to go for twenty-four hours on five of those horrible cellophane-wrapped pastries whose ingredients sound like the contents of a chemistry set.

Phone calls aside, it was an extremely solitary time, but I've grown to enjoy my own company a lot more over the last few months - I hope it won't turn me into a hermit after I've finished.

Being on your own all day creates a heightened sense of reality and makes you much more aware of little things; it's almost like a drug, and just as addictive.

It wasn't all serene tranquillity. Thursday was one of the noisiest nights of the whole trip: the wind was blowing in my direction from the interstate, bringing with it the incessant whine of tyres and engines; in the Chocolate Mountains gunnery range to the south, air force planes used innocent rabbits and cacti for target practice; and a border patrol helicopter circled my tent with a spotlight until I came out and waved wearily.

The next morning, I met three border patrol agents hunting a group of five illegal immigrants. I was pleased to see that in the high-tech twenty-first century, they were still employing the time-honoured technique of peering at the ground to look for footprints.

They told me to call if I spotted anyone, but I thought fat chance - my sympathies lay more with the fugitives than the pursuers.

Indio itself is nothing much to write home about, but its surroundings most certainly are. My route brought me from high in the Eagle mountains through citrus and date groves to the Coachella valley, which is below sea level.

It had been drizzling all afternoon, and the spent rainclouds were spilling like dry ice down the slopes of the Santa Rosa mountains to the southwest. Behind me, two concentric rainbows arched spectacularly over the interstate, so that the cars seemed to be driving through them.

I was hungry, thirsty, and caked with dust after not washing for five days. I booked in to a motel just along the road from a casino, and casinos are always good for elaborate and reasonably priced buffets, so that was where I dined last night.

After all that silence and aloneness, it felt really odd being surrounded by people feeding coins into clamorously insatiable slot machines. This is a sense I've often had on this journey, of walking often unnoticed into other people's lives and then out into the wilderness again.

Today was my second most unsuccessful day in terms of distance. In Cincinnati last August, I managed just three miles in one day thanks to being waylaid by various interesting characters, one of whom has become a friend. Alcohol played a prominent role then, and it did today.

I took advantage of the motel's late checkout at noon, walked just under three miles, and then found an enticing-looking Mexican restaurant. I ordered lunch and a margarita, but when the food arrived it was the wrong dish.

I was quite happy to eat it, but they gave me another margarita on the house by way of apology, and then I had one more for the road, by which time it was about 3 pm. There was a motel just down the street, so I checked in and promptly passed out on the bed for four hours.

Of course there are other ways of measuring the success of a day than the number of miles I've put under my belt, and this was definitely a successful day.

Ehrenberg, Arizona. 2,854 miles.

2007-04-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

Back in August last year, when I was walking through Pennsylvania, I posted a picture of a roadsign saying 'California' on my blog. I wrote:

After more than a week of dallying, I've put on a burst of speed and made it all the way to California.No, not Arnie Schwarzenegger's land of perpetual sunshine, but the Pennsylvania town of the same name - but I did think one day, with luck, I'll walk past a similar sign and it really will be the Golden State.

Well, tomorrow I should be doing exactly that. I'm one mile short of the state line, on the banks of the Colorado river, and eagerly looking forward to seeing the Welcome to California sign. Back in August, this seemed like an event in the impossibly distant future, but now it's arrived. I wish time wouldn't pass so quickly.

After that, there's another long, empty stretch of Sonoran desert to look forward to, so you probably won't hear from me for a while.

Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

2007-04-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

I made a seventy-mile detour here (using my thumb rather than my feet), and I'm really glad I took the trouble.

The journey led me northwards along the Colorado river, a broad ribbon of deepest glinting turquoise pushing its way purposefully through empty desert and forming the boundary between Arizona and California.

Then the river widens into the 45-mile-long reservoir that is Lake Havasu, overlooked on its eastern shore by Lake Havasu City, a wholly artificial creation built in 1964 by chainsaw magnate Robert P. McCulloch.

Its centrepiece is the old London Bridge, dismantled in 1968 and brought here stone by stone.

I'd always been fascinated by the grandiosity of the project and the famous (though wholly untrue) legend that McCulloch thought he was buying the much more interesting Tower Bridge. The extraordinary story of what Guinness World Records describes as the biggest antique ever sold is recounted here.

I'd pictured the bridge as an incongruous tourist curiosity, feet planted in the sand, pollution-stained bricks fading in the broiling sun. In fact it still serves a very necessary purpose, spanning a busy canal and used by vehicles and pedestrians.

The bridge that replaced it is quite similar in design, and I could imagine a post-global-warming London in which speedboats full of bikini-clad tourists sipping exotic cocktails plied their way up and down a palm-fringed Thames.

It's a beautiful, elegant structure that fits perfectly into its new setting on the other side of the world. If bridges could think, this one would be dreaming of a bygone age, in which the sun never shone and bowler-hatted, grey-suited commuters scurried back and forth between London Bridge station and an assortment of banks and insurance companies.

I wish it a long and happy retirement.

Quartzsite, Arizona. 2,838 miles.

2007-04-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

If any of my Scrabble-playing friends are reading this, Quartzsite is easily the highest-scoring town of any I've visited - just imagine it mouthwateringly sprawled across two triple word scores. Shame about that redundant 'S' - the town was originally known as Quartzite, but the misspelled name somehow gained currency.

The four-day, 77-mile walk here across the Sonoran desert from the hot springs in Tonopah has been the most physically challenging stretch of the whole journey. It's been hot and empty, and I've had to carry up to eight litres of water. Also, I've avoided walking on the interstate, instead opting for tracks that follow it through the desert, some of them boulder-strewn switchbacks crisscrossed by deep ravines.

Everything is prickly, from the endless dense thickets of creosote bushes and palo verde trees to the dozens of barbed-wire fences, and my arms and legs are covered in scratches.

I've crossed thirty or forty fences; each time I have to decide whether to climb over, crawl underneath or gingerly part the wires and go through the middle. My backpack always gets thrown over the top in what I call the Barbed-Wire Bounce, in which I hold on till the very last moment to minimise the impact. So far, my laptop doesn't appear to have suffered any adverse consequences.

The Harquahala mountains have been another highlight of the walk: an immense cactus garden spanning a surprisingly rich gamut of sage and olive greens and stippled with scarlet ocotillo flowers like a Flanders poppyfield. Again, I'd have expected the area to be swarming with camera-clicking tourists, but the only sounds were the wind in my ears and the whine of tyres on asphalt a few hundred yards away.

Speaking of wind, the weather took a dramatic change for the worse today after weeks of constant heat and sunshine. Dark clouds massed over the mountaintops, the temperature plunged, and a vicious gale unleashed a phenomenon I've never experienced before and can only describe as a mudstorm, whipping up musty clouds of dust from the desert floor, mixing them with lashing rain and flinging the results into my face.

No matter how much water I carry, I usually have to ration myself at least slightly, and thirst is never far away. It's given me a special appreciation for little things I'd normally take for granted: the gurgle of water pumped through irrigation channels like the one I photographed in Phoenix the other day, the plink-plink of ice cubes rattling in my two thermoses as I walk, and even, last night in my tent, opening a tin of luscious pineapple rings in their own juice.

I'm awarding myself a day off tomorrow, metaphorically shedding my walking boots, donning my tourist hat and going off to explore a little bit of olde England in the Arizona desert. Watch this space.

Tonopah, Arizona. 2,761 miles. Happy Easter.

2007-04-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

I had two encounters with less than likeable creatures yesterday.

The first was in Subway, where I was buying my 31st footlong Veggie Delite on wheat with pepperjack cheese, all the veggies and lite mayonnaise. The woman in front of me was ordering for what I assume were her three teenage sons, and the assistant was just putting the finishing touches to a submarine sandwich when one of the sons muttered something in surly fashion to the mother.

'He doesn't like the look of that one,' she said to the assistant. 'Gimme a turkey one instead.'

Without a word or a moment's hesitation, the assistant dumped the sub into a bin at her feet and started making one with turkey.

'You should have charged them for the one you threw away,' I said to her afterwards.

'I know, I didn't think' she replied.

I wish I'd had the presence of mind to go after this spoilt little bastard, give him my card and say take a look at my blog, I'll be writing about you.

Later in the afternoon, I was scrambling up the bank of a dried-up river and listening to Andrew Marr's Start the Week on my MP3 player when I heard a sudden very loud chirring in my right ear, like a cricket on steroids. I took my headphones off and looked for the source of the noise.

On the sand beside me, about ten feet away, was a two-foot rattlesnake, head reared and tail in furious motion. I stopped just long enough to snap a few pictures and hurried off, not leaving my card to tell the snake I'd be writing about it.

Arizonans reading this will probably say what's the big deal, I clear half a dozen of the things off my front porch every morning, but it was the first time in ages that I'd felt adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Later on, darkness fell and I got hopelessly lost for a while. Funnily enough, I walked past another three rattlers: I'd never seen one before, and now they were everywhere.

As a respite from all this stress, I've spent much of today in a piping hot bath with water streaming over the sides. I stayed in El Dorado hot springs, only a quarter of a mile from the interstate but half a world away, and even on Easter Day there were only a dozen people there. I wish I could have had a place like this at 100-mile intervals all the way across the country to rest my aching legs and wash the dust away.

Buckeye, Arizona. 2,738 miles.

2007-04-07T00:27:00.000-07:00

I'm now on the very farthest western edge of Phoenix, and once again I've enjoyed seeing a bustling downtown street metamorphosing ever so gradually into a sleepy country road.

It's taken me three days to walk across the city, but it's a beautiful place, and I haven't seen so much dazzling greenery since I was in Florida at Christmas: shady parks, nail-scissored golf courses, and mile after mile of flourishing crops.

Trouble is, this is supposed to be a desert city, and all this verdancy has been achieved by irrigation. Phoenix has been wracked by drought for the past twelve years, its water supplies are believed to be adequate for another twenty, and today's study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that areas like the Southwest could soon return to the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s. These are all the hallmarks of an environmental disaster in the making.

On a lighter note, I've noticed in the past week or so that when I tell people what I'm doing, they no longer say, 'Wow, you've got a long ways to go'. They say, 'Wow, you're almost there', which I find immensely heartening, even though I still have another 350 miles and anything could still happen. A friend of Pam's stubbed her toe and broke it the other day, and I thought selfishly: ouch, that could have been me.

This afternoon, a guy did a U-turn and stopped beside me: 'Are you going to the coast?' he asked, and I told him yes. 'Well, hop in,' he said. 'I'm going to Newport Beach in about an hour.' Newport Beach is a suburb of Los Angeles. I thanked him and explained that I was walking; it was a six-hour journey for him, but several more weeks for me.

And then, as I arrived at my motel tonight, I saw this and was really excited. It was the first time I'd seen the City of Angels mentioned on a roadsign, and it really felt like the end was within my grasp.

Goodyear, Arizona (another suburb of Phoenix). 2,726 miles.

2007-04-05T22:48:00.000-07:00

Do any of you kind people have a couple of thousand dollars, or the equivalent in another freely negotiable currency, or any smaller amount, burning a hole in your pocket? This is a serious question.

If you do, fellow coast-to-coast walker Stuart Hamilton could put it to good use. Remember he was diagnosed with testicular cancer just before he went home to England for a winter break? Well, he's fine now, and he and Dave are about to resume their walk. He explains here why he could really use the money. If you can spare something, please contact him direct. I cannot imagine a better cause, or a nicer person, to donate your hard-earned readies to.

Ten facts about Phoenix

2007-04-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

1. According to an analysis of search engine requests by the fascinating ePodunk.com, Phoenix is the ninth most frequently misspelled US city. Tucson is no. 2 on the list. The others in the top ten, in decreasing order of frequency, are Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Albuquerque, Culpeper, Asheville, Worcester, Manhattan, and Niagara Falls.
2. A person who lives in Phoenix is called a Phoenician.
3. Phoenix, and most of the rest of Arizona, don't put their clocks forward in summer. They don't need any more sunshine than they have already.
4. The average number of days on which the temperature exceeds 100F (38C) is 89. In 1989, it was 143.
5. Because of its huge sprawl, Phoenix is the tenth most dangerous US city in which to walk.
6. Perhaps for this reason, paramedics are the city's fastest-growing occupation.
7. The University of Phoenix, the country's largest private university, is notorious for its alleged poor-quality teaching, its 16% graduation rate, and its use of spam and popups to recruit students.
8. Maricopa county, in which Phoenix is located, is the nation's fastest-growing county. Its population expanded by 43% in the ten years to 2005, reaching 3.6 million.
9. The real name of actor River Phoenix was River Jude Bottom.
10. I met a female novelist in Texas called River Jordan. Sorry, not relevant, but it's just reminded me.

Phoenix, Arizona. 2,710 miles.

2007-04-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

Great news! William McGonagall is alive and well, and now has a part-time copywriting job at McDonald's, where he penned the timeless ode I found on my placemat tonight.

Breakfast is the meal that defines your day,
don't let a juice box and granola bar steer the way.
Go with a McGriddles® sandwich or a platter perhaps,
cold meals are tasteless and boring; they're for saps.
Next, pair your food with coffee for the ultimate taste,
it's so good you'll leave nary a bite nor sip to waste.

Tempe, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix). 2,692 miles.

2007-04-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

If you get a moment, do have a listen to my podcasts by clicking on the link above. You don't need an MP3 player; you can listen to them on your computer.

Actually, they're not mine. I was asked to do a regular podcast several months ago by Podshow.com and Jack Cumming, my contact at the Association for International Cancer Research, but I said I wasn't sure I could make the commitment.

So Jack went off to AICR's lavishly equipped recording studio and did them himself, reading selected nuggets from my blog in his mellifluous Fifeshire (that's in Scotland) tones and adding comments of his own. I think he's done a lovely job, and he's still churning out more.

On a different note, I hope the heat isn't going to be a problem for the rest of this trip. It was 90F (32C) today, and although I wore my wide-brimmed hat and plastered myself with sunscreen as I do every day, I was still exhausted and dehydrated by the time I arrived at my destination. I had a fit of the shivers in the restaurant just now, and I must be the only person in Arizona to have the heating on in my room.

I'm used to temperatures like these from last summer - the hottest I experienced, ironically, was in Frostburg, PA, when it reached 99F (37C) - but that was the densely populated east coast and there were shops and vending machines every five minutes. Here, water supplies need rather more careful planning.

Things are looking up on the social front, though. After the Empty Quarter of Arkansas, Texas and New Mexico, I'm meeting a lot more people. I've got used to the solitude and learned to enjoy my own company, but I still find that a steady succession of encounters with strangers makes the day pass a lot more quickly.

I also have two new forms of vegetation to add to my collection. I first saw saguaro cacti growing wild on a hillside outside Tucson, and they're now a ubiquitous feature of the landscape, often with the regulation Mexican dozing beneath their outspread arms.

The other is palm trees, which made their debut in the little town of Picacho. Normally I would have found it a rather funereal place, with its junkshops, fleabitten dogs chained to posts in every front garden, defunct motels and mournful country music wailing from someone's stereo, but the palms and the cacti and the dazzling Arizona sunshine somehow redeemed it.

The bit about the lavishly equipped recording studio was a joke, by the way. In keeping with their status as charity workers, everyone at AICR wears threadbare tweeds, pays £5 a month in rent for the privilege of living in a tumbledown, roofless highland croft, and travels to work by horse and cart, all so that every penny of your donations goes to a good cause.

Tucson, Arizona. 2,580 miles.

2007-03-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Tucson, but this time I've got here under my own steam rather than by hitching.

The last few days haven't always been easy, because there's often been no alternative to walking on the freeway, which gives me no pleasure at all. I just put my head down and try to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Four police cars have passed without stopping to tell me off, but I do get tooted at by drivers every now and then, and I'm sure they're 'Get the hell off the freeway' toots rather than 'Good on you buddy' ones.

But there have been compensations, and the dry riverbed where I camped on Sunday night was one, another really idyllic spot just half a mile from the interstate. I was mindful of the two things they always tell you about desert camping - watch out for flash floods and check your boots for scorpions in the morning - but neither has been in evidence so far, though I could see the river had been flowing in the past few days.

Trees that until now were just wizened bundles of sticks are bursting into leaf, and the desert is carpeted with wildflowers; these are fairyduster, Calliandra eriophylla.

Benson, Arizona. 2,545 miles.

2007-03-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

I never thought waterproof boots could be so much of an asset in the desert, but mine have come into their own in the last couple of days.

As I began walking again on Thursday, heading west out of Bowie, the first drops of rain started to fall. Spikes of forked lightning struck all around me, and thunder boomed endlessly into the distance.

It rained almost solidly for the next thirty-six hours, turning the path beside the railroad tracks into a quagmire, creating deep ponds and rushing streams overnight, and reminding me how much of this normally arid landscape is shaped by water.

The railroad struck boldly out through the middle of another huge ephemeral lake, Willcox Playa, and then began a long, painfully slow, 5,000-foot ascent into the Dragoon mountains.

It was here that I encountered the loveliest scenery of anywhere on this walk. I followed a dirt track running parallel to I-10 through Texas Canyon, a spectacular cascade of granite boulders the size of houses.

Few of the drivers speeding by on the interstate at 75 mph could have dreamed that a five-mile garden of Eden lay just a few hundred yards to their left: shady groves of broadleaf trees in all their springtime glory, cacti and yucca nestling in the cracks between the rocks, and the air filled with birdsong.

If I owned this land, I thought, I'd be tempted to put labels on all the trees and plants, open a cafe, call it The Living Desert, put a sign on the interstate and charge $5 admission to this major tourist attraction. I'd be a millionaire overnight, but thankfully the owners had not succumbed to temptation and the track was deserted.

I had a nice surprise today. A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast of BBC Radio 4's popular Sunday morning news programme Broadcasting House, and they asked people to email them if they were doing anything unusual or interesting as they listened. So I told them what I was up to.

This week, the presenter began the programme as follows: "Before we start, I've just heard from Phil Goddard, who's doing a 3,000-mile walk across the United States raising money for cancer. He says he was listening as he did the toughest section of his journey across the Chihuahua desert of western Texas, and Broadcasting House and other Radio 4 programmes help to keep him sane. Let's hope today's programme has the same effect."

Tucson, Arizona.

2007-03-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

I can be a pretty irritating person when I put my mind to it, but today even I found myself annoying.

The plan was to leave my hotel in Tucson bright and early, hitch the hundred miles or so back to Bowie, and start walking again. The problem is, bright and early is not my strong suit. If I had the willpower to get out of bed at 7 am and be walking by 8 every day I'd have been basking on the beach in Los Angeles weeks ago, but often I don't manage to drag myself away until checkout time at 11.

Today, to make matters worse, I realised that I was nearing the end of another book. I have a phobia about being in my tent with nothing to read, so I paid an emergency visit to Barnes and Noble. That was another couple of hours down the drain, and by the time I started hitching it was 1 pm.

Usually, I've found this a very quick way of getting from A to B. I nearly always get a ride within an hour, and sometimes it takes only minutes, but today, for some reason, Lady Luck was not smiling upon me. I stood there for five hours and ten minutes, trying to look cheerful but inwardly cursing. There's no rhyme or reason to hitchhiking; it was a perfectly good place to hitch from, and I was looking quite respectable, but thousands of cars sped by without stopping.

In the end I gave up. I'm now in a motel only a couple of miles from where I started, and all I have to show for the past twenty-four hours is a shiny new paperback novel. It had better be good.