Ask most Americans what the absolute worst way to travel is and they’ll tell you the Greyhound Bus. One step up from the bus, apparently, is the train. “Scum of the earth take that train” I was told… by an actual Amtrak employee. On an actual train. My apprehension about the coming journey was getting worse. Every American I’d mentioned the epic train journey to had been relentlessly negative about it. Everyone, apparently, flies. Trains are for scum. End of story.

Nevertheless, competing with the negativity and that advice was that of Michael Palin on Radio 4 who probably had no idea that people were going to make life-changing decisions based on his advice to “travel slowly” and to avoid planes where possible. Travel slowly, he says, and make the travelling as much the point as the destination.

How slow is slow, though? Well, New York to San Francisco is a 3,500 mile journey that takes 4 days using two trains, the Lake Shore Ltd to Chicago then the California Zephyr to San Francisco. It goes through: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island [Those are the Acela Express, Boston to New York, not the Lakeshore Ltd.. did that 4 days earlier.. whoops], New York, Pennsylvania,  Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and finally California. It is astonishingly long.

Turns out the Americans were wrong about this journey. It’s sort of redefined the words ‘spectacular’ and ‘epic’ in my brain… apart from the Day Of Corn which involved waking up in the corn fields of Ohio and going to sleep in the corn fields of Iowa and seeing very little else all day.. okay most of the day involved hanging out in Chicago Union Station, but it’s hard not to be someone stunned by the scale of the corn growing operations they have in the USA. There’s a day of it. A day.

The next day, however, waking up in Denver and then making our way through the most literally breathtaking landscape I’ve ever seen – first the Colorado Rockies then watching the sun go down on the monumentally epic mountains in Utah… I don’t know how I’m going to ever be content with Yorkshire now. Damn. The day after the train goes through the Sierra Nevada mountains and it’s goo goo time, your brain is gone. That’s it.

America… it turns out… is a truly beautiful country. The magnificence of the scenery is then added to by the sheer audacity, courage and engineering-fu to build a train line all the way through it, not to mention everything else they’ve done to this continent.

I’m a bit stunned. In awe, really. San Francisco awaits outside but it’s all a bit too much.

What’s devastating, however, is that most Americans will never have this experience. They hate the train. They’ll fly, or maybe drive instead.. and they just won’t see their own country this way. They really, really, really don’t know what they’re missing. Far from sharing the train with ‘scum’ I found really pleasant, friendly people wanting the same kind of experience, sharing my own lack of comprehension at the gap between the perception and reality of these rather immense train journeys.

I’m glad I’m the kind of soppy loser tourist that can get some sort of quasi-spiritual experience from a journey of this kind. I gave up smoking so that this journey wouldn’t be ruined by waiting for the next smoking stop (few and far between) rather than living in the moment. Best. Decision. Ever.

Still, to get off a train 4 days after getting on feeling like it all went by far too quickly is not what I expected at all. Colorado… we’ll meet again, you and I, mark my words.

Apologies for the lack of blogging and continued off-topic stuff. Things will be back to normal soon.

The curious phenomenon of radioactively white and uncanny valley-esque perfect teeth in America continues to disturb, but one image has stuck in my head for two weeks. I can’t get it out of my head.

I wish I could remember his name – I have attempted to find it today but have given it up as a needle finding exercise for the League of Non-Guild Aligned Haystack Workers Union. Sod that.

However, the man’s face? That’s burned into my mind forever. He was a Democratic Party candidate for some southern state – that’s how he ended up on MSNBC anyway – and he had conspicuously man-made looking teeth. They were brilliant white, as if determined to bleach the viewer’s retinas with their fluorescent glow. His skin was orange and his hair suitably quaffed. He’s not the only one with such teeth and hair, but he’s certainly the only one that’s seemingly so proud of his teeth that his lips are permanently twisted into a grimace that, if nothing else, displays these teeth. Clearly he’s very proud of these new teeth and believes that it’s very important to his future career that people see them.

Hmm.

I wonder what the point of all this is, what the cultural significance of this display is, and what the connection between cosmetic dentistry and political ability might be. Then again, I’ve got his hideous face burned into my brain.. so perhaps mission accomplished as far as that politician is concerned. Perhaps this lesson is to terrify people with your appearance, so as to make sure they never, ever forget you.

The tyranny of pedestrian restrictions is getting me down. Sure you get pedestrian crossings absolutely everywhere – they’re on the end of every single road, mocking you, laughing at you – but the down side is that you HAVE to use them.

They really don’t like you just crossing a road because it happens to be safe. In fact it’s a crime. It’s called Jay Walking and it’s one of those crimes that exists purely because some utter arsehat decided that FromNowOnPedestriansWillDoThisOrElse and that’s pretty much all there is to it. No wonder people drive everywhere.

However, the sinister nature of tyrannical pedestrianism is nothing compared with the eerie phenomenon that is People Actually Pressing The Stop Button On Buses And Waiting For The Bus To Stop Before Standing Up.

I mean, for reals? Apparently so. People round here are strangely well behaved, following rules and regulations of which public life seems strangely full of. There’s precious few smokers (speaking of which, I’m not one of them) and…. there’s no teenagers. Or, at least, they’re impossible to spot because they’re indistinguishable from children or adults, or hiding in a special death camp of some kind.  I can’t tell you how bloody nice it is.

I’m missing pies, decent beer, Tea and my stuff and life…. mostly I’m missing proper broadband though. Oh, I miss my car… I really really miss my shitty hairdresser’s car. I even miss Enemy Cat, the fat bloated feline menace belonging to a neighbour that believes my car is some sort of cool hangout party place for cats. No, wait, I don’t miss Enemy Cat. I miss squirting Enemy Cat with the Super Soaker, the little shit.

What I’m not missing is the yobbery and the palpable air of menace that I normally have from home. I hate to say it but it’s just possible that there’s something not quite right with the UK, that it’s… actually… you know, a bit more horrible than it actually should be? Maybe? Or maybe Boston’s just weird and just happens to be a really nice place to live… stranger things, etc.

Sorry, did I say nice? I meant nice except for the pedestrian crossing tyranny, obviously. Bastards.

Okay so, yes, in America at the moment. Boston, actually.

Getting into America required filling in a special form on the interwebs, then after I’d arrived in Boston I was photographed and fingerprinted and questioned and yelled at. I was searched in Dublin but, good news, dodged the bullet of going through the electronic strip search in Manchester.

Last night I caught a special screening of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Edgar Wright, the director, was there… along with some of the cast which was nice. Suspect the film has a younger demographic in mind than Edgar’s previous films “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” and the use of the vocabulary of Nintendo games to tell a story in film form will leave many baffled… but for those that ‘get it’ this film seems to hit the spot.

America is fascinating so far, although I appreciate I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. First things first though… there’s no kettle in this hotel room. I mean, seriously? A coffee filter machine but no kettle? Even the dirtiest, nastiest, most cheapo hotel in Britain will provide you with a kettle – it may kill you, of course, but you’ll get a kettle. Here? No kettle.

It’s the little things that really freak you out.

Pandas.

They eat bamboo. They struggle to breed. The two things aren’t entirely unrelated – bamboo, it turns out, isn’t really what Pandas should be eating. They can only digest something like 10% of the bamboo which means they need to eat non-stop, all day, every day, just to basically feel completely knackered and hungry.

Why do they do it? Well bamboo is basically like a drug, and all baby Pandas are born with… I guess fetal bamboo syndrome or something.

Poor Pandas. Yet, crucially, there’s nothing anyone can do. You can’t reason with a Panda. You can’t explain that bamboo might give Mr and Mrs Panda a proper bangin’ buzz but isn’t really very healthy because Pandas have no ability to comprehend any human form of communication.

No, they’re just going to keep wanting nothing but bamboo. Forever and ever. Even if it kills them… which it seems like it will.

However, it does offer a handy new version of the cliche, “Yeah? Then I’m a monkey’s uncle” which, amusingly, is “Yeah? Then I’m a Randy Panda.”

Use at your own risk.