November 1

For most carless visitors to America traveling from state to state is done either by train (bland, expensive) or Greyhound bus (stinking, unreliable). For the journey from Memphis to New Orleans, Louisiana my friend and I took the third, less fashionable option: clapped-out, converted school bus covered in white and purple graffiti. This came about after I'd randomly chatted to a guy called Ryan outside of a cafe. I mentioned in passing that we were heading to New Orleans and before I could say "wait, did you say schoolbus?" he'd offered us a ride.

Ryan had driven with his friend Kristee from Chicago, where they lived, in the crazy bus which they'd bought cheaply in New York. They'd ripped out all the seats on the inside and installed a bed, under which lived an understandably skittish cat. Both in their late-twenties they were fantastically normal for people traveling through the South in what could be described as a spaceship from a hippy's half-remembered LSD-nightmare. Okay, Kristee spoke to me for a while about the cat's insecurities and phobias, but some people really love cats. And sure, Ryan had spent a part of his youth as a "gutter punk", living off crystal meth on the streets of San Diego, but who hasn't?

Ryan had even had a crack at being a rail-car riding hobo, hopping from city to city. Apparently there's a mysterious pamphlet called The Crew Change, written by a legendary hobo who wrote down everything he knew about the hobo life. The book gives you the locations of all the major train yards and the times at which the train crews change, allowing the cunning hobo to sneak aboard. Ryan vividly remembered him and friends freezing at the back of an empty carriage, passing round the whiskey flask. Unfortunately they went 100 miles before realising they were heading in the wrong direction. Obviously the hobo book isn't as clear as it could be as Ryan's navigational skills seemed very good to me.

I could really get used to traveling this way. And it's a real plus that it has next to no suspension as the bumpy journey keeps the driver awake on long stretches of cornerless, Mississippi road, preventing crashing and death.