You read about it last week: my cousin Frances and I are on our way to Washington DC to try and meet Donald Trump and ask him to unite our country. We appeared on the local morning news in Oklahoma City, a rightwing radio show in St Louis, a podcast in Texas, with many more to come. We’re telling anyone who will listen.

I’m writing from St Louis on the second day of our journey.

People ask what it’s like to travel with a 93-year-old woman who loves Donald Trump. For one, we fight all the time. We managed to get into only three major arguments from Dallas to Oklahoma City, which I felt amounted to a good day. We argued about welfare and immigrants and which presidents were best. “I loved Ike,” she said. “But I hate Lincoln.” The fallout from that comment lasted a good hundred miles. I mean, who hates Abraham Lincoln?

The people we’ve spoken to along the way, in cafes and gas stations and in the checkout line at Walmart, say they want this. They want their leaders to grow up and compromise the way our leaders once did, and they want the president to cool it with his Twitter account. And mostly, they feel frustrated with their political foes and are often angry.

This bothers them deeply, but they don’t know how it can be fixed. “I don’t think we’ll ever get back to where we were,” an electrician named Roy Short told us yesterday.

As I write this, a most gorgeous sunset strikes the Gateway Arch outside my hotel window and I wonder if he’s right – if the divide is just too wide to bridge.

Although I chronicled Frances’s life in my book, The Kings of Big Spring, and talk to her several times a week, the road has exposed our differences. Not only are we 50 years apart, but we grew up in vastly different countries. She was orphaned during the Great Depression and reached adulthood during World War II. I reached adolescence on punk rock and pulling bong hits in strip-mall parking lots. I loved Bill Clinton.

These days, Frances spends most of her time at home in Scottsdale watching Fox News. I live in progressive Austin and besides my family, I don’t speak with many conservatives. So it’s important to me to try and expose us to people we don’t normally engage with and who challenge our preconceptions. And so far, it’s been difficult.

At a meeting with an evangelical pastor on OKC, I grew angry over a comment he made about gays and lesbians. It was your standard biblical condemnation, nothing hateful, but my instinct was to lash out, which I momentarily did, then remembered the point of the conversation we’d been having – which is how in the age of social media, we as Americans need to learn how to find common ground with our rivals before leaping to judgment and anger. And while I have little common ground with the pastor when it comes to that issue, I made my opinion known and we moved on.

Back in the car, I anguished over our conversation and felt I didn’t say enough, that I’d backed down too easy. But I was never going to change his mind and he wasn’t going to change mine. What could we have achieved from yelling? Nothing, and instead, we found commonality in our respective faiths, in stories about our children, and we shared some laughs. Before leaving, we held hands and I asked him to pray for our journey.

Listening is hard work. Exposing yourself to the monsters outside your echo chamber can be scary. In the end, we usually find that they’re only human like us.

Today, we travel to Ferguson, and then we’ll push on to Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.

On Thursday, we’re visiting a mosque in Columbus and asking the imam to bless our last push to DC.

As ever, email me at acrossthegreatdividetour@gmail.com if you want to recommend people we should talk to on our way.