Articles by Lucy Denyer

And by a matter of hours before Hurricane Earl is due to batter the Eastern seaboard. The impeding arrival of the huge storm has meant we had to make Boston little more than an overnight pit stop.

Not long after crossing the border, the Fiesta had a surprise reunion with one of its forefathers: a 1911 Model T Open Runabout parked outside a restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, just across the border

It’s goodbye to the vineyards of Niagara-on-the-Lake, and off to Canada’s two biggest cities: first Toronto, and then on to Montreal.

We had breakfast in Niagara-on-the-Lake, lunch in Toronto, and arrived in Montreal, Quebec in time for dinner and some live jazz. But first, a quick tour of the city. The Montreal tourism office has provided the World Tour team with a guide, who hops into one of the Fiestas and directs our convoy to some of the city’s sites. There’s just enough daylight left to check out some architecture and take in the views from some of the many bridges that span the St. Lawrence River (the city is an island). As the sun sets, we head for the historic city centre. But we can’t explore much of Old Montreal without parking the cars first: the narrow cobblestone streets lined with 17th and 18th century stone buildings are almost all pedestrian areas. Montreal hosts one of the largest jazz festivals in the world, drawing musicians and fans from all over the globe. But we want to check out local artists, so we head to the Upstairs Jazz Bar.  We arrive in time to catch Montreal singer Nathalie Renault’s second set. Describing herself as “a little blond girl that shakes up the piano,” Renault performs solo at a grand piano, playing a mixture of her own songs and her favourites, interspersed with stories about the songs themselves, or her adventures as a musician. Between sets, we ask Renault about Montreal’s jazz scene. She explains that the jazz festival has a huge following outside Montreal, and the audiences can be mostly out-of-towners. Here at the Upstairs Jazz Bar, it’s Montrealers.  Renault looks around as the room starts to fill up for the third set.  “It’s a great audience,” she says of the crowd at Upstairs. “They’ve really come to hear music – and this is a Tuesday night.” www.vintage-hotels.com/pillarandpost/default.htmWww.upstairsjazz.com www.tourisme-montreal.orgwww.nathalierenault.com

So it’s like being able to drive round the world in one place,” says Todd Schroeder, who runs Ford’s Dearborn proving ground.

When you’ve only got five hours to get somewhere that’s nearly six hours away, stopping off for a two-course lunch kind of falls off the radar. Which is why it was nice, today, to sit down and eat in a restaurant for a change. I even had salad – a novel experience after a dearth of greens over the past week. It’s no wonder that every trucker you see is, shall we say, a little on the large side. Healthy snacks? Forget it. The best you might get is a packet of heavily salted seeds, or perhaps a mouldy banana from a wire rack. But why would you pick that when the road fatigue is kicking in and there’s so much high fructose corn syrup on offer? Lunch and dinner, meanwhile, generally take the form of Subway, followed by McDonald's. In this respect, it will be a relief to return home to a well-stocked fridge and a cupboard full of saucepans. In the meantime, bring on the Big Mac.

As a small boy growing up in Salisbury, Wiltshire, he was miles from the action, but that didn’t stop him. He’d heard about the Indy 500 and he was determined to get there at all costs. By 1964 he’d saved up enough money to make the trip. He was completely sold, and a year later he returned to settle in Indianapolis for good. Forty six years later, he’s still there. Davidson now works as the official track historian at the Indy 500 Speedway. He knows the answer to pretty much any question you’d care to ask, and can pull up  random facts and figures from dates way back in the past from seemingly nowhere. He is fanatical about the big race itself. "It’s more than just an automobile race,” he says. “It’s an event, an experience. It’s been my all-consuming passion for as long as I can remember." We met Davidson this morning, on the hallowed turf itself. There has been a track here, in exactly the same place as it is now, for over 100 years. Originally built for car manufacturers to test their vehicles and show them off to the public, it has now turned into one of the world’s most celebrated racetracks, a mecca for petrolheads and this weekend, the site of the Moto GP bike race, whose entrants are already screaming round the curves when we arrive. You can’t help but be entranced – even if you’re not into racing. The on-site car museum is even better. Here is the winner of the first ever Indy 500, in 1911, there is the Ford winner of the 1995 Indy 500, driven by Jacques Villeneuve. Ford features quite heavily, in fact. Not sure the Fiesta is ever going to win the Indy 500 though... It’s more than just an automobile race – it is an event, an experience and if you’re sensitive at all you’ll get the vibes off other people that this is so important to them and they’ve got their family traditions. The indy 500 has been i’d say my whole life for all of my adult life and even prior to that it’s no necessarily the event now but the history of the event and the place has been my all consuming passion since I was 13 going on 14 and i’ve been very fortunate that I was able to do something with the interest and it keeps developing.

Route 66, which was established in November 1926 (the signs went up the following year) was one of the original US highways and has since acquired an almost cult-like status. It was a major path for migrants, especially during the depression of the 1930s, and in the early days it was common to travel the road in convoy for protection (kind of like what we’re doing in the Fiestas today). Businesses that set up along the way made a mint, and it was even immortalised in song. Sadly, little remains of the original road. Route 66 was removed from the highways system in 1985, considered, with its narrow lanes and meandering route through small-town America, to be pretty much obsolete. We managed to pick up parts of the road on our trip today, however, and there were one or two places where you could get a real sense of what it must have once been like to motor down it. At Odell gas station, for example, you can see the original gravity pump and drive your car up to it to get a feel of what it was like to pump gas here. Further down the road in Dwight, Ambler’s Texaco gas station was still dispensing fuel from its retro red pumps until 1999. This evening, we arrived in Chicago, which is where Route 66 kicked off. And what better place to be staying than an original motel – the roadside inn for motorists? To be sure, it’s pretty retro, with an interesting stale smoke scent to the bedrooms, but it wouldn’t be right to sleep anywhere else. So with that, good night.

Not Tom Bennington however. He buys the whole plane, and then turns it into a house. Or at least that’s what he’s trying to do.

We arrived there this afternoon, and it was immediately obvious that we were in a place where motor racing is king. Everywhere had some sort of car theme going on, from the Lucas Oil stadium to Pam’s Pit Stop cafe just outside the speedway race track. We headed straight for the Union Jack pub, the undisputed hangout for racing enthusiasts, and boy were there a lot of them. The walls were decked with racing paraphernalia – signed photos, paintings, racing outfits – even a full-sized racing car behind glass – and the place was full of punters, some of whom have been coming here for years. Stephen, a gray-haired man in his 50s, has been to 30 Indy 500s and says his greatest motoring moments were the years when first the 150mph barrier and then the 200 mph barrier were broken. Scott, a moustachioed 52-year old moved to his mother’s native Italy for eight years when he was eight, but despite his funny accent, made friends because everyone there had heard of Indianapolis. “Indy is a big city with a small-town feel,” explained one motoring enthusiast we spoke to. “It’s just got a great vibe.” We all agreed – despite the roaring of motorbikes outside our hotel window as people arrive in town for the Moto GP this weekend. Tomorrow, we’ll get stuck into the throng.