I spend two days trying to get my bike out of the port. After all the paperwork, all the walking miles across the port in the sun back and forth between customs and freighters, all the fruitless negotiation to waive the $90 crate opening charge, all the pointless attempts to get the crate put in the shade for us to work on the bikes, the hours of sweating in the sun reassembling the machines, the appeasing of interests in the yard to give us peace to work in, the delicate stacking of components on my rack into a fine sculpture of metal and angles, after all this, I pull out my key ring to start the machine and realize I have the wrong set. There are no words, there are no words…

Me and the Transalp go across the states in ten days, via Chicago and Yellowstone. It occurs to me that this is the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance journey in reverse. New York is as great as ever (so good they named it twice). I then head south via the overrated New Orleans to Dallas (where I don’t get shot) and then out.

Goodbye. Out through Texas, the huge belly of the beast: you were kind, prosaic and troubled. Biggest market on the planet, more violence to offer than any empire in the whole of history, but you still don’t feed and clothe your population. One does wonder. No more dollar-horror max-it meals of fat and fries: fucked by forty, dead by fifty, still with ten pounds of undigested red meat in your guts when they shovel dirt on the timber. Another road for me.

There's a lot more to say. Some other time.