Ticket To Ride: Lost And Found In America

We've been to Paris with one, India with another. Now it's time to catch a Greyhound - and much more - and cross America as another intrepid Sarah tries to make sense of the vast new country she's won.After a lifetime of winning nothing but the right to be designated driver, Sarah Darmody strikes it rich in a contest so bizarre most people think it's an urban legend - the Green Card lottery. Her prize: the right to live and work in America forever, all for less than the price of an instant Scratchie.But it's going to cost her much more.Fingerprinted, stripped, x-rayed, measured and investigated, she's warned that unless she commits serious time to her new country and uses her Green Card, she loses it. So, armed with an ugly red backpack, a tattered map, and a wad of hard-earned tips stuffed into her bra, she sets off to circumnavigate the continental US of A by way of another legendary American ticket to ride, the Greyhound bus - and to go where no tourist has even been before.However romantic it might look in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' Sarah soon discovers the Greyhound is more 'Midnight Cowboy' territory, favoured by the desperately poor, the despicably odoured and the dubiously paroled. But she gradually becomes at one with her new tribe as each trip becomes a private Jerry Springer show on wheels, filled with truly unforgettable characters and their stories. And as she is expelled into ever more amazing and improbable places, from New York to Santa Fe, Montana to Minnesota, New Orleans to Savannah, and is inexplicably drawn to a town called Truth or Consequences, she finds herself falling in love with the huge, unwieldy, crazy, ugly, beautiful and mixed-up kid that is the US of A, along with an addiction to airconditioning, fried food and the great American refrain: "I gots rights!'.In the tradition of HOLY COW! and NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, this is travel writing at its best - edge-of-your-seat, funny, deliciously insightful and thoroughly addictive.