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Change of address

I now have a new site, with all sorts of extra features including this blog and a map, at http://www.nytola.org/. Nytola sounds like a sleeping pill or something, but I promise it's anything but soporific - it actually stands for New York to Los Angeles. Please drop in to follow my continuing adventures, and change your bookmarks accordingly. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Summerford, Ohio. 581 miles.

I enjoyed a rare taste of freedom yesterday. Pete Yoder, whose hospitality I'm enjoying at the moment, ferried my backpack here in his car, allowing me to walk for half a day with nothing to carry for the first time. It was a real treat. I don't mind my pack, but it weighs 40 pounds and sometimes, especially towards the end of the day, it can be a real burden as I constantly shift it around in an attempt to get comfortable.

I was in a bookshop the other day reading a book on ultra-lightweight camping, and it had a whole chapter on how to reduce your pack weight to 5 pounds. That's the kind of thing I can only dream of. I'm usually good at travelling light, and I constantly review the contents of my luggage (a couple of days ago, my 700-page guidebook was consigned to the bin because it's mainly about big cities, and this trip is mainly about small towns), but I really feel I need all the stuff I have.

As I walked, I spotted a hidden bend in the river beside the road. Show me any expanse of open water, and I feel a compulsion to immerse myself in it, so I dabbled for half an hour as the cars sped by a hundred yards away. The opposite bank was a firmament of star-shaped purple and yellow flowers, the air filled with pale-blue mayflies and monarch butterflies and the hum of crickets. So much goes on unseen by human eyes, especially in this vast country.

The landscape changes abruptly west of Columbus: horizons broaden, the sky and the clouds assume a more dominant presence, and the road is lined with huge expanses of corn and soybeans. It's beautiful, but you can have too much of a good thing.

After Pete had shown me round some of his own farmland, we sat down at the dining table with a pile of maps. 'There's lots more of this on route 40,' he told me. 'Basically, it's like this all the way across Indiana and Illinois. If I were you, I'd start heading south. Go to Kentucky. It's much more scenic - it even has hills.'

So that's what I'm going to do. Route 40 has served me well for more than 300 miles, and it could have taken me to Salt Lake City, but it's time for a parting of the ways.

Columbus, Ohio. 554 miles.

Some useful statistics. Well, sort of.

• Car crashes witnessed: 1
• TV interviews: 1
• Times told off by police officers for walking on interstate: 1
• Times walked on interstate without being spotted by police officers: 1
  
• Radio interviews: 2
• Dogs that haven't barked at me: 3 (but one of these was Maxy, who's so clever he must be Albert Einstein reincarnated in canine form)
• Autographs signed: 4 (but one of these was "in case you get famous")
  
• Consumption of Subway Foot-Long Veggie Delites on wheat bread with pepper jack cheese, all the veggies and lite mayonnaise: 7 (I have a rule that if I'm hungry and I go past a Subway, I eat one. I don't know why, because I'm getting fed up with them. It's a bit like Supersize Me, but without the trans fatty acids)
• Nights in tent: 9
• Nights in people's homes: 11
• Newspaper interviews: 18
• Nights in motels: 34
• Dogs that have barked at me: approx. 150
• People walking or cycling across America at any one time: approx. 1 million. This figure was extrapolated by my brother Nigel based on the number of people I've met who are doing a similar thing, the population of the US, and the number of possible routes across the country. He doesn't have any statistical qualifications that I know of, and I think he may have added a few extra zeroes by mistake.
• Approximate number of steps taken: 1,329,600

And some thankyous...
to Shirley Haynes, John and Shirley Vingle, Diane and Ted Mueller, and Dan, Mim, Logan and Emma Halterman, for all your generous hospitality.

What the papers say

I'm starting to add links to my cuttings file in case you're interested. It's no good linking to the papers themselves, because a lot of them start charging for content after 14 days.

If you read some of these pieces and think "Phil would never say anything like that," it's because Phil never did say anything like that. Much as I'm grateful to all the journalists for the valuable publicity they've given me, they do have a habit of putting words into my mouth.

One recently quoted me as saying that the key to colon cancer prevention lay in "Bugging the heck out of your doctor". I may be going native a bit (today I tried a glass of root beer with my lunch and almost enjoyed it), but does that sound even remotely like me?

Bexley, Ohio. 549 miles.

My favourite person of the week is someone I've never met. I don't know who she is or where she lives, but her name is Candis Roberts. She visited my Justgiving website, calculated that I needed £99.66 to achieve my £10,000 goal, and donated precisely that amount. I like her because her generosity is equalled only by her sense of humour.

Candis - if you're reading this, please phone or email so I can thank you properly for helping me to achieve this milestone. Meanwhile, I've upped my target to £12,000 ($22,700), which I hope is not too optimistic.

Bexley is a posh district of Columbus - the governor of Ohio lives here, and so does the city's mayor - named after the nondescript south London suburb just a few miles from where I live.

I'm still following route 40 after more than 250 miles, and it's been very strange over the past 24 hours to see it evolve from a relatively sleepy cornfield-lined two-lane country road into the main street of a metropolitan area that's home to 1.7 million people.

This is my first big city since New York, and I must confess to a sneaking enjoyment of the eight miles of strip mall-land I passed through today - unlike the cornfields, there's always something going on to make the time pass more quickly. And while I'm no great fan of Starbucks' bid for global domination, I couldn't resist nipping into their first branch since New York for an espresso.

Zanesville, Ohio. Exactly 500 miles.

My much-loved but pedantic friend Tim has reminded me that I've also been to Zermatt, Switzerland and Zeebrugge, Belgium. Well, OK, but you get the idea.

Anyway, those hardworking people in the coincidences department have been working overtime, and today they pulled off a real coup. As I walked out of Norwich, I saw four hikers heading towards me. Seeing anyone using their legs as a means of propulsion is rare enough in this country, but these were the first people in seven weeks who were actually walking on the road for its own sake, rather than because their car had broken down or something.

We stopped to chat, and I learned that they were part of a team of seven progressive Christians hiking from Phoenix to Washington DC in a project called CrossWalkAmerica, seeking to encourage greater tolerance and offer an alternative to religious fundamentalism. They'd notched up 2,100 miles since Easter Day, so the end was in sight. I particularly envied them for their support vehicle, which allowed them to concentrate on the thing that mattered most: putting one leg in front of the other. They invited me to dinner in the evening, I accepted with pleasure, and we said our farewells.

Left to right: Stephen Yarbrough, from Zanesville, spending a day with the walkers; Eric Elnes; Rebecca Glenn; Mark Creek-Water, who has been drinking from muddy brown rivers for the past ten years with no significant side effects.

Less than a minute later, as I was picking up my backpack and moving off, two cyclists rode up. "Are you crossing America for cancer research?" one of them asked. "So are we."

Jacob and Ezra Pierce are part of a six-strong group of college students, pedalling from San Francisco to Baltimore to raise money for the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. Three of them are from Britain's second best university.

Actually, I'm not sure "pedalling" is quite the right verb, evoking, as it does, little old ladies wobbling their way to village cricket matches. No, these guys are the real deal, streaking across the prairies at a phenomenal 600 miles a week, their bloodstreams untainted by even the merest hint of performance-enhancing substances. They left SF on 3 July, and expect to cross the finishing line on 14 or 15 August.

These people really put me in my place. Any reasonably fit person can walk across America if they want to, but not everyone can cycle it in less than six weeks. As if that weren't enough, the prose on their website is as finely crafted as a Shimano cotterless titanium alloy crankpin.

Dinner with my fellow walkers was a delight. We ate in the grounds of a church in Zanesville, compared notes on crucial issues of the day like blisters, daily mileages, and objects we'd found beside the road, and enjoyed a tour of this fascinating city.