Paul Watkins in America in 1965

IT was 1965 and Paul Watkins had quit his graphic design job and embarked on life as a freelance.

But before striking out on his own, he saw an notice advertising “99 Days of Travel” for £35 on the famous US coach firm, Greyhound.

He saved up, budgeted for $6 a day to live on, got a temporary Green Card so he could work if his funds ran low, and embarked on a journey that, six decades on, he has now revisited.

Paul, who lives in Camden Town and is a book designer by trade, used the trip he made in his 20s to write his first every travelogue – a genre he would later enjoy success in.

But after faithfully tapping out on a type­writer his thoughts on a trip of a lifetime, he put the work away.

The manuscript was finished nearly 60 years ago, but lay unread in a drawer for decades.

Paul rediscovered his youthful musings and decided now, in his 80s, was the time to publish it.

“I imagined my children finding it after I’ve gone and throwing it out,” he says.“I looked at it and it looked at me and I thought – I should get this out there.”

The manuscript was typed “laboriously on yellowing foolscap paper”, he recalls, and reveals a young man who mixed caution with bravery, naivety with deep curiosity, who set out to discover a land that for his generation had been brought alive through the romance of cinema that sold an American Dream across the Atlantic.

Arriving in New York, he saw the society as both as a tourist and a immigrant worker. He marvelled at the skyscrapers – and washed dishes in basement kitchens.

Boarding the legendary Greyhound buses, he checked into the founding cities of Philadelphia and Washington and – as with each stop – immersed himself in the history.

Trips to New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and much in between, Paul went through a country undergoing huge change in a decade that, in so many ways, created the modern world.

“When I started re-reading Go Greyhound Go after all that time it was as if I had discovered – and then reinvented – this innocent and impressionable individual who had lived through a multitude of adventures in a land that, until then, had only existed in his imagination,” he says.

At home in Camden

He saw first hand racism and the response of the Civil Rights movement, and reading his thoughts on the society he was studying as an interested outsider is, he says, as much a reflection on himself as the world he travelled through. He has used the telescope of time to look again at some accepted values of the period. From General Robert E Lee, the Confederate commander in the American Civil War, to Henry Ford – Paul mused on these Americans back in 1965 and has now re-visited their place in history.

After finishing his National Service, Paul worked for the Eagle magazine stable, designing puzzles.

“I left school aged 16 and I did not want to go to university immediately and then have to do my National Service,” he recalls. “I joined St Martin’s school of art part time, and worked as I studied. I learned fine art and got into graphic design. I wanted a job, and I got a couple of years’ worth in advertising before I joined the army as a conscript.”

After working on magazines he produced children’s books for some of the biggest names in the publishing world and then joined Paul Hamlyn as an art editor.

When he returned from his American adventure Paul established a publishing company called Format Books. Travel always intrigued him, and he has carved a career of both designing books and writing guides. He has penned numerous books on Greece, a country he has visited regularly for more than 50 years.

This early talent for description and sifting through the noise to present the reader with a tasty fact is apparent. When writing of his visit to the Hoover Dam, he reported in his guide: “The most awesome piece of information was the amount of concrete used to build the dam. Three quarters of a million cubic yards. I couldn’t absorb the figure – much easier to think of it as a highway, 16 feet wide and 4 inches deep, stretching from New York to San Francisco; or a continuous flow of concrete going on for two years, 24 hours a day.”

In Vegas he loses sleep in a dive where he can hear the slot machines below, and recalls: “Vegas’s most enduring image: architectural aberrations that were little more than glorified advertisement hoardings.”

He toured the wedding chapels, noting that if an alien were to land in Nevada, they’d be bemused by the “get married, get rich or poor quick” approach of the state.

On a journey to California through the Nevada desert, into Los Angeles, he records, after reading that the state enjoyed 292 days of sun every year, that he wondered “…what did California’s 18 million do with all that sunshine? Were there enough beaches for all of them to sunbathe in comfort?”

Looking back, he sees himself but with a well-rounded perspective that comes with the passing of time. “I recognised all of my responses to the journey as the playback of my cultural education, certified by my white-British passport and coupled with this, the privilege of my innocence,” he adds.

And he has a sense of respect for what his younger self did.

“Would I be up to carrying out the journey again on such limited funds, even with a book of bus tickets and a friendly sponsor?” he asks. “With my immigration credentials I’d been able to bail myself out in the tomato fields of San José and the kitchens of New York, but the thought of bending my back to reach that elusive fruit or gagging at those saucepans full of fat was inconceivable.”

Paul’s memoir brings alive both the America of the period and a young person’s reaction to landmarks that told a nation’s journey over the past two centuries.

• Go Greyhound, Go!: A Journey Through Sixties America. By Paul Watkins. Format Books, £10.99