Cambridge, Ohio. 476 miles.

On the Phil Goddard Acts of Kindness Scale, the attractive little town of St Clairsville (also known as "paradise on the hill") scores an impressive three.

First there was the manager of the Econolodge motel who, when he heard what I was doing, gave me a whopping discount on my room, presented me with a meal voucher for a Texan restaurant a mile down the road, and insisted on driving me there himself.

Then there was Charlie and Michelle Donley. They drove up to me, asked what my favourite milkshake flavour was, and brought me one as I continued walking.

Frank Curtis also came up to me in his car, said he was off to a Rotary Club lunch, and invited me to join him. He showed an instant and admirable understanding of the rules of my walk, offering to drive me back to exactly the same spot after we'd finished.

I received a warm welcome from the Rotarians, who asked me to say a few words about what I was doing and spent much of the rest of the time exchanging extremely upmarket badinage. In my favourite example, the chairman picked on a hapless colleague and said: 'Hey, Tom, is that a seersucker suit I see you're wearing?' Tom shifted in his seat and admitted that it was. 'Do you know why they call them seersucker?' No. 'Because Sears sell 'em, and suckers buy 'em.'

Afterwards, Frank took me home and introduced me to his wife Suzanne, his granddaughter Emily, and the most extraordinary model railway layout I've ever seen, occupying the entire basement of his house and complete with realistic sound effects.


By way of contrast, I spent the night in a village which shall remain nameless. It was the worst example of rural poverty I've ever seen in the US: half the houses were abandoned and had long since given up any attempt at verticality, while the main street was lined with skeletal, shattered hulks that had once been cars and were now rapidly becoming smothered in vegetation. I passed a long-defunct showroom of some kind, its roof caved in and its floor littered with broken glass and yellowing papers - and just as I walked by the open door, the phone started ringing, like something out of a David Lynch film.

I continued to the end of the street, briefly considered pitching my tent in the cemetery before deciding against the idea of sharing a night with lots of dead people, and ended up in a field. I got hardly any sleep because I was suffering from really bad itching all over the top half of my body, possibly some kind of allergic reaction. The whole area cast a pall of gloom over me.

My sister Jacqui often researches the places I visit, and today she told me what she'd found out about the village. According to local legend, the cemetery is haunted. A severed hand reputedly stalks it at night, and if you walk round it six times you'll disappear, never to be seen again. So it looks like I had a narrow escape.