Back twenty years to... Thursday, May 25th, 2006. Day 47. The wonders of online-booking, and the flight up to Alaska. A fair dose of Northern Exposure, the 'Nenana Ice Classic' and the Alyeska oil pipeline. The Mecca Bar – and Chilkoot Charlie's.

"At five am. at the Sea-Tac South Terminal, most people were barely even half-awake in the departure lounge. Hacked-off and weary people – most having been delayed from Chicago. Now there’s a surprise. Now why does it always turn out to be 'Chicago O’Hare', that buggers things up. I worried about getting onto the now massively oversubscribed flight – but somehow I did – and about three-and-a-half hours later, we’re touching-down at Anchorage International Airport. And so, 'place number eight' on my long list of places to go.

Having picked-up a rental car – a 'GMC Yukon' – a big, bugger-off, four-litre, gas-guzzling SUV, and now on the road, the sky is an azure-blue and cloudless, the weather is barmy and warm, and way up ahead, the scenery is spectacular and massive – with soaring, Himalayan-scale ranges to the north. Mount McKinley – or far more commonly now – Denali, at over twenty thousand feet, is the highest in North America. In fact, Alaska holds all top-ten places. I'm enjoying the big truck now, and probably burning as much fuel as a small jet-plane – just get motoring. I have only five days here, and it’s a really big place. A little over six hundred-and-fifty thousand square miles. So twice the size of Texas – but home to only seven hundred-thousand people or-so, around half of whom live in Anchorage.

At Talkeetna I make the stop for a weird and wonderful, 'igloo-looking' building. An oversized, white-painted dome – with windows. I learn later that it was built as a hotel, but failed to achieve the required building standards – and so never actually opened for business, so bankrupting the owner.

My room at The Cantwell Lodge is 'primitive'. The communal bathrooms are down the hall, and the bed is decidedly on the spartan side. But it's clean and cosy – and a bit later – after an anticipated prolonged residence in the bar, I’m sure it will seem positively palatial. I wire-in all the machinery and download my pictures. I feel something like a very well-seasoned traveller. An accredited photojournalist. A 'Foreign Correspondent' even."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.