Stephen McGinty: It will be tough for Greyhound's new UK service to match the romance of crossing America

THE Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait and Eddie Harp had just signed a contract to illustrate a superhero comic with a Florida company that just loved his big-breasted heroines with their short skirts and long legs. We celebrated in Wendy's, with the company director picking up the bill. We had been in the sunshine state for just 16 hours, after travelling 22 hours from New York and were now bound for the wilds of Montana. By bus.

Armed with a 21-day ticket, all of America was open to us, if we had the resilience to ride out there and join it. Who else but an 18-year-old (Eddie was 23) could exclaim that the badlands and an interview with James Crumley, the greatest living detective novelist, were only 36 hours away at a steady 55 mph?

The only problem was seating. With our rucksack stored in the belly of the bus, we wandered the aisle in search of a pair of seats, of which there were none. Just two individual seats, separated by seven or eight rows. There was one next to a Haitian fruit-picker and another beside Wendy, a 30-year-old divorcee from Moline, outside Chicago. I got the fruit-picker, a quiet soulful chap whose grasp of English appeared to consist of "Chicago?" which he uttered at each and every stop, smiling and nodding as each time I said "no". (He was generous too, in a way only the poor are. In the middle of the night I awoke to see his hand move across my chest. I froze, fearful of what was to come, then relaxed as he shared the faded curtain he was using as a blanket.)

Seven or eight rows back Eddie and Wendy were enjoying a more vigorous introduction and quasi-courtship. After she introduced him to her two young sons, who were sitting in the row behind, the pair talked long into the night as the silver-grey coach with its distinctive sprinting dog rattled along the concrete ribbon of the interstate Highway.

By the time we reached Atlanta, Georgia, so enthusiastic had they become that they had to be warned that their behaviour was inappropriate for a Burger King queue, even if it was 3am.

By Tennessee, he was smitten, by Illinois in love, and by the time it came to parting at the Chicago bus terminus, she to the trailer park, he to big sky country, there were tears.

On the next leg, across the great plains of North Dakota, Eddie preferred to sit on his own, so as to more easily brood and stare moodily out the window, leaving me to indulge in my own trundling romance with a girl, a fellow traveller, who ended our brief kiss with a line that I can still remember 20 years later. I can see her now, pulling back, sweeping her hair off her face and uttering, in a sing-song southern twang: "My boyfriend just got out of prison. I was only 16 at the time. That's statutory rape in Florida." Visions of a heavily tattooed suitor now swimming in my head, I nervously asked if he was meeting her at the bus stop. Sure, she replied, would I like to meet him? It was an offer I politely declined.

Meanwhile, with each of the wheel's rotations, Eddie was growing increasingly wound up, until eventually, at 6am, he woke me to announce a change of plan.

We had ten days of travel still scheduled - Missoula, Montana, then on through to Seattle, before riding down the California coast towards LA and, finally, the Comic Art Convention at San Diego. Well, while I was welcome to stick to the plan, he was now heading back to Wendy. He'd meet me at Boston Airport for the flight home, and with that he hopped off.

Years later, whenever I told the story people thought of the advert for Wrigley's chewing gum, in which a young couple on a Greyhound bus are united by a shared stick. In fact Cupid is a regular passenger on the famous bus line, launched by a Carl Eric Wickman, a Swedish immigrant in 1914, when he used a hupmobile, a large car, to transport miners from Hibbing, Minnesota, to the neighbouring town of Alice, for 15 cents a ride. Think of Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin eloping with Mrs Robinson's daughter at the end of The Graduate or Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night.

Well, reader, he married her. Not until six months later when she flew over to Glasgow for a registrar office wedding and a reception in the basement of Blackfriars Bar in the city's Candleriggs, where, owing to an error by the DJ, they danced cheek to cheek, not to their original request, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes but The Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Loving Feeling.

I couldn't help but remember my American adventures when I read this week that Greyhound coaches, that American icon that introduced Eddie to his wife-to-be and me to the land that I still love, had launched a service in Scotland, trundling through the night for nine hours to unite Glasgow with London and vice-versa.

Yet despite the company's decision to name its Scottish buses Hello Dolly, Long Tall Sally and Suzy Baby, I can't quite see the romance of the American west travelling. Somehow, its just not the same.

One of the most memorable meals of my life was hot biscuits and gravy at the counter of a roadside diner in Montana. It was dusk and the fields were alight with the rays of the setting sun. Bacon and eggs at a Little Chef outside London is a meal I'd view in dimmer light.

For the romance isn't really in the buses, but in the destinations to which they can carry you across that vast continent. A couple of years later I travelled coast to coast again, this time from Los Angeles, through Arizona and the sand sculpted mittens of Monument Valley, to New Orleans, up through Athens, Georgia, for the obligatory REM pilgrimage and on to New York.

The road movie doesn't quite work in Britain - we're just too small. In comparison to the vastness of America, we scarcely have time to reverse and move into fourth gear and we're at the end of the island. In America, the Greyhound bus was the principal mode of transport of the young and the poor, who couldn't afford to fly. But with the new buses in Scotland offering wi-fi, larger legroom and complimentary newspapers, it will be interesting to see what other travellers they can attract, in these tough times.

The last I ever saw of Eddie was on the night of his wedding, but eight years later, in the early days of e-mail, a missive arrived to say he was still happily married with a young daughter.

As a romance, that one had more than legs: it had wheels.