Aloha!

Surely that depends on where in Texas you start from, I think, but decide not to voice. It would only add to the general air of confusion. He’s on holiday. You can guess where from.

I thought racking up over 500 miles on an island that measures only 44 by 30 was pretty good going, but Oahu, it ain’t like America. It’s an itty bitty little place, smaller than Houston. But it packs it in, and so have we: film sets, Mustang meets, surfing, volcanoes, daft shirts, a bloody gyrocopter, an autosolo. We came, we shaka’d, we brah’d and we left.

There is no element that ties these things together besides geography. But then this is a story about geography. And history. So let’s start there. You see back in 2014, when TopGear magazine was a mere 263 issues old (21 in human years), we drove a Ford Mustang around America. Not across America, no. We visited every state. The thinking was this: the Mustang is 50 years old. The United States of America is made up of 50 states. So let’s visit every single one. We started top right, finished bottom left. It was a journey of epic numbers – 11,175 miles in 15 days, four different crews, 32 tanks of fuel. And more pertinently, sleep deprivation, hallucination, a cabin odour that can still trigger a gag reflex, and a quite profound admiration for America’s favourite sports car, the Mustang.

But even doing the lower-48-plus-Alaska doesn’t equal 50. The plan had been to put the Mustang on a boat to Hawaii, but Ford wanted to put the car, covered in its 49 state stickers, on display and we didn’t have enough time to get it there and back. For years it’s been unfinished business.

The trouble with our epic roadtrip was that we came away with an overall sense of America, but no deep knowledge of the individual states. This time I get to put that right. And the first thing I get a sense of is paperwork. A few days later someone describes Hawaii to me as “a first world country with third world bureaucracy”. The Mustang, shipped specially from Michigan, is trapped in customs. So that day I go and watch an autosolo at Aloha stadium, rather than taking part. There used to be a racetrack on Oahu, but it closed in 2006 so now the island’s motorsport enthusiasts are reduced to this, ragging around cones in a car park. It hasn’t dampened their enthusiasm. Nor their hope that one day their petitions will bear fruit. There are a lot of military airfields littered across Oahu tha