This post is bound to cause some consternation amongst those from across the duck pond of the Atlantic, so my apologies in advance. But what the heck, let’s blame George Bush.

My friend from Colorado has informed me that Americans have realised that their reputation isn’t exactly at its peak right now. She’s also told me that Americans have realised that George Bush, as the figurehead of American culture, is to blame for the international disillusionment towards them.

But I had to suggest that some Americans don’t exactly help themselves…

On a Greyhound bus from Vegas to Denver this time last year, our bus driver commenced our 14 hour journey with the ground breaking announcement that:

“There will be a number of stops on this trip, beginning with the first stop.”

Damn, I didn’t want to go to the First Stop; I must be on the wrong bus.

A day or so later in Denver I picked up a bottle of ‘Suave’ shampoo, the blurb on the back of the bottle confidently stated:

“Get better results from Suave shampoo for less than more expensive brands!”

A rather bold statement I thought. I hope their market researchers did their jobs correctly and confirmed that Suave did indeed cost less than the more expensive brands.

The year previously, as I had joined a seething mass of hundreds of people lining London’s Oxford Street in the chance of meeting German Rock band Rammstein, an American tourist trotted across the road and looked up and down the line of people and demanded:

“Oh my God, are you guys, like, queuing for something?”

Goodness me, no! We’re British; we just like to stand in a line for our own unadulterated entertainment.

It’s not that Americans are stupid; to generalise a nation of millions would be idiotic. It’s just that some of them, a select few, have this fantastic ability to make themselves appear so unbelievably dim, and I’m not entirely sure we can blame George Bush for that. Although I’m sure they’d have a damn good go at it.

I learnt a valuable lesson today, one that some day or another, any nervous driver must learn: Motorways really aren’t that scary.

Thanks to a sat-nav of course. It’s sad that we rely so blindly on technology today, when hundreds of years ago people could travel the globe without so much as a map. Yet, without this little piece of taken-for-granted technology I would have been hopelessly and irretrievably lost on the London Orbital.

I had barely had time to panic about being behind the wheel on the motorway for the first time in my life, when I was pulling into the hotel car park to the sultry sounds of “You have reached your destination.”

On arriving in the hotel, again my first time in a hotel on my own, excitement got the better of me and I’m ashamed to say that I did a Dylan Moran.

“Bouncing up and down on the bed, wearing the shower cap and thinking, ‘what can I do in here?’”

Within minutes of dumping my bags I’d pilfered the complimentary biscuits, tested the shower, boiled the kettle and tinkered with the air-con machine.

Five minutes later the novelty wore off and it was back out the door and off to find some real food to sate the appetite that the ginger biscuits had failed to control.

“It is the first secret conceit of every voyager to imagine that he alone has found the world’s last paradise. It is the second to believe that the door has slammed shut right behind him.” -Pico Iyer