We left Las Vegas on the 5 July, tired, dehydrated and hung over. Americas’ independence reduced and defeated our small British contingent. The trek from hostel to bus station proved arduous.

We left Las Vegas on the 5 July, tired, dehydrated and hung over. Americas’ independence reduced and defeated our small British contingent. The trek from hostel to bus station proved arduous. In five months on the road, I’d accrued my own bodyweight in baggage. A hold-all emblazoned with a Bolivian lama swung from side to side digging into my legs, an Argentine guitar-case hung across my chest swiping me in the chin. Struggling along like a tramp fleeing with his life possessions, I gasped in pursuit of my less constrained comrades. The tramp analogy continues with examination of my attire. Just like a vagrant confined to his winter garb, I sweated it out under layer upon layer of clothes that no longer squeezed into my overburdened backpack.

BJ, my heavily tested companion from Brazil to the USA, strode ahead paying no attention to my choleric cursing. He was on a mission that day: escape Las Vegas at all costs. Tensions reached a head when after half an hour trawling in the midday sun no bus station materialized. In a town essentially constructed in single strip, we had somehow managed to get completely lost. Drenched head to toe in my own sweat, I stood scowling at BJ. We parted at a crossroads while our third amigo, the Chief, watched at loss to who to follow. Generally BJ was a better bet, but on that day it was I who ran into the state trooper and gathered the necessary directions. With a fair bit of panicked running or perhaps labored hobbling is more accurate, I rejoined the others and we completed the journey to the bus station. Another ten grueling minutes were spent doubling back in the direction of the hostel.

We joined the back of a long snaking queue, which wound from the Greyhound desk to the exit doors. It formed a grey river of comfortably retired pensioner gamblers. Beside me stood a sun burnt retiree in a wide brimmed wicker hat. We chatted. The exact dynamics and idioms of our conversation are lost. She’d been to Britain, and much of the rest of the world; travel she lauded as the most positive of all life’s activities. Wiping her seeping brow, her conversation turned from sentimental nostalgic optimism to a damning indictment of America’s roads. Looking me straight in the eye, she sternly warned against hiring a car in Texas. The discontented Texan, she cautioned, will pull up beside you, reach for a gun, and shoot you down right there on the inter-section.

BJ, ever driven, had left the queue some way into pensioner’s dialogue to find a faster opening. Locating spaces on an earlier bus, he waved us over. I barged, excused, bashed and pardoned my way over. A few moments passed before I realized I’d left the Chief daydreaming oblivious on the other side of the hall. The Chief was to all intents and purposes the perfect comrade; always calm and never remotely aggrieved, he dreamed his way around those United States. All the same, at times his calm bordered on a trance of complete detachment. This being one of those days, we found our small party divided, roped off in separate closed queues. Taking our seats on the bus, leaving the helpless Chief to the gun slinging, knuckle swinging natives, we sat uncomfortably and reasoned out our rationale. The engine started up, the driver got on the microphone and introduced himself in his southern afro-American drawl, and then the pneumatic doors swung shut. Bus company rules stipulated strictly once you’re onboard you’re there for the duration, no one gets off, no one gets on. Then in the dying moment the pneumatics hissed and the door swung back open. There, calm as ever, stood the grinning figure of, our comrade, the Chief.