WE NAME THE GUILTY MEN! And underneath, in the Sunday newspapers of my youth, would be photos of people I had never heard of, still less met, who had fallen foul of the editor's moral rectitude.

And so it is that I look at my own unknowns, convicts of the road, members of the chain gang. Seven Americans, an Australian, a Dutchman, a Canadian, a Belgian and another Brit, although this time from London.

They have the random oddness of those lost at sea. Who and what are Nigel Backwith, Oris V. Barber (American; no European would use his middle initial), Wil Friesen (why no second L?), Tim Hewitt, Richard McCluskey, James Meyer, Toni Romp-Friesen, Helen Sandilands, E. Van Schooneveld (just an initial) and Jacques van der Eecken?

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Had it not been that both have an address which starts "konacoffee@..." I wouldn't have spotted that Wil Friesen and Toni Romp-Friesen were a couple. I have three months to find out why "konacoffee".

Something I got with the names was the maps. Adventure Cycling has wonderful maps that are, literally, a line. Each section is the shape and size of a hand, held horizontally, and you ride from one edge to the other before moving to the next map. Each town or village is shown with its potential for bike shops, cake shops, camp sites, libraries and what Americans coyly call "rest rooms".

Americans have such trouble with lavatories. Other nations may complain about squatting over an open hole, à la Turque, but Americans have trouble even with the name.

They can't say "lavatory" and they don't even like "toilet". They pile euphemism on euphemism and prefer "bathroom". When an American asks for your bathroom, he is astonished to be led to a room with a tub. Some go still further and describe their petits coins as "rest rooms". That is how they are marked on my maps, something possible only of a nation that has never known à la Turque.

Here in France, you get off your bike and pee where you wish, with or without discretion. To get to the women's lavatory, you pass men pissing into urinals. French women know what men look like when they're having a pee and it doesn't bring the nation to revolution.

In America, these things are differently ordered. "Rest rooms" are indicated from sea to shining sea because, I suppose, Americans can't bring themselves to widdle en plein air. Which reminds me how a French magazine recounted the experience of a group riding what remains of Route 66.

Overwhelmed by the water they were drinking in the desert, they let rip with only the silent dusty mountains to see them. Except that along came the only police car within a thousand kilometres. The boredom of the endless sands must have been no less for the policemen and they rushed from their car and wondered how to arrest a dozen Frenchmen convincingly. Convincingly in the sense that a dozen Frenchmen are a lot to get into a single patrol car.

"Happily", the magazine reported as it sniggered at the prudery of American policemen, "there was an Englishman in the group who, speaking his own language, could explain that such things were not considered a major crime in France, that the culprits apologised and that they promised never to do it again."

At which, the custodians of public safety turned their bellies back to their cars and went off to fight crime elsewhere.

Anyway, no doubt all this will be useful, and I am grateful. Less useful, perhaps, will be the maps of Kansas which, so far as I can see, are just a succession of single straight roads. Now and then there are slight bends but usually they are ruler-straight. On Map 7, twelve successive panels say simply "straight on". Just as well. There isn't anywhere else to go anyway. Kansas is like that.