I catch my first glimpse of Maine at the apex of the Piscataqua River Bridge, where the Interstate 95 bids farewell to New Hampshire. Even at this low elevation, one of America's final frontiers spreads before me, a realm of green. I know this is Maine because, above, a pall of grey cloaks the sky.
Here is my greeting, a raw burst of weather typical of a place that, at the top right-hand corner of the US, is privy to sharp meteorological moodswings dictated by the North Atlantic as it slaps and snaps at the state's 230 miles of shoreline.
Of course, there is a rather more obvious indication that I have arrived in the largest of the six states of New England - a broad sign, stationed alongside the hard shoulder, which broadcasts a self-assured message. "Welcome to Maine: the way life should be."
Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck rather agreed with this sentiment. In the autumn of 1960, America's finest 20th-century novelist - Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden behind him - embarked upon a 10 000-mile anti-clockwise road trip around a country he felt he had lost touch with. An ailing 58-year-old, already struggling with the heart condition that would kill him eight years later, he was not always impressed with what he encountered.
The book that resulted from the trip was Travels with Charley (1962) - Charley being the name of the French poodle who accompanied him. Steinbeck was bemused at the development of his native California, with its "noise and clutter and inevitable rings of junk", and wary of Texas - confessing to a dread of the swagger of "a nation in every sense of the word" that "sticks its big old Panhandle up north and... slouches along the Rio Grande".
But New England - and Maine in particular - earned his admiration. He devoted nearly a quarter of the book to the appeal of an area where "the villages are the prettiest, I guess, in the whole nation" and "the pine woods rustle and the wind cries over open country".
Having read and loved Travels with Charley, my plan, as I land in Boston, is simple: to follow Steinbeck's tracks around New England, discover for myself what so filled this grizzled wordsmith with childlike delight - and do it in the peak season of "fall", when I could expect a world where "the trees burst into colour... reds and yellows you can't believe". But also to see, 50 years on, whether what enchanted the great man - a forested, mountainous, sea-lashed wonderland - still truly exists. Or whether, in half a century, it has been eaten by supermarkets and sprawl, its spirit crushed by Tarmac.
Naturally, there have to be differences between Steinbeck's itinerary and mine. Where he had Rocinante, a camper van named after Don Quixote's horse, I have a rented Chevrolet. Nor does my route dovetail exactly with Steinbeck's. At least, not initially. Heeding his remark that "I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside" - as well as the fact that, anxious to put space between himself and his Long Island home, he tore through the bottom of New England, paying it scant attention both on the road and in print - I flit across the lower three of the six states.
I sample Connecticut amid the colonial elegance of New London, where Steinbeck's ferry from Long Island docked. I ignore his decision to avoid the Rhode Island capital Providence, where the neo-classical State House resembles the Capitol in Washington to such an extent that it has played it in movies. I spear into Massachusetts, where there is already a tint of orange to the boughs. And then I get to the point, veering up the Interstate 95 artery and bypassing Boston - aware that Steinbeck retraced his northbound steps through New Hampshire and Vermont, and that I can catch him here on my own return south.
It is at Bangor, in southern Maine, where I properly meet him. In 1960, tired after long hours at the wheel, Steinbeck became lost in what was a hectic lumber city of "traffic and trucks, horns blaring and lights changing". And evidence that I am on the lip of wild country assails me as soon as I open the car door: an early hint of chill winter menace in the air; a 31ft-high axe-wielding statue of Paul Bunyan, the mythical giant lumberjack of North America, that surveys all visitors as they leave the highway; the lead story in the Bangor Daily News of a man sustaining serious wounds in a bear attack as hunting season begins.
Yet, with the decline in its timber trade, Bangor has mellowed since Steinbeck's time, evolving into a cultural enclave that is home to a symphony hall, an opera house - and horror writer Stephen King (who used the city as inspiration).
As evening falls, I try citrus-glazed salmon at the Sea Dog restaurant, and talk to a fellow diner, who explains that Bangor was the site of America's worst naval defeat before Pearl Harbour: a 1779 battle with the British that led to the destruction of the US fleet.
Outside, the Penobscot River - the graveyard of these dead ships - flows serene and unconcerned, its progress no longer choked by logs.
Life remains calm as I go south on Route 15, though there are still cameo appearances from the lumber trucks that "roared" past Steinbeck as he trundled to the sea. On advice from friends in New York, he was seeking the coastal idyll of Deer Isle, and got lost while doing so. I have no such problems, every junction heralding the isle's location.
But if road markings around Deer Isle have improved since 1960, little else has changed. A green-and-white suspension bridge "as high-arched as a rainbow" still offers passage to a place that had Steinbeck reaching for undiluted praise more than any other mentioned in Travels with Charley. "It is an island that nestles like a suckling against the breast of Maine," he wrote, comparing it to "Avalon; it must disappear when you are not there." - The Independent