Rome: 1

      Fiumicino airport, Rome, 15/2/08

Just the two of us, Gregor and I. He wanted to see Rome before he was another year older, and I wanted to see him seeing it before he was another year older. The home of St Valentine, we were destined to be still in Rome on Valentine's day, but we both agreed that we would manage quite well without any girls on the trip.

We walked up and down Via della Republica, pulling our wheelie case, and looking for Hotel Alius. After passing it a couple of times, I noticed 'Alius' handwritten on one of a bank of sixteen doorbell buzzers on an intercom plate by a large unmarked courtyard door. I pressed the button.

"Si?"

"Hotel Alius?"

At the sound of the buzzer, I pushed open the judas gate like a good laboratory rat, and we trundled in.

Greensboro: 4

In one corner of the showroom, several refectory tables had been pushed together to form a makeshift boardroom table. An assemblage of variously bespectacled, besuited, and bedraggled executives were sitting astride a relief map of coffee mugs, pizza cartons, half-eaten muffins, and calculators with thermal print rolls. It must have been an all-nighter. Alan, the New York – New Jersey émigré, was even sporting the sun-visor favoured by poker players in old black and white gangster movies. I was interested to discover, finally, that they were green.

Lee was sitting back, arms folded, behind his laptop, and peered over the tops of his glasses at me.

“Gordon Bennet, when did you get here?” I could see one or two of his companions looking around to see where this Mr Bennet was.

“Hotfoot from the hotel.” The same two guys were now surveying my feet with concern.

“Did you drop ‘em off at the pool?” Now he was doing it for the sheer mischief of it. Naturally, I played along.

“Top decker.”  Our observers’ faces were embossed yet deeper with blankness. These crazy Brits…

The business of the day slipped down agreeably like a spoonful of blancmange, and has been whisked in recollection into a homogeneous mousse of female torsos.

In the evening, all twenty-odd of us decamped to an Italian place called Gianni’s. Possibly as a precaution against the spread of foot and mouth disease, or possibly bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or possibly to preserve US national security in context of the War on Terror, the European contingent of the party were successfully contained at one end of the table. And, as if an Englishman, and Irishman, and a Scotsman were not caste enough for a thousand jokes, two Frenchmen, Benoit and Jacques, were written into the script.

Inevitably, the conversation bifurcated into two separate rallies, above and below the salt, with the occasional deep, easy lob the length of the table. Finally, a stroke was played that nobody could return. Joey, the account manager for a chunk of the Mid-West, addressed us in earnest, innocent, ingenuousness:

“So, can you guys get Italian food in Europe?”

Greensboro: 3

By the end of the ride, I had succeeded in persuading Lisa, Tatiana, and Reg to donate their bodies to Science. I needed, I explained with Borat-esque diplomacy, to include a variety of different body types in my studies. The procedure, I assured them, would be quite painless. All I needed to do was give them a full-body scan with my fiendish contraption, and then photograph them in bed. No, individually.

I woke up back in Zulu time, and had the world to myself for a couple of hours before the hotel opened for breakfast. I jogged past stores with names like Spanky’s and Backyard Burgers, and past countless churches of ever more infinitesimal sub-denominations. I thought of De Gaulle’s comment about the difficulty of unifying France, a country with 500 different kinds of cheese.  Jesus, I supposed, was their cheese.

At breakfast, I tried and failed to operate the waffle machine. The instructions bade me to tip the measured quantity of batter, from the paper cup on the adjacent tray, onto the waffle iron, close the lid, and wait for the timed beep. I didn’t realise until later that the timer was not initiated, as I had assumed, by closing the waffle iron, but by rotating it through 180 degrees after closing it. The beep never came, and only the acrid smoke billowing from the apparatus several minutes later alerted me to the fact that I had given this waffle the Good News.

In one meal, I overran my monthly quota for land-fill. The plates were disposable expanded polystyrene, and the cutlery was not only itself disposable, but each fork and each knife came individually wrapped in its own plastic packet. The sauces and syrups also came in individual sachets. While I wrestled with the waffle machine, my table got cleared, and I had to start again with a fresh set of everything. When I finally started eating, it soon became evident that the knife and fork were not fit for purpose, and I ended up using my fingers anyway.

I arrived at the showroom half an hour before I was due, so I strolled in the jolly morning sunshine down to the end of the lane while I was waiting. At the end, the road just stopped, and through about a hundred yards of forest I could see a square mile of yellow school buses. Either I was at the back of the Thomas Bus factory, or there was some major hopscotch going on down there.

Greensboro: 2

Flights being flights, mine slinked into Charlotte four hours late on Monday afternoon.  My grand plans, of arriving in Greensboro with enough time to join Lee for a few beers, were looking barely tenable. I knew I would have missed the Amtrak train to Greensboro by the time I got to the station, and from memory, the next one was not for another nine hours. Walking through in the concourse, safely through immigration, following signs for ground transportation, I yawned to equalize ear pressure and tried to look in the right place for some luck.

I tripped right over my portion of luck, thirty seconds later. By the main exit was a makeshift stall set up on a folding table, with a hand-written sign: “Free shuttle to Highpoint Market”.

I just had time to visit the restrooms to wash the long-haul sting out of my eyes, before heading out to the pavement where two other passengers were just loading their wheely carry-ons into the back of a Dodge Van.

My fellow travellers were Lisa, who represented a Filipino manufacturing company in Winnipeg, and Tatiana, a suspiciously young head buyer for a furniture chain in Moscow.

“What time is it where you all come from?” The cordial, gurgling voice of Reg, the driver, filled the cab like a Barry White record minus the music.

“I’m behind by two hours in Manitoba.”

“I’m ahead by five in the UK.”

“I have eight!” laughed Tatiana, wagging her head in a mock swagger, as if she had just played the winning card at whist. Her straight black henna-rinsed hair, trimmed to a geometrically straight fringe just above her brow, swayed with her head. No hairspray. I wondered how she could still look so neat after losing eight hours somewhere on the way from Moscow.

The forested landscape of the Piedmont streamed past us, trees at the roadside just at that sticky bud moment, some already erupting into colour. I was particularly struck by a dusty yet luminous blue mauve bush that dotted the verge in sporadic clumps. I pointed these out to Reg, and asked him what they were.

“Oh that.” He nodded, “That one is something called ‘red bud’.” He turned around to look at us all, one hand left on the wheel and no eyes on the road. The oncoming traffic somehow continued to miss us. “Although, ‘tween you an’ me, “ he lowered his tone as if sharing a secret. “Fella that named it musta been colour blind.”

Greensboro: 1

England, the traveller would do well to learn, is best navigated by pubs. Country roads are frequently named after them. “Plough Lane” and “Red Lion Road” will inevitably terminate in the eponymous hostelry. Start anywhere in the country and ask for directions to anywhere else in the country, and the instructions will go something like: turn left at the Fox and Feathers, then second right after the White Hart, and then first left after the King’s Arms.

There is no such succour to the lost Scot in America.

However, a near equivalent may be found in the back catalogue of Townes Van Zandt. This first occurred to me as I scrolled through Googlemaps, tying to plan my route from the airport at Charlotte, North Carolina, to a place called High Point, where I’m headed for a big furniture show next week. The terrain was peppered with classic Townes numbers: Greensboro Woman, Word Come Down from Spencer, Tobaccoville roadkill…

I’m quite excited by this. Will the words that up to now have, to me, just been clusters of syllables to fill a space in a song now be plumped up with meaning, in the same way that McCartney’s “Scambled eggs” transmuted so beautifully into “Yesterday”?

Or will I just find the same Starbucks, Subway, and KFC as everywhere else?