The Heart of America - American icon - The Greyhound bus

The slogan reads: "Travel throughout North America with safety, dignity and convenience". Greyhound still sends off more than 20,000 buses every day. The Dog got its start in 1914 in Hibbing, Minnesota, transporting iron miners. Its big break was the film It Happened One Night (1934), in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert rode a Greyhound overnight to Florida. The Dog has been a national institution ever since. The rise of the low-cost airlines has hit the very long-distance services, yet Greyhound still has a seamless network of transport covering much of the country. You'll see a different US, one that only rarely makes the American news, the one where almost all Americans live. That's my country, and once you get the knack of navigating it, it's not such a bad place after all.

MICHAEL PAULS