Tomorrow is not Yesterday....

The First Day of Thirty Days in America with Andy Mill....

We landed in Denver on April the 4th, or maybe it was the 5th, 2011, and hired a car, the cheapest we could get. And I would have liked a four wheel drive Chevolret pick-up truck and Andy had hoped we could afford a Cadillac convertible but instead we got a small white Nissan, hardly more noticeable on that late-hour three lane blacktop than a dropping from an exhuberant night-bird.

But this modest looking vehicle turned out to be a miracle machine, a David amongst Goliaths, and, driven by Andy, took us to places a Sherman tank could not have gone. Or might have gone but wouldn't have got us back again like this desperate wee chariot did. And if there is ever some terrible disaster, nuclear war or the like, I'm going to make a fast dash to the safety of this bairn-sized transport and jump in and shut the doors and only come out again when the frogs start jumping and the canaries start singing again.

So we drove off down the road, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, and, after some miles, I suddenly saw, for the first time in my life, on our left, glowing in the neon lights of a Motel 6, a hugely and heart-breakingly-beautiful silver and blue Kenworth truck. And even if I had then got immediately onto the next plane back to Scotland I would have, from that moment alone, brought back enough to wonder at for the rest of my life.

Yet none of the rest of our days in America were to be less than this one.