After three relaxing days exploring, imbibing and dreaming at waterfalls in Portland, we parted ways with Rachael, our native guide and superstar driver, to catch the ‘Empire Builder’ train back to Chicago. It’s been emotional. And tiring. Mostly tiring. 50 hours in transit does funny things to your brain.

Our cab to Portland’s train station was driven by someone who looked just too much like Hunter S Thompson: the shaved head, the shades, the almost clinically sober expression borne of one too many bygone drug frenzies. That’s not guesswork either: this guy was, to his chagrin, banned from voting for a drugs felony. Caught with 3.2g of cocaine and $400, he escaped the threat of serious jail time – after one month in the “disgusting” state prison – in exchange for 200 hours community service. But now he’s not even allowed to cross the river into Washington state, and he can’t vote in the Democratic primary, which he seems pissed about. Hunter would’ve been livid.

Thanks to melting snow flooding the tracks east of Portland we’re shoved onto a grotty replacement bus for the first part of our journey. In Britain this would’ve been cause for some pretty hardcore grumbling, but the passengers are all merrily laissez faire about it. The gallows humour is as rich as blue cheese dressing as we wander hopefully off into the dark in search of a train. It’s like if ‘Lost’ was a light-hearted comedy rather than a Serial Confuseathon: people from all walks of life thrown together by circumstance, mucking in and happily teasing one another. A mouthy young punk boy, a middle-aged massage therapist, two good ol’ boys in their 60s with military eyes, a young hispanic family.. modern America in all its glory.

The massage therapist is for Hillary. “Just because she cares” she says to me. Her new friend, a short 30 year old woman with a midwestern waistline, is not shy about confronting her on this: “she does NOT care. My children are both diabetic, and we were at this event for diabetic children which Hillary came to, and she went a long way out of her way to avoid talking to any of them.” “Oh” said the masseuse, before returning to her banter with the punk boy.

Eventually, at some point in a night of fitful naps, sporadic grazing, and weary bag-dragging, we boarded the train that would take us the remaining, ahem, 44 hours to Chicago. We talked politics with a lot of great people during that time.

Gail, a Democrat whose husband is half-Blackfoot Indian, told us how upset she was with Bush, how her husband would argue that his ancestors had been fighting terrorism since the 1500s. Maurice and his wife were both excited about Obama and Clinton, just hopeful that one of them can beat McCain. There was Antonio, the dining car waiter and unofficial train jester – “who do you want to get assassinated first, the woman or the black guy?”. Young New Yorker Josh, who spent 18 months serving in an artillery unit in Iraq (”what was it like?” “it was real“), voted Hillary for no particular reason he can think of: “they make you vote in the army; it’s seen as a duty. I don’t really mind who’s President, as long as they do their job properly.”

And now we’ve come full circle back to Chicago, ready to fly back to London and let the jet-lag turn our insides out. There’s a hell of a lot more to come, from us and this election: so keep checking back.

In downstate Oregon the other day, I had been talking to Mr and Mrs Comfort-Inn about their disappointment over Mitt Romney’s exit from the race. They didn’t think much of the Republican frontrunner John McCain. Would they be voting for Mike Huckabee then, the more conservative alternative to McCain?

“Well, he did do well in the Bible Belt,” Mr Comfort-Inn acknowledged, “but he seems kinda stupid to me. He’s said some really dumb things.”

Outside in the car park I relayed this comment to Tom and Rachael. Tom raised his eyebrow a little. “Huckabee’s too stupid to vote for? That’s a new one.”

And it was new; we’d heard a lot of things said about Mike Huckabee, but not that. It was the latter part of Tom’s comment that really struck a chord with me – in the six incredible weeks we’ve been on this trip, there have been only three constants:

(1) The breakfasts are as big as the Bay Bridge,
(2) The motels are as clean as Howard Hughes’ soapdish, and
(3) We never fail to unearth new opinions everywhere we go.

There was Anna, the Russian Studies graduate from Eugene, Oregon we met at a rock show the other night. She’s from a long line of Democrats (”my grandmother will kill me if she finds out I’m not voting Clinton”), and is a Democrat herself. And yet, she told us, she intends to vote for John McCain “for professional reasons” – which is ‘a new one’ again. Her theory is that a more hawkish foreign policy towards Putin’s Russia will increase her job opportunities in the field.

Then in San Diego, at the Mike Huckabee sign-waving event, there was the arch-conservative family man Mark, with his six-strong brood of healthy white Christian kids in tow; fiercely anti-abortion, and living in a city that bordered Mexico. He’d once had his car vandalised by illegal Mexican immigrants, he told us. If voter profiling was to tell you anything about this man’s stance on immigration, it doesn’t take much to work out what that would be. And yet, and yet…

“I think if you people come over to this country illegally, I would just say ‘welcome to the US, God bless you, pay your taxes, and become a citizen.’” He told us. “If you’re an immigrant and you commit a crime, you should be punished for it of course – but as a citizen.” Mark looked slightly nervous about his dissent. “I know I differ from my party on this issue.”

There were the Republicans at Berkeley University, hidden shyly away in the corner from the all-pervasive Democratic circus. The three people looking after the stall were split all over the place. One of the guys, Derek, had initially favoured Fred Thompson, who dropped out, then Rudy Giuliani, who dropped out, and at the time we spoke to him was going for Mitt Romney – who has of course now dropped out.

Victoria, the nerdy girl in a physics-meets-Star Wars t-shirt standing next to him, was marked out from her Berkeley peers just by being a Republican, and here she was bravely signing people up to the GOP in the middle of a liberal wonderland. Yet, surprisingly, she confessed to us that she didn’t really like any of her party’s prospective candidates: “It’s pretty disappointing, because it’s the first time I can vote. I want someone who’s socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and none of them fit that description.”

We have been told by supporters of at least six different candidates that theirs is the only candidate who tells it like it is. Well, they can’t all be the only one.

America’s two-party system does not bind people, indeed it seems much less tribal than the Labour/Conservative divide in the UK. We’ve heard people give their Presidential preferences as (1) Mitt Romney, (2) Barack Obama on more than one occasion now. And as we discovered from Iowa to North Carolina, from Texas to California, a lot of people would like an opportunity to vote for a viable third party candidate, whether they be a Green, a Libertarian, or something else altogether.

We’ve learned a lot on this trip beyond the fact that there are two ways of pronouncing the word ‘parmesan’, and one lesson stands out, for it has infused our every conversation with our fellow Americans – across 24 states in over six weeks on the road. It’s something that opinion polls will never be able to account for, that armchair ‘experts’ will never have the energy to investigate, and that serious news journalists will never be given the time or column inches to fully report – the remarkable, unpredictable intricacies of each voter’s opinions. Many journalists are doing terrific jobs reporting this election. But if you’re up against a deadline – which you always are – and you want a two-line quote to illustrate a point, you are likely to rule out the man or woman you met that morning who had a jumbled hodgepodge of atypical, confusing or contradictory beliefs.

This election, of all elections, can just not be reduced to clear, simple ideological blocks of opinion. Through unique combinations of experiences, influences and perceptions, two people with identical beliefs on paper can easily be gung-ho supporters of completely different candidates. Of course all media outlets, ourselves included, have to generalise opinions into blocks sometimes. But no-one should ever be allowed to forget that voters are like snowflakes – no two are alike. (Also, they’re hard to catch on your tongue.)

A voter’s opinions can be bizarre, they can differ from public perception, they can differ from their party, their candidate, and frequently they can be far beyond an accurate impression of the truth.

And that, my friends, is democracy.

After 24 leg-weary, election-less hours hanging out in San Francisco, barking at the sunset with Pier 39’s sea-lions and shopping with the Haight’s hippies, today it was time to move on again. Driving north from Oakland we stopped at a cheapo roadside place called Straw Hat Pizza in Williams, California. They have little embedded Fox News TVs in the wall-side of the diner booths, so you can corrode your brain and your arteries at the same time. It’s been a while since we had the displeasure. The host was interviewing some smarmy city-boy jerk about Mitt Romney’s (unsurprising) exit from the race; he wanted to know how jerk-boy’s fellow money-men would react to a President McCain.

“Well,” he said dismissively, “Wall Street doesn’t trust John McCain, because he’s a man of principle.”

The presenter looked at him like maybe he was forgetting something. Forgetting that maybe, somewhere out there, people might consider that being a man of principle might not be a shortcoming. In the next segment, the host put it to a Clinton supporter that Obama was now in the ascendancy in the Democratic race. The logic runs that even though the delegate count is pretty even, Obama has the momentum and the funds to do better in the next few rounds of voting, on 9, 10, 12, and 19 February. He pointed out that since winning big in (predominantly white) states since South Carolina, Obama was “no longer the proverbial black candidate”.

Did he really just say that? The proverbial black candidate. Tom and I froze in mid-chew. A Fox pundit proceeded to explain that the Democrats would be “riven by internecine strife” in the coming months, because they hadn’t already anointed a candidate; a ludicrous claim to anyone who watched the back-slapping charade that was masquerading as the last Democratic debate. It seems clear from our travels that however long it takes to choose between them, Democrats will happily get behind either Obama or Clinton. The same cannot be said for a Republican party that stands at an ideological crossroads – they’ve got a leader now, sure, but a lot of Christian conservatives do not want to follow McCain where he’s going.

As we finished off our ‘Hot Hat’ pizza pockets an advert for that evening’s O’Reilly Factor thundered “Is the media distorting the election?” Bill O’Reilly decrying media distortion? Fox decrying media distortion? I pushed my excess salad croutons away in disgust. No amount of blue cheese dressing or complimentary lemonade refills can neutralise the bitter taste you get watching Fox rummage through the bins and rabidly chase its tail.

If you’re a Britisher and don’t really know what all the fuss is about, check out Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. It’s guilty of some Michael Moore-ish hyperbole at times, but it’s still essential viewing. Or if you don’t have 90 minutes to spare, here’s a fun little two minute clip. And if you think that it’s just lefty propaganda to claim that Fox is right-wing propaganda, check the facts: a stunning 67% of Fox News viewers polled in 2003 believed there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, compared with 16% of PBS (public access) viewers. There was no connection, of course, as Donald Rumsfeld admitted in 2004.

When we planned this trip, it always had definite bookends: the Iowa Caucus, at the start, and then Super Tuesday as the grand finale, the closest America has ever got to having a nationwide primary. With so many states voting on one day, it seemed like when the dust settled on 6 February we would have an end to our narrative, a final scene for our film: Tom and I stumbling tired, battered and bruised into the sunset, possibly accompanied by Governor Bill Richardson. Well, it now seems that someone’s shown that film to a test audience, and they’ve decided they want to spin out the plot for several more hours before resolving anything. Hillary, Barack: what are you guys trying to do to us?

As you may or may not know from the more traditional news outlets, John McCain was the big winner in the Republican race, with Mike Huckabee doing better than expected, and Mitt Romney doing worse than expected. The Republicans look closer than ever to picking McCain as their candidate, but doing so will alienate substantial swathes of their conservative base, especially in those southern states that Huckabee cleaned up in tonight. The night for the Democrats was pretty much split down the middle: Obama got more states, Hillary got more big states – including California – and neither of them will be conceding anything for a good while yet.

We’re just back from spending the marathon results session in La Val’s Pizza Restaurant, having been invited by the cheerful, resilient Berkeley for Obama supporters. We took our place at 4pm to watch the results start coming in from the eastern states, but at that time there wasn’t much politicking going on in the room. We met Sid, who is Canadian, and failing his economics degree at Berkeley because of his dedication to the Obama campaign. He went to Mason City, Iowa earlier this year, hitching a ride with another volunteer from Chicago out to the tiny midwestern town ahead of the caucus. “I’m pretty invested in this campaign,” he told us, with some understatement.

It wasn’t until 8pm local time, when the Californian polls closed, that the Obama supporters started to show up, with their signs, badges, and t-shirts, fumbling their way around plastic tables and into diner-style booths, their eyes permanently fixed on the big news-bearing screen in the middle of the room, like the Mona Lisa inverted.

In such an achingly long results session, lubricated by over seven hours of beer, soda, and tantalising, glistening pizza grease, there were inevitably considerable peaks and troughs. In the lulls, every new bit of news becomes magnified in importance, the absurdly over-used ‘Breaking News!’ tag for once convincing in its phoney weight. “Romney wins Montana!” Rachael called out at one point, seeming to realise about half-way through delivering these three words that none of them were of interest to her. We laugh at the relative insignificance of this news, electorally speaking. “Montana? What is that? Like maybe three delegates? A farmer, his wife, and their pet pig?” A debate ensues as to whether this line is better finished with the word ‘pig’, ‘cactus’, or ‘rock’, and whether Montana in fact has cacti – or anything else. It was a long night.

But there was genuine excitement too. When Obama overturned Hillary’s long-held lead in the slowly-tallying Missouri popular vote, it was met with a room-full of whoops, cheers, and a snatch of the classic ‘fired up! ready to go!’. Twenty seconds later, CNN projected Arizona for Hillary Clinton, to pantomime boos and hisses. When Alaska went for Obama, meanwhile, the 40-odd students erupted in tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm – massive, full-strength, double-armed high-fives are exchanged. ‘Woo! Alaska!” someone shouts. Meanwhile Senator Obama’s speech from Illinois, another fine one in a litany of fine speeches, earned him some dogged, sincere responses from the committed young activists in the room. “Change is coming to America” declaimed Obama from the TV screen. “Damn right it is!” shouted a fresh-faced young turk from beneath his nascent beard. “I didn’t travel the country for nothing!”

When CNN projected California for Clinton at about 9.20 local time, it was not met with surprise, let alone shock or horror; just quiet, mature murmurs of disappointment. There was no need for rage against the dying of the light (”Washington does not need more heat. It needs more light.” is one of my favourite Obama epigrams) – because the contest is not even half-lost yet. Victor, our friend from Wisconsin who we met earlier in the day, is concerned about what the prolonged struggle to find a nominee will do for the Democrats chances in November, but he’s also relishing the challenges ahead:

“When the delegate counts from tonight are all in they’ll be pretty even I think, Obama and Clinton, so it’s all about how the media report it in the next few days, whether they decide someone is ‘the big winner’. But I think it could be the first time in decades that the race goes all the way to a brokered convention [in Denver in late August] – which would be both awesome and absolutely terrifying at the same time.”

Six more months of this, followed by a kind of giant, three-day super-caucus to make the final decision? What kind of masochists do they take us for?

The University of California at Berkeley is to political activism what Manchester is to rain; historically, it’s drenched in the stuff. It drips down the walls and gets into the water supply. Going back to the Vietnam protests and the formation of the Black Panthers in nearby Oakland, it’s famously a hotbed of radicalism.

Stepping onto the leafy campus on a sunny primary day, the whole place is thronging with activity. Those who aren’t involved in the election madness, occupied with such fripperies as studying, seem to be in the minority. A young woman dressed up as the lesser-known superhero Captain Vote is telling anyone who will listen how important the youth vote is, before starting an election conga line to prove her point. A golf cart bearing a banner that reads ‘Vote or get run over!’ hares past us. Amidst a gauntlet of student society stalls with names like ‘Students for Responsible Business’ and ‘Ask a Palestinian’ sit a multitude of political stalls, partisan and otherwise. The Berkeley Republican society sits quietly, shyly tucked away in a corner, separate from the main action.

Everyone here seems to be about Obama, from the campaigners with placards haranguing passing traffic, to the ubiquitous chalked messages about hope and change, to the diverse array of regular students wandering about their everyday college business wearing ‘I voted Obama’ stickers. The campus activists are optimistic about Obama’s chances, both in California and nationally. Today it’s just vital to get the vote out, Victor explains:

“Students never have their shit together, and you have to vote in a very specific place on election day, so we’re armed with information to make sure people get there. We know that Berkeley is like 80% Obama.”

80%? Wow. How do you know?

“From phone calls, from just being around. Hillary hasn’t even bothered campaigning here.”

Obviously, Berkeley’s not a representative microcosm of anything, but it’s certainly where the action is.