Day 12 (part two): Wednesday, October 11^th 2017.

More books to buy at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore then say goodbye to Stephen, Lola and Boo and set the satnav for Roanoke, Virginia.

Touched Maryland on our way through Virginia, stopping off for a loo break and coffee at one of the welcome centres that are dotted along most interstate highways. We meet a couple just on their way to Tennessee, they were moving there from Vermont so they gave us the lowdown on what to see there. We plan to spend the last week of our trip with Elisa and Nick who moved to Vermont last year and have just had a baby daughter. Elisa is Lari’s brother whom we met in New York and she, like Lari, is very dear to me so I’m really looking forward to seeing her again. She holds a special place in my heart for all sorts of reasons. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet, many things to see and do before Vermont!

One of the joys for me of being a foreigner is the chance to meet strangers and brush lightly past their lives; chance meetings with other souls who must have experienced all the highs and lows that most of us go through at some point in our lives and who just happened to have walked into the same building on the same day and at the same hour as we have. The billions of inhabitants who all cling to this planet of ours, whatever their colour, race or creed are mostly all engaged in pretty much the same activity: getting by, making a living, bringing up children, just getting on with it. All the people we meet will have had good times, bad times, dull times. Or maybe they’re still to come? They may have travelled the world or never been outside of their own backyard but the chance to step into their lives, and for them to step into ours, is curiously moving. It’s likely we’ll never see them again, ever. Maybe that’s the poignancy; we won’t know when they have a birthday, when they have children, when they find out they can’t have children, when they get that job. Or when they die. We won’t miss them, and they won’t miss us. In a way they will cease to exist when we part company.

Existential interlude over, it’s back to Interstate 81, which today has dark storm clouds looming up ahead as well as the promise of the Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park and whatever other eyesores the Appalachian Trail has in store for us.

We cross over from Virginia into West Virginia, pausing only momentarily to think of John Denver, and flick through the radio stations. It’s staggering just how popular ‘Country’ music is in the US. You can cruise around in California accompanied by an amazing soundtrack of rock/alt-rock/adult oriented rock/you name it rock/eclectic/trippy/folk/classical with a different radio station at seemingly every single degree on the FM scale, but here in the east it seems that aside from preachers asking for money in many and varied ways there’s little choice but to tune in to yet another achey-breaky, lachrymose song about someone called Randy, doing someone called Mary-Jane, wrong. We did find the PBS channel but this seemed pretty much choked with wall-to-wall, Trump-based dismay.

The AirBnB search for Roanoke came up with what sounded like the perfect place. It had a creek at the bottom of the garden, made famous by Annie Dillard in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ and the photos of the house looked amazing.

Roanoke also boasted, and I quote, ‘the world’s largest, freestanding, illuminated man-made star’ overlooking the town, which wouldn’t have been high on our wish-list but sounded intriguing nevertheless. I’d started to read the novel back in England and had a clear picture of the creek and surrounding woodland in my mind.

Our host Dave messaged us as we got near, he wanted to be outside the house to greet us on arrival, which was kind of thoughtful. The area was suburban and open-plan, with pretty wooden houses. And, as Halloween was approaching, had scarecrows, black cats and pumpkins on most of the porches. Front porches are synonymous with middle America and not something we see much in England. They seem like an outward-facing, neighbourly idea to me, although I don’t recall seeing many people actually sitting out much.

Our host was a big, open-hearted, avuncular kind of guy and welcomed us warmly. He showed us around the back of the house to our basement apartment, another cosy, artfully decorated space with wood-pannelled walls and big comfy sofas. He was keen to show us the creek and presented it to us like an eager estate agent. There was a steep slope running from our front door down to the creek and the rushing sound of the water increased in volume as we stepped down the wobbly stone pathway that led to the water’s edge.

The stormy weather of day had subsided, it was now a beautiful, calm and warm evening, so we sat by the river with a glass of wine and watched a blue heron standing in the creek looking for fish.

We left it to its work and went in early, I read a few more pages of the novel and Jane continued her battle with a crotchet hook and some wool. John-Boy, Jim-Bob and Mary-Ellen said their prayers, kissed us both goodnight and all felt right with the world.