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I am devouring a slice of pizza on Broadway in downtown LA and talking to Matthew, a gaunt-looking fellow whose protruding ears make him resemble a coyote from his native Arizona.
"Seven minutes - that's how long your average tourist experiences the Grand Canyon for," Matthew tells me in his cowboy drawl.
It is 3am and I can't sleep. Down the stairs, a startled night porter looks twice and ushers me into the night. Theories turn visibly in his head: people trafficker? Mafia fixer? Art historian? I turn left along the waterfront and walk - moonlight rippling on the black lagoon waters.
I'm fascinated by Florida because it's both obvious - balmy weather and beachside condos - and hard to place. Three visits in, what I'm seeing is that Florida's story is one of man conquering and transforming a very unique natural environment.
Yet driving back from Key West to Miami you follow the broken remains of the Great Florida Overseas Railroad - an emblem, perhaps, of that conquest not being forever...
"So, it's true that the Dutch swapped New York City for your country in the 1600s?"
"Yes. With the English. Dutch are clever people but the worst deal they ever made."
I look up. We have left the Jessica Jones murk of the Times Square hinterland for Fifth Avenue, one of whose doormen is outlined in orange. Grand Central up ahead. "So tell me about Suriname."
There is some debate about which is America's Christmas tree. On the Mall in Washington DC, carefully aligned with the monuments and Oval Office, there is a ghastly looking conical shape that is plastered with green, yellow and purple lights.
On closer inspection, you can actually make out leaves and branches inside. On the plus side, the President of the USA switches on the lights each year. I might put in for tickets if Hillary is in charge (I could skip a Trump lighting ceremony). This year the tree is a 74-footer proudly supplied by Alaska and chosen (I presume) as the best specimen from their vast forests.
But much better, in my view, is the real America's Christmas tree: the one outside Rockefeller Center in New York.
St Thomas's church, an oasis of Englishness on Fifth Avenue, has just helped me empathize with the millions of Ukrainians, Irish, and other ethnic groups who flock to a particular place each Sunday for that feeling of being connected with home.
Each weekend morning in the East Village I would head out in search of borscht, blintzes and other tastes of East European cooking. Why? Because it's available, it's home-made the way the chef's grandmother made it, and therefore it tastes amazing.
In the same spirit, the Ukrainians in my neighborhood have built a spectacular orthodox church with vivid murals and gold ornaments. It turns out that my little piece of cultural turf in the city is right here: squatting on some of earth's most expensive real estate just a few blocks south of the park.
This doesn't feel like Texas in 2017, the year of the orange apocalypse, but my new friend in Austin tells me why:
"We call the San Francisco to Austin flight the Nerd Bird: kids tapping laptops all the way - then they come here for a place they can afford, the music, the weirdness."