––What is your single outstanding memory of the trip?

Haigh: Our mechanical difficulties were really too numerous to mention. The Winnebago broke down, on average, every hundred miles, most notably at the bottom of an exit ramp in Columbia, South Carolina, at the height of the afternoon rush hour on the hottest day of the year. We got out and found ourselves parked at an alarming angle, leaning heavily on a dilapidated guard rail, the only thing that kept us from tipping over a steep embankment onto a busy highway below. These were pre-cell phone days, so J walked to a gas station to call for help. “Wait in the camper,” he suggested. “You’ll be cooler out of the sun.” I did this for ten minutes, sure that at any moment a car would come careening down the ramp and into the side of the camper. Finally I climbed out and trekked a hundred yards in the hundred-degree heat, clinging to the guardrail, so overheated that my legs were dripping with sweat. I perched on the guardrail just in time to see a pickup truck roar down the ramp and into the guardrail, not two feet from the Winnebago's back end.

Livesey: How generous everyone was to me. People bought me meals, told me their life stories, advised me where to go next, asked about Scotland, gave me money, invited me to their houses. I was amazed and abashed at how open people were.

Poirier: A creepy American dude with like four teeth and scraggly hair who had been living (hiding) down there for years offered us a VCR in exchange for my friend Melissa. He was serious.

Richter: I ran into my good friend Susan at Disneyland. She’s from New Orleans and neither of us lived in California. It was just the kind of utterly unlikely coincidence that can turn a little mushroom-addled co-ed to our lord Jesus. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

Wallace: This was in 1978, and the rock star of writing back then was indisputably Tom Robbins. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction (his first book) were very very hot. We loved his books and by extension him, so we decided to track him down. Robbins was notoriously private, however, and his book jackets said only that he lived in small town somewhere near Corvallis, Oregon. We called directory assistance of every town near Corvallis (lots of quarters), and finally found a Tom Robbins in a little town not far from Corvallis. But we didn’t have an address. So like a couple of goobers we collared anyone we could and asked them if they knew where Tom Robbins the writer lived, and finally somebody did. The house was hidden in a wooden lot not far from town. Mary and I had picked a bunch of blackberries that afternoon. Mary took them and knocked on the door, and after just a moment it opened. And it was him. “We picked these for you,” Mary said. And he invited us in for dinner, just like that. He said we couldn’t stay very long, though, because the next day he was going on a tour of North American roller coasters with his son. I’m not making this up. He was a very sweet, charming guy. But I could tell that if I hadn’t been there he would have slept with my Mary. In a heartbeat. Even my being there wasn’t much of an impediment: when he looked at her his eyes glittered like the light from a star, and under the table I think he was touching her leg with his charming foot. Even then I wanted to be a writer. More specifically I wanted to be Tom Robbins, with this lovely house in the Oregon woods and about to go on a roller coaster tour of North America with the money I made selling something I’d written. I wanted to be him, but that night, for one night, he wanted to be me. After dinner we thanked him and left and celebrated by staying in a hotel. A Motel Six. It was great.

Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.