Our 2019 US road trip has been unforgettable in so many ways, not least for the spontaneity that’s characterised it. Within the broader travel plan, involving stopping off at various scheduled points during the journey from San Francisco to Boston, we’ve deliberately left the activities and adventures we might experience at each place unplanned and to be decided upon on the day. This has resulted in such jewels as the last-minute dash to the Bazaar Café in San Francisco in an effort to get on the list to perform, and then playing a battered house guitar at what turned out to be a wonderful open mic with a friendly, appreciative crowd; the afternoon beer and chat with a bunch of locals at the Whiskey Creek Saloon in Hollister, California, about everything from whether we knew the Queen of England to details of our proposed trip; getting to play one of my songs at the coveted Bluebird Cafe open mic in Nashville; and spending a fabulous evening in the company of Doyle and Debbie, enjoying their brilliantly funny country-music-themed comedy at the legendary Station Inn.

But it’s also led to more poignant moments – such as coming across so many homeless people living on the streets of the cities we visited. The Haight-Ashbury part of San Francisco – the birthplace of the free love movement in the Swinging Sixties – was where we first became aware of the appalling hopelessness experienced by many of these people – a hopelessness borne by becoming completely spaced out and existing in some other world to this one that’s failed them so badly.

On the other side of the country, on our first evening in New York, we came across a similarly desperate picture. We’d eaten at an Italian restaurant in Little Italy, where pepperoni was found – too late – to have been liberally dotted across our ‘vegetarian’ margherita pizza, so we were given a replacement, this time smaller but sans meat. Angry that they’d got our order so wrong, we weren’t really interested in eating any more pizza, so we asked them to box it up and then headed back up to our Airbnb apartment on the Upper East Side, determined to find a hungry homeless person to give it to along the way. Unlike earlier that evening, there was not one needy person in sight – until a rather fulsome woman finally came up to me when we came out of the subway and said she was very hungry and could I help her out? Delighted to have found someone to bestow my beneficence upon, I said, ‘Well, I’ve got just the thing for you – a whole pizza! It’s in this box, and it’s for you!’ To which she replied, ‘I’m allergic to the tomato sauce on pizzas… Can you give me money for something else instead?’ Somewhat deflated and taken aback, I reluctantly fumbled in my pocket for loose change and gave her the 75 cents I found in there, not quite knowing whether to be annoyed with her or with myself…

Another very unexpected but highly emotional moment occurred at, of all places, a souvenir shop in the departure lounge at Nashville Airport. I’d been rifling through the rack of T-shirts on sale at the front of the store for a while, trying to decide which one to buy, and feeling sure that I was being watched by an eagle-eyed assistant behind the till. But when I finally made my decision and went to the counter to buy the T-shirt, I was greeted by a red-eyed, clearly distressed woman who took one look at me and could no longer hold back her grief…

‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there,’ she began. Then: ‘I was on the phone to my sister. I lost my thirteen-year-old wiener dog last night…’ At that, she burst into tears and I, with two ‘wiener dogs’ (dachshunds) of my own, felt that I was right where I needed to be.
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‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be laying this on a customer,’ she wept.

‘It’s absolutely okay,’ I told her. ‘I have two wieners of my own, and I know how terrible it is to lose a beloved pet. I’m so sorry for you.’

‘Some people just don’t get it,’ she said. ‘They say, “It’s just a dog – get over it!” But he was my life – I slept with that dog in my bed for thirteen years, and now he’s gone.’ She cried again.

I wanted to console her, to let her know that I understood, so I showed her a picture of Silva and Chilli, and she calmed down a bit and said her dog had been a smooth-haired black and tan with a face like Silva’s. Then she said that her other dog was also in a state of grief at having lost her companion. When I suggested that she might get another companion for her, she wept again, saying that her living situation made it impossible for her to get another dog.

Eventually I paid for the T-shirt and walked out of the shop, feeling so sad for this complete stranger and her surviving dog, both of them pining away with no one to help them through what, to a dog lover, is tantamount to losing a family member.

By complete canine contrast, we spent four days becoming acquainted with the gorgeous Titus, a ten-year-old chihuahua mix who had been consistently and unaccountably overlooked at the dog shelter by prospective adopters, but who is now happily ensconced in the home of my friend Elizabeth, both of them counting themselves equally lucky to have found each other!

Random stories, touching vignettes, unexpected incidents, friends we’ve stayed with and come to know better, strangers whose lives briefly crossed paths with ours and then went on their way – these are the things that have made this trip so precious and so utterly memorable.
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And it’s not even over yet!

We decided to visit the small Californian city of Soquel, near Santa Cruz, as part of our road trip as I’d lived there very briefly a long time ago and wanted to show Carol the delights of that area nestled on the Pacific coast between the ocean and the Santa Cruz Mountains. The drive there from San Francisco took us along the fabulous Route 1, which follows the Pacific Ocean all the way down the west coast, but when we reached Santa Cruz, it turned out to have been so long ago that I had lived there that I barely remembered anywhere we drove through, and even struggled to recall the name of the street that I’d lived on. I did, however, remember the name of one iconic café in Santa Cruz (and shall refrain from giving its name in order to preserve its iconic status), so we went there for breakfast the morning after we arrived – but ended up stomping out, with me clutching a takeaway box containing the burrito I’d ordered but that had failed to materialise when Carol’s meal arrived. It turned out that somehow my order had never been given to the cook, so by the time it finally did arrive, Carol had finished hers and I was so angry and stomach-churny that I demanded they take it off the bill, and had to be persuaded to even take the wretched boxed-up meal away with me. I would soon be glad I had done, though, as I was by then really hungry, and once we were safely away from the iconic place, I tucked into it rather ravenously.

Another institution I remembered from my few months there back in the late '80s was the Saturday flea market that runs from 6 a.m. to early afternoon. So, with me still munching the botched burrito, we headed over to the large car park on which it’s held, paid our dollar fifty each, and found ourselves sauntering around a car boot sale California-style. By the time we’d finished looking at guitars with strings missing (though not the one in the photo - that was a decent one, but it wasn't for sale!), grubby old clothes, boots that had seen better days, and other assorted potential gems, it was clear that tat is tat the world over, whether it’s sold out of an old estate car in a field in Essex or from the back of a battered pick-up truck in a parking lot on the Pacific coast.

The other thing I wanted to show Carol was the famous Santa Cruz boardwalk, allegedly the one referred to in the Drifters’ song ‘Under the Boardwalk’. But when we got there, I felt sad to see it had become so grossly over-commercialized and was now nothing more than mass of elaborate theme park rides – so we carried on down the coast and came to Seacliff State Beach, with its lovely old wooden pier replete with keen fishermen, and a wreck at the end that’s become a sanctuary for seabirds, including pelicans – as well as a lone sea lion we watched swim along the line of the shore, to the consternation (mixed with delight) of the children who happened to be swimming in the sea at the time it made its appearance. Other unusual (in the UK at least!) species we spotted in the area included a hummingbird (in the back garden of the house we stayed in) and, further inland, a vulture…

Our Las Vegas hotel reservation was for 3 p.m. the next day, so we’d originally planned to drive there overnight. But having done all we wanted to do in the Santa Cruz area by early afternoon, we decided to press on then and take our time ambling over to the Nevada gambling mecca. That decision led us to stop at Hollister, California, a small town lying an hour or two inland from Santa Cruz and at the heart of a major salad-crop-producing region of the USA. We were looking for a bar, any bar, as we were both thirsty by then and in need of liquid refreshment, but it was by pure chance that Carol decided to park where she did. It turned out to be virtually outside the Whiskey Creek Saloon – from its name alone you can tell that it was exactly what we were hoping to stumble upon – an all-American dive bar full of locals intrigued by two Englishwomen stepping in and ordering Blue Moons and telling the bartender about their west–east road trip. A lovely group conversation ensued, and we eventually left there with our heads reeling with all the different routes suggested to us as the best way to get to Vegas, and wondering (yet again) why Americans seem to be so very obsessed by the British royal family…

A very sensible and valuable suggestion, though, was that we refuel at Bakersfield, as after that we’d be hitting the Mojave Desert – at night – and we definitely didn’t want to run out of petrol (or rather, ‘gas’) there…