J., a good source of amusing stories (but some of which I can't blog about), told me a story yesterday about her search for a Paris apartment. Many property-owners won't consider her because she doesn't have a permanent job contract and she has a dog.

Last week she spoke to one apartment-owner who asked her about her unusual surname, which she took when she married her Senegalese husband. "She said she'd ring me back," J. said, "but she never did."

Of the many surprising things to happen in the States was the frequency with which we went through time zones. We had been warned of it, but it wasn't as simple as passing a state line and going back an hour: in some states, Native American lands keep to one time zone whilst the rest of the state keeps to another, so we would pass in and out of zones, not ever quite knowing what the time was. Often we found ourselves turning up in a place and finding we had an extra hour before things shut, and sometimes we arrived and were noisily putting up the tent when we found out it was 11pm and everyone was asleep. In the end we ceased to be fazed by it; we were mostly keeping to the time as dictated by the sun, so it didn't really matter what time the clock said.

Driving into Utah, having had an inspiring conversation with a Navajo man about his ranching on the family corral just above the Grand Canyon, I was struck with the feeling, again, that I was putting my energy into the wrong kinds of work and should get on with writing. All of a sudden, the skies darkened and it started to rain, large, heavy drops. Just beneath the red cliffs to the side of the road and stretched above a small white house, a complete rainbow appeared.

It's been 4000 miles since my last post, and H. and I have crossed America. From Nashville to San Francisco, the journey was populated by beautiful people and extraordinary lives. Some of the stories I heard I am getting around to writing down, though at the moment most people's words lie hidden in my notebook.

One of the things that made our trip special was our accompanying guide book, Roadfood, by a couple called Stern. Without it we would have missed out on some of the best food made by the most interesting people. The book is filled with loving overtures to odd barbeque joints, diners, tamale shops and cafes across the country, usually in towns where we would otherwise not have bothered to stop.

One of our big, and perhaps predictable, mistakes was to underestimate the size of everything, from the size of cups to the size of towns to the size of the country. What was an inch on the kitchen table in Clapham turned out to be a day's drive, something we found out on day one and which I carried with me as a mild panic until we were within spitting distance of the Pacific two weeks later. But the journey was often broken by a meal in one of Stern's joints, and something I always looked forward to as the miles ticked flatly by.

In El Paso, western Texas, we stopped at the H and H Carwash Cafe, a large forecourt with a small shop at the back. A man sat in a tall chair, almost like a throne, outside, waiting for customers to pull up for a boot shine. Mexicans and the (American) owner of the joint busied around the Sheriff's patrol car, wiping down the glossy black and white body, and we were shown inside the cafe at the back for a late lunch. The heat was stifling.

At the formica counter we cased the joint. A young security guard sat to one side eating quesadillas, and at one of the tables, two ladies chatted over plates of stew. An old Mexican woman asked us in Spanish what we wanted, and we ordered burritos stuffed with chorizo and omelette and tender beef, stew without the liquid. We enquired about the salsa that Sterns had described in the book with such enthusiasm, and were given a pot of it, green, zesty and dangerous, along with a basket of tortillas that the cook cut and fried, sprinkling with salt and serving with a shy smile as she set it down.

"Mexicans are wonderful people," said Mr H., whose father had opened the carwash in 1958 when he was just 12. "Many people have tried to poach my cook, and have offered her more money than I can. But she refuses to leave, she doesn't care about money, she just wants to be comfortable."