Things I am looking forward to

1. HUMAN-SIZED TOWELS

While serial hotel-dwelling has many perks that I cannot for the life of me think of, among the worst things are the distressed wafers that hotels like to pass of as towels. On the spectrum of human size, I am nestled down the fairly petite end, so if I can’t manage to enrobe enough of myself to prevent a public indecency charge, should I fall out of a motel window, perhaps after being startled by a lizard, then how is a regular grown-up sized person meant to manage? (That really happened by the way. The lizard in the room, not the toppling out of window semi-naked.)

THE STOCK PHOTO LADY TRIES TO LAUGH OFF THE VERY REAL DANGERS HER POORLY-COVERED VAGINA IS EXPOSED TO

Would an extra inch or two be too much to ask for? Let’s leave that question there. I’m going to start lobbying the international hotel industry to demand they implement a minimum boob-to-vagina towel measurement standard, as a matter of urgent safety.

At home, there will be towels large enough to encompass my whole body at least twice around, head-to-toe. Towels big enough to live in, which is something I occasionally like to do for several days at a time.

I FOUND A PICTURE OF THE LIZARD THING

2. SAUSAGE ROLLS

Possibly spurred on by that Lovely Eggs video that I have on almost constant repeat, I have been longing for this monarch of British bakery products. There was a very strange stretch of the upper peninsula in Michigan that seemed to be lined exclusively with pasty-selling huts, where I temporarily sated my savoury pastry craving with an excellent over-sized replica Cornish pasty. Yet once I crossed the pleasingly-named Mackinac bridge into the larger, mitteny bit of the state, the huts vanished.

I am baffled at this extreme culinary localisation, and am very glad to be returning to a place where mulched up meat in flaky pastry is worshipped nationwide.

THIS SAUSAGE ROLL APPEARS TO BE AUSTRALIAN

3. X-MAS

Probably because I haven’t been shopping or watching much TV, the X-Mas spirit has been fairly late coming to me this year. However, that spirit has come perilously close to being quashed entirely by the horror that is American X-Mas radio stations. What started as a pleasant festive musical diversion rapidly spiralled into deep, psychological torment with violent shaking triggered every time some crooner starts reciting the names of Santa’s reindeers.

Now I’m pining for British X-Mas, with its comfortingly crap TV and superior Christmas #1 back catalogue. Not to mention over-cooked turkey, weird presents from family and, most importantly, beating everyone at Trivial Pursuits.

One thing the USA does get right is the very tasteful decoration that adorns its suburbs. I desperately want one of these inflatable light-up nativity scenes, but there’s simply no room at the inn/my suitcase:

And, not to get all sappy, I’m looking forward to seeing my family. I guess half a year’s absence intensifies the rosy hue of remembrance, but I really did enjoy X-Mas last year, with its deluge of snow that was probably annoying at the time but now seems rather charming. One of the things I like about my parents is that they have never got out of the habit of being providers. Whether spurred on by parenthood or not, they have this magical ability to always have stuff around, the kind of stuff that I never think about needing, but when it’s there I realise is really great. Like clean human-sized towels, functioning heating systems and more food in the fridge than two-week old leftover curry and milk that has about half an hour before it goes gloopy. Sometimes I look around at my friends to see who has managed to achieve this level of adulthood, and wonder how they got there. I feel like this is something I could maybe achieve, but it would require such hard work and re-wiring of the brain to connect it more directly with reality that it isn’t worth it.

4. A SINGLE TIME ZONE

While I do love that time zone shenanigans means you can download The Good Wife straight after it’s aired on the east coast and finish watching it before it airs on your telly on the west coast, I fear this is outweighed by more serious drawbacks. Specifically: fucking with your mind. Although I’ve rarely had to be anywhere at a specific time while I’ve been road-tripping, it’s still nice to have a sense of both where and when you are. Mrs Satnav, under some duress, took care of the geographical side of that but, left to its own devices, it appeared America had little interest on informing me when I was hurtling an hour into the past or future. That’s just rude.

There’s only one time zone I need. GMT: the original and best.

5. SHOPS YOU CAN WALK TO

Oh, corner shops! How I have missed thee.

There is little in life as disheartening as being able to see a place a short distance away, then realising there is no possible way to walk there, owing to the intervening 10 lanes of traffic. Not only that, there’s no way of even getting to the 10 lanes of traffic, because there are another six lanes running parallel outside it. That’s my idea of hell. Or, Texas.

While cities are pretty similar in all the countries I’ve visited (which is almost every country in the world with passable toilet facilities. Plus France), it’s out in the sticks that you can get unstuck. The car-centricity of America outside of its urban centres (and, I would argue inside a fair few of those urban centres) is so notorious because it is entirely true. I was startled, when driving through some suburbs after dark, to realise that there is a complete lack of streetlighting. But that makes sense: streetlights are largely to aid pedestrians, and no-one walks anywhere. Pavements and paths peter out unexpectedly, as though roadworkers gave up halfway, overwrought with the futility of it all.

Obviously, people must get used to driving for several miles just to get to the nearest shop. For me, however, when I’ve shuffled semi-dressed to the kitchen, having summoned all my energy to make a cup of tea only to find the milk is off, I can just about hold it together enough to bundle up into some overwear and stagger the thirty seconds to Sainsbury’s to buy a fresh pint. If I had to get into a car and drive across town, it would be that nanometer too far, it would break me.

Ironically, there’s no corner shop for miles where my parents live, in a particularly obscure location in rural Wales. But, as I mentioned above, they have sufficient restocking magic that this will never be a problem.

6. VEGETABLES

This may be a surprising entry. You may also be surprised to know that my current belief is that as humans advance, we should aspire towards vegetarianism, even veganism, for environmental and economic reasons. However, I am far more selfish than principled, so I continue to feast on bloody steaks.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for fans of cows living beyond toddler age), my trip has been low on steak and high on cheap filler. I think prolonged ramen consumption would make anyone get misty-eyed over the verdant allure of a broccoli floret. I am sure this feeling will pass very quickly.

7. NO MORE PHOTOS

Like with any new toy, when I first got my camera I was eagerly playing with it at every opportunity, snap-snap-snapping away at anything that moved, or didn’t. Which is to say I have a lot of pictures of sheep.

This enthusiasm persisted throughout much of my trip and, when my camera stopped working after a run-in with some aggressive spray at Niagara Falls (I probably should have seen that coming), I was most distraught. It eventually dried out and came back to life, and I continued my inept photo-documenting with renewed vigour.

Under pressure from friends and family that weren’t convinced I wasn’t just spending half a year sat on a sofa in Britain somewhere, I began to upload some pictures. Uploading photos on a crappy (but beautiful) netbook using intermittent hotel wifi is perhaps one of the most soul-destroying activities to emerge out of western technologisation. Day by day, I found myself increasingly reluctant to take photos, until my quivering trigger finger refused entirely to shoot, so distressed it was by the prospect of having to do something with the many thousands of pictures that digital cameras goad you into taking.

Even after I had expended great uploading effort, when my sister (who had been one of the most vocal in demanding evidence of my travels) started to browse through my flickr account, she said to me: it gets a bit boring after a while.

Mess Neutral