The bus to Tulsa looked outwardly promising, it was a coach. The driver offered his assistance with my case, after registering my disability, but then left his charitable nature in the hold and sternly warned me that the bus was a sleeper service, so I shouldn't make any noise.

At this point in my journey, I'd been travelling for 9 hours and it was 12.30am, I wanted as much as anyone else to sleep.

 No chance. The only remaining seat on the bus was broken and didn't recline so I spent the five hours trying at least to close my eyes, although sleep did not fully arrive. 

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I dragged myself off the bus at the Greyhound station on North Detroit in downtown Tulsa at 5am. Conveniently, across the street from the dramatically modern City Hall, nicknamed The Glass Cube, where my host and friend Stephanie works.

When Steph arrived, I was reminded of the singular capability of the USA to accompany every roadside with a roadside cafe. Across from the Greyhound was IHOP - the International House of Pancakes - which showed no evidence of any international input but happily showed plenty of pancakes. 

My experiences of Bible Belt Christianity did not chime with many of the external clichés about the area. For an area so well known for its number of churches and the fervent beliefs, the old adage about not talking about politics or religion seemed still to hold true.

There is little I can say about Tulsa as a city in an organisational sense because I was based in the suburban city of Jenks but I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this area. 

A city of roughly 400,000 people spread around the banks of the Arkansas River with a strong sense of its historical relationship with oil but no particularly strong influence at this moment. Not even the large number of churches, in various shapes and sizes from warehouse-like buildings to more traditional looking churches, particularly spill out into the feeling of the city and its area and the unobtrusive flavour of this activity was even true in the suburbs of Jenks and Sand Springs when I visited.

The small size of Tulsa means it is not soon before the city dissolves into suburbs and further into countryside such as the glorious countryside of Lake Tenkiller. I think Tulsa will re-find its place, as it moves through the transition into an era defined by the Glass Cube and the stark glass fronted BOk Centre sports complex. 

 From downtown Tulsa all the way out to the suburbs, there are plenty of churches. But their sermons and their preachers never ventured onto the street to challenge the presence of a non-believer in their town.

 I was never once accosted by a street preacher or bombarded in any way by a religious message.

Steph's Mom suggested that it was possible that the churches were not as obvious as I thought they would be because they didn't look like churches.

And to an extent she was right, redolent as they were of the converted warehouses here on Brixton Hill which also house evangelical churches. Down in the suburbs they still looked like churches, but I have come across more proselytising outside the tube station in Brixton than I did during this trip, even in the suburban city of Sand Springs.

The abiding memory of my time on this leg was the sheer joy of an air-conditioned room or car after the searing heat of the Oklahoma autumn on my Lancastrian skin. The difference between the air conditioning and the air temperature outside was reinforced by the ability of the state's institutions and house makers to build solid housing and virtually miraculous blinds which are so good at restricting the light flow into a room that it is virtually impossible to judge the time of day. 

Thank you to Brian and Stephanie Thurman, who hosted me during this trip. Brian even allowed me to accompany him on a flight instruction he conducted over Tenkiller.

A day visiting Steph's Mom (Deirdre), sister (Jennifer) and nephew (Luke) spread out lazily in the autumnal heat into an evening barbecue. The meat was secured at Wal-Mart and Brian disappeared out into the yard. Through the heat shielding, down below, Brian threw petrol into a large drum which looked like a fireman's brazier - resulting in a monumental tower of flame.  

The more I think of this evening, the more it strikes me as the most typically American night in my entire trip. Back-yard grilled steak and beer in a suburban house.

Or maybe in these searingly hot days and evenings with steak and 'taters, I had a taste of what makes the South so distinctive. 

Eventually, I headed back out of town on the Greyhound. Back into the world of hub and spoke transit. The USA has two attitudes to transport. The car is king. Even for journeys through a metropolitan area like in and out of Memphis or Tulsa.

Despite my strong distaste for this methodology, I am happy at least to have had the opportunity to taste the Lone Star state of Texas. In a journey where state flags are highly uncommon (in comparison with the US flag), Texas proudly flies its statehood at every opportunity. 

After the long bus journey from Dallas, the bus rolled into the station at 203 Union. No maps of the city were in evidence anywhere in the terminal building, on walls or printed.

The lockers at the terminal needed money and only lasted 3 hours, so I gave up on that idea and ventured outside into the already warm Tennessee morning and came face to face with AutoZone Park, home of the Memphis Redbirds.

No game until the weekend so I followed signs for Downtown.

Three blocks south to Beale Street.

I loved the feeling in the city of Memphis.

Everyone helped me at every stage, it has a lot of potential to grow and a lively atmosphere.

But they need to relocate the Tourist Visitor Center close to the FedEx Forum, midway between the Greyhound Station and the Amtrak Station - and possibly add a little depot at the airport.

In the absence of such a move, my initial attempts to establish where I was and what I should be doing were complicated.

The geography is weird, because the largest geological landmark of Memphis is the river but the river is strangely disconnected from the Downtown, and walking from the river up to Beale means walking up a steep hillside onto the bluff plateau.

I was disappointed by Beale. A street which felt like a pastiche, stuck in the 1960s heyday of the musical movements which formed there.

So I collapsed onto a park bench at Handy Park (Complete with its minor amphitheater and its statue of the "Father of the Blues", WC Handy) at the junction of Beale and Third to apply suncream. It was lunch-time. I have to admit that I had never heard his name before (or since) . So he is a subject for further research.

I stumbled back up the street to the Peabody Centre to get some cash out of a machine and eat something.

I got on the Main Street trolley and asked the guard. We worked our way all the way up Main and then round the corner West and backdown on the 'Riverside Loop'. The trolley is only 10 years old, but has been styled after the 1950s trolley that originally ran the streets. And despite claims to the contrary on the city transit website, the trolley was not especially accessible. In fact, it rattled its way around the route as if the carriages had been built in the 1950s and never upgraded.

Next stop on the surreal tour of historical echoes, the corner of N. Riverside Drive and Auction Avenue. The vast shiny Pyramid Arena. It has not been used for anything since 2004 after the Memphis Grizzlies moved down to Beale, and the impressively modern FedEx Forum. And now it just sits lonely on the banks of the Wolf River Lagoon of the Mississippi, with only a parking lot and the Tennessee Visitor Centre for company.

The TVC, full name the BB King Elvis Presley Visitor Centre. It is a very pleasant, air-conditioned building outlining the scale of Memphis history. The staff were amazing and there was all the information I needed. The fantastic Precious even dug out a map and worked out the geography of my host's apartment and the local bus to get me there. Although predictably, even the TVC had no bus leaflets.

As well as the rather odd and long-winded name of the TVC (reinforced by Memphis's decision not to name its airport after anyone), I have yet to establish how it is that a marker to the preservation of Overton Park is next to the building - several blocks from the park. The act of preservation was necessary because the Illinois government was originally intending to build the Interstate 40 through the middle of the park in order to link city suburbs more directly to downtown Memphis. As with any challenge to state power, this dispute ended up in the US Supreme Court, where the court ruled that the preservation of parkland should take precedence over anything else. As I said, I'm not sure why it is marked at that spot.

I find it interesting that the Grizzlies arrived in town in 2001 after the long trek south from Vancouver, and the Redbirds baseball team was founded in 1996. This tells me that there is some desire for urban reform, for pumping some fresh blood into the city's connections with the outside world. But the Grizz have underperformed and the Redbirds have only made the playoffs twice in the 13 years of their existence.

Because of the weird franchise history of the Grizzlies, I started supporting them in the mid-90s when they were in Vancouver and I told myself that my distaste for the NBA's prioritisation of showbiz over sport could be compensated for by supporting one of the two Canadian teams. Given the state of Memphis, that still remains the case even now. Underdogs they definitely are.

I will sit at home here in Brixton and cross my fingers that the Redbirds win the playoffs and that Allen Iverson - signing today for the Grizz - helps them win something.

The City has a mayoral election on October 15th. It will be interesting to see how that affects the area. I hope that one day there will be more organisation.

Just as I was giving up hope of experiencing 'real' Memphis, my Arkansasian host Carolina led myself and a Swedish guy with an English accent - Martin - to Ernestine + Hazel's, off Beale. It was 11pm but they were still serving the wonderfully hunger-quenching Soul Burger. Ernestine's was an old building with ill-equipped rooms and random visitors within. Maybe I'll come up with a better description soon. :) 

Special thanks to the staff at the Comfort Inn Downtown and once more to Precious at the Tennessee Visitor Centre, as well as to Carolina for hosting me during my time there and Martin for company during my evening there.  

Perhaps it is the oddest sensation to say something in a mutually intelligible tongue and yet be greeted with a stare of incomprehension. On the few occasions it happened, it was an odd sensation.

At least in Germany I can blame my grasp of the language.

There is a reason why the USA is so often referred to as big. I will defer to others to describe it in pure statistical terms except than to repeat the breathless admission of an old friend of mine on his first trip to the USA, to the sparsely populated state of Nebraska.

Matthew told me that Nebraska is the size of the United Kingdom, but with the population of Yorkshire. And if you can fit my entire home country into one state, then somewhere with 49 more must be huge. 

The space is huge, the myths are too. So here are some of my observations on the enduring myths about America and Americans after having gained some empirical knowledge. The Americans I met on this trip were much like the Americans I have grown to know and love over the course of a decade of chatting to people I now know as friends. That is, they are complicated as any group are but generally conversational and almost without exception friendly and willing to help.

I'm not aware of any specifically Northern myths, except than to disagree with a taxi driver who told me on my arrival in Washington DC that 'Northern hospitality' is a one-fingered salute. My hosts for the first leg of this trip were a mixture of North and South and neither was wanting for hospitality. The taxi driver's comment was a reflection on my telling him that I could see why 'Southern hospitality' is so well known.