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I’ve just booked my post-London Marathon hotel. A bit of luxury to, I hope, reward 4 months of hard graft. And also not very far away from the finish line, just on the other side of Green Park. Should be eminently walkable, even after 26.2 miles and sore legs. Heck, Frances may even be able to carry me there

I’d also rather fancied getting the train back on Monday. I’m not a fan of flying unless it’s necessary or the only option available. Previously I’ve managed to find very good deals from Glasgow to London, even at peak times, with a bit of advanced planning (a rare commodity in my case). It’s quite possible to get first class travel if you travel outside of the rush hour, and the price difference is often as little as £15 – Given you get free meals on the way, it’s not much different from standard class plus a couple of sandwiches and coffee from the buffet car. Plus you don’t get half as many distractions, so it’s ideal if you plan to work.

Unfortunately, I was in for a bit of a shock last night. Because I’ll be in London already (I’m going to be quite some way south on business, and arrangements are being made by my client), I’m just looking at a single ticket rather than a return. It seems that train prices, with Virgin Rail at least, are geared on return travel. Consequently where it was once not much difference in price to travel by train, it’s looking very hard to justify not flying back (Assuming I can make it up the boarding stairs; I’ve heard horror stories of marathoners struggling to get on flights! And I do like a good horror story to keep me honest)

I’m not sure whether this is a function of dropping demand for air travel keeping easyjet and co’s prices low (it is also unusually foresighted of me to be planning a flight 10 days in advance), or whether the train companies simply don’t have a system to adjust ticket price based on availability: Surely one of the best legacies of budget air travel?

Regardless, I’m now pondering flying back, and then putting the money I’d save on the train trip I’d planned, to good use with a nice meal out with Frances later in the week. Heck, with the money I’d save I could probably buy a chunk of rain forest.

If the Government really wants to do something about getting more people to travel by train, it would do very well to insist they adopt the pricing strategy of budget airlines because as things stands, train travel is starting to look prohibitively expensive, even if you’re prepared to spend a bit extra.

There are a number of excellent programmes on television at the moment about the United States of America. Simon Schama’s The American Future: A History is a particular favourite, and whilst I’m enjoying the variety and cinematography of Steven Fry in America, I fear it’s taken on too much, so we’re left with fleeting glances. I suspect the companion book from Fry, which will probably be on my Christmas list, will be more in depth. Finally, we have Jon Snow’s American Journey, to be broadcast tonight. I always enjoy Jon Snow’s reports from America (he has a knack of finding interesting views from ordinary Americans), so this promises to be a treat.

But in watching any programme or news report on America, so much in vogue as the presidential election nears it’s climax, I find my mind is always cast back to a cafe in Luxembourg one spring day in what must have been 1996. Myself and two American friends and work colleagues (Amy and Peter) from the company we worked for in Düsseldorf, Germany, had hired a car and headed off on a road trip over one of the many really long German weekends.

Of course, given it was Amy who had booked the car, the German company presumed an automatic car was required, so that’s what we got. My first go driving such, and on the wrong side of the road too. I found the automatic harder to get used to by a long shot. A hill start in Monaco a few days into the trip had me asking (quite frantically, I recall) “but where’s the clutch; how can I start on a hill without the clutch”, only to be told all I needed to do was take my foot off the brake, and on to the accelerator.

Our trip took us down through Germany, to Strasburg, then in to Switzerland, where we stayed in Berne. Then down to Italy and Genoa, over the border to Monaco, then back through France, and a few excitements in Lyon, and on to Luxembourg. It was a great break, and what working abroad was all about.

Luxembourg left me with two memories. One, that there are an awful lot of petrol stations there. Brought about, I seem to recall, by the tax policies, which made it very attractive for German, Dutch, Belgian and French motorists to fill up.

The second leads on to my choice of the title. Over lunch, I idly asked Amy and Peter if they could name all fifty states, because, I suggested, I didn’t know if I could do the same about English counties (I knew I couldn’t name many Welsh ones, so English was it!). They seemed to think this was achievable, easy even, and set out to name them.

Thankfully we had a paper table cover, and a pen, so they set out to write out every state and write it down. Quick progress was made. I even chipped in with some easy ones. We made good progress. But as we hit 40 states, it genuinely started to get tricky. But one by one, they fell. Until we had 49 states. Out of, of course, 50.

And there it stayed. As did (perhaps most regrettably of all) the table cover. We didn’t take it with us, so no way of working out which one had been missed. So as a result I’m left with this annoying gap of one state. Whenever America is mentioned, a programme featuring an off-the-beaten track State, I always find myself wondering “was that the state we missed?“. That red table cover with the 49 states, and the furrowed brows of my American friends, 12 years ago in a Luxembourg cafe, at the end of a superb road trip. I’ll never know which one was it, of course. But do like to think back to a great road trip with good friends all those years ago.