I know you may be expecting a spanky new bit of story, but you'll just have to wait. Here's something I should have put in the last post, but forgot. Mentally insert it between "We correct our course and head for LGA" and "I wish I had never made it."

...head for LGA.

I'm still not in the US. Or at least, I don't think I am. Maybe it's an airport thing; they make the surrounding area as bland as possible to put your mind at ease when you land. Save the culture shock for afterwards, as that's the last thing you need while you're waiting at the conveyor belt for that bag that may be yours but didn't yours have a longer handle and you don't remember that logo on the side but you think that it's yours and it's almost certainly yours anyway so you take it and run as fast as you can out into the street without attracting too much attention.

Culture shock, yes. Airports are all designed to look fairly similar to stop you from going mad. They don't fill them with green pillarboxes, or paint the road outside bright yellow. The exception here is Sacramento's airport, but I haven't got there yet. Being outside JFK was just like being outside Birmingham International, only with the sun shining and cleaner air. They accepted my dollars, which was a bit odd, but I ignored it. Then it happens.

We drive over a freeway.

Well, I don't know whether it was a freeway or not, because the Americans have far too many words for far too big roads. It had about 5 lanes either side of the reservation, which is off the scale of British road widths, even with the hard shoulder. But what really hits me is that *everyone was driving on the wrong side* and in *a perfectly straight line*. It's like they had a heck of a lot of tarmac and a heck of a lot of dynamite, too. We drive past a yellow school bus. Then a yellow road sign with something on it. Then a yellow taxi. Then a yellow set of traffic lights that think there is enough yellow around so jumps straight to green. The crossr-- sorry, intersection that we are on has the names of the streets marked with little green signs like flags. A sign says that I can "inquire with in" about their "range of colors." I think that if I see any more America, I'll not survive the trip. We drive past three McDonalds.

I come to just as we're approaching LGA. I wish I had...

Mat"We now return to regularly scheduled posting"thew