My 'last' solo trip

by Sophia Moss (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find USA

I didn’t expect to find a lifesize Donald Trump cardboard cutout wearing a pink Hawaiian garland as I wandered through Philadelphia airport in a daze. It was August 2017 and I’d spent the last of my money on a cross country solo trip around the USA. A year before, I’d quit my monotonous call centre job to travel and work as a freelance writer, which in reality meant writing endless buyers guides about lawnmowers. This was my meant to be my big harrah, a once in a lifetime trip to get the wanderlust out of my system so I could settle down, do my masters and become a ‘real adult’. Having never learned to drive a car, I got around via planes, trains and an assortment of tin-shaped buses. People will tell you it’s impossible to get across the US via public transport and it certainly isn’t easy, but it can be done. After my encounter with cardboard Trump, I headed to Lodi, a leafy New Jersey town 45 minutes away from New York City. I wanted to see the stifling suburban America that generations of rock stars managed to escape from. I didn’t see any white picket fences and I had to leave New York at 11 pm every night to get the last bus back, but I got to see the Friends house on a Greenwich Village walking tour, spent hours wandering around the Met and took several grainy, zoomed-in photos of the Statue of Liberty courtesy of the free Staten Island ferry. Most people from the US have an inherent fear of buses. It's like they think a bunch of knife-wielding zombies are going to sit next to them and steal their iPhones. When leaving New York, I boarded the ‘Chinatown bus’ to Charleston. It takes 16 hours, the windows are grimy and towards the end, you’re ferried off and put in a minivan with little explanation, but it's still the only method of transport I ever got in the States which actually arrived on time. What does a vegetarian eat in New Orleans? Tonnes of hot sauce, from my experience. New Orleans has rows of vibrant independent galleries, gigantic tequila slushies and the best alien-themed hostel in the west, but my favourite memory of the city will always be coming across a huge hot sauce shop with rows of crackers, olives and crisps which you could dip in varying degrees of chilli. This was my lunch and it was glorious. Things never quite go to plan when you’re backpacking. Hurricane Harvey meant I ended up on the ‘Elvis Mobile’ - a free bus from central Memphis to Graceland which shows a loop of Elvis videos - instead of going to Texas. I stayed in Memphis’s only hostel, which is attached to the First Congregational Church and is opposite the inventive, if slightly too sweet, Imagine Vegan cafe. The hostel made us select a ‘chore card’ and do that chore every day of our stay. I chose to dust the lamps. I wish I could tell you about the rest of my trip. About the musician’s commune in Chicago, where I watched Chi-Raq and slept in a basement with the guitars. Or the California Zephyr train from Denver to Salt Lake City, which goes through the rocky mountains where the trees no longer grow and descend into the flat, apricot coloured deserts of Utah. If only I could tell you about the pollution in Salt Lake City, where mountains are hidden by clouds of chalky smoke. I want to convince you to go to San Diego instead of Los Angeles because the green gates of Beverly Hills are surrounded by the worst poverty and poorest public transport I’ve ever encountered. For now, I’ll just tell you to forget what you think you know about travelling around the USA. You can get around without a car. You can backpack and there are hostels (or Airbnb hostels, which are like shared houses with bunk beds and no staff) despite what people say. I didn’t expect to find so much difference in culture, climate and scenery in one country. Try it sometime. You don’t know what you might find.