MIKE Edwards has had travel in his blood from a remarkably tender age. “My dad,” he says, “worked on the railway. We were so fortunate because he, and we, had free travel. We were all over Europe by the time I was three. I was in Paris when I was less than a year old.”

Edwards is now 53 and his wanderlust is as strong as ever. He has just written a book in which he details an arduous, near-4,000-mile trip, by road and rail, across the States, visiting five places named after his home city of Inverness - “the one true Inverness,” as he describes it. From California he travelled to Illinois, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, staying for the most part in “unspeakable motels” and meeting colourful local characters. It’s a vivid book, and it is interspersed with his own story and career.

Mike Edwards is one of Scotland’s best-known journalists. As a senior reporter at STV he has covered everything from Lockerbie and Dunblane to the Clutha tragedy. He has covered scores of grim court cases and light-hearted stories alike. He interviewed Thatcher and Blair, reported from Bosnia and Kosovo. He was eyeballed by Peter Tobin when Tobin stood trial for the murder of Angelika Kluk; Edwards coolly stared right back. He had a brief correspondence with the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady. Though Brady responded, he never disclosed the whereabouts on Saddleworth Moor of the body of Keith Bennett, one of the victims of Brady and Myra Hindley.

In 2003 Edwards went to Seville to report on the Celtic fans flocking to their team’s UEFA Cup final; five years later he witnessed rioting in Manchester after Rangers lost a final in the same tournament. A keen military man (he’s a major in the Army Reserve, and several times escaped with his life after coming under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan), he was delighted, as a journalist, to fly in an RAF Tornado that swooped low over Inverness.

These terrible court cases, though: many of them must have left their mark on him. “Of course they have,” he says, “but you just have to put your own emotions and feelings and sensitivities to one side and get on with the story. I would keep it all bottled up until my piece was cut and the programme was finished, and then when I got on the train home, I would sit and think about the people, rather than the subject of the story. You’d think - well, these were human beings.” He was deeply upset when he covered the murder, on Bute, of six-year-old Alesha MacPhail and her funeral, but he couldn’t let it show.

Edwards often has to interview grieving parents or relatives. It can be hard for print or radio journalists to do this, but it is more challenging still when you’re standing on someone’s doorstep next to a camera operator. “It’s one thing giving a quote for a newspaper when you’re grieving, it’s another thing to do it on camera. You just have to be yourself, and as sensitive and polite as possible. More interviewees don’t do than do, but when they do it, there’s a good reason for it. You have to try to appeal to that side of their thinking.”

He can be quietly persistent when the occasion demands it, too. He once grabbed a few words with Mike Tyson when the former champion was in London prior to his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fight with Lou Savarese at Hampden in 2000.

That memorable flight in the RAF Tornado didn’t come about by accident, either. “I used to go to the Press Ball in Inverness every year and I would harangue the RAF’s press officer in Scotland every time, saying, ‘you’ve got to get me up in a plane’. That went on for about 10 years and one day he phoned me, out of the blue, and said, what are you doing next Tuesday?

“I said I didn’t know. He said, get yourself up to RAF Lossiemouth for 10am. So I went, and the medical I had to undergo was grim. The press officer said if I passed it, I would fly. I passed it, and I flew in the Tornado when it went on a bombing run on the range at Tain.”

The entire experience was exhilarating. Edwards was recording a piece for a filmed report on the STV news, and is slightly ashamed to recall that, when the supersonic jet took off, he shouted, “This is f---ing awesome!” into his microphone.

The book is an insight not just into some of the smaller towns and cities in America but into the life of busy TV journalist, too. Edwards is competitive, as he has to be: nothing pleases him more than getting one over on his rivals at BBC Scotland. When researching Angelika Kluk’s background, he and a cameraman flew to Gdansk and painstakingly knocked on one church door after another until they met her priest. They also interviewed her former university classmates and professor.

Edwards’s next book will cover his time in the Army Reserve, and will include one episode in which he almost paid the ultimate price for a throwaway joke.

For two months he taught English at the UN’s Kabul headquarters to local male and female journalists. “There was one guy whose English was better than any of the others. He was the class show-off, and he started getting a bit cocky with me one day. He asked how many children I had, and I said none. He looked at me and said, you’re 36 and you’re not married? I said, ‘no’, then I made the biggest mistake of my life. I said, ‘Who knows? I might find a wife in Afghanistan while I’m here’.

“Honestly, the atmosphere changed in an instant. The women all put their veils up and the men started to get really argumentative. I like a joke and a wind-up but I realised there and then that I had made a horrific mistake. The women left. The men - about 30 of them - started to scream at me. They came over and started prodding me in the chest. The alpha male, the guy with the English, had his face in mine, screaming at me. I really thought I was going to die.”

Regulations stipulated that, this being a UN building, Edwards had had to check in his pistol at the armoury at the front gate, something he only remembered when he thought of opening his combat smock and showing the men his holster to remind them he was armed. The holster was empty. “They began talking amongst themselves and of course I couldn’t understand them. It sounded as if they were asking each other, what are we going to do with him? Alpha male told me that men had been killed in Afghanistan for saying less than I had said.”

Apologising to the baying mob for his remark, he carefully put his hand in his pocket and found a Russian-calibre bullet casing, which he had found the previous day and kept because of its unusual shape and size. “I slapped it down the table, pointing upwards, to remind them they were dealing with a soldier, and I turned on my heel and walked out.”

At length he returned to base and reported what had happened to his superiors. He was confined to barracks, and was on a plane home within a week.

*The Road Home: My American Journey in Search of Inverness, Kessock Books, £14.99. Mike Edwards is on Twitter as @stvmike