There's no place like home..

The flight home was fine, beautiful sunset in NY and could just about see the flat as we landed. Unfortunately the jetlag is a funny thing, slept until 11:40am today and the 6am start tomorrow is not looking so hot at the moment!

It is great to be home- we have one more blog post to write in a couple of days so until then, good night!

writing while intoxicated

Boston was great today- surely one of my favourite cities. We saw all the sights; the site of the Boston Massacre (though I refuse to call it a massacre, the soldiers were confronted by a baying mob) and the USS Constitution which were great.

Having someone who knows a city is invaluable sometimes and we got taken to some great places this evening by some friends.

And yes after midnight, and a few drinks, we met some other people who spent 20mins trying to get onto the roof of our hotel. Apparently it is usually pretty easy, and they'd done a real good job stopping people here. Oh well, something to try at home.

Outbound to Wonderland

So here we are, last stop of the trip, in Boston, Massachusetts. It poured down for the entire drive from New Hampshire but has miraculously cleared up and has been beautiful and sunny today.

Today we checked out Harvard...along with the new freshers, as they were all enrolling for the new year. We went on a walking tour led by two Harvard students, showing us the sights of Harvard Yard. Like lots of places in America, it felt a bit familiar....all the films which have been set there no doubt! It was a really pretty campus, impressive red brick buildings and lots of trees.

We also had a wander round Quincy market which was great - it felt a little like Boston's version of Covent Garden, but with fewer people! We also had a look round the Boston Public Library, which is a stunning place, more like a museum or art gallery than a library.

One final thing that I liked about Boston today - we were on the subway, and on one of the lines you could go to Wonderland. Now that's friendly.

Ben and Jerry and Unilever

The Ben and Jerry's factory in Vermont is apparantly one of the state's biggest attractions, which is understandable i guess. The tour is fine, but when they asked for questions i couldn't bring myself to ask how much they sold the company for...

New Hampshire seems to be famous for 3 things; the state motto 'Live free, or die', the electoral primary that occur here first, and waterfalls. We decided to focus on the latter. We explored our way through to the tallest falls in the state today, and they were certainly the most beautiful i've seen anywhere. There were lots of little splash pools and mini falls further down- truly a haven for kids on a sunny day!

How now brown (and multicoloured) cow

Apparently Vermont used to have more cows than people. Nowadays the state still has the most cows per capita of any in the US. And to make the point, along the main shopping street in Burlington there were around 30 cows, all painted with different designs, kind've like the elephants that have been around London recently. I was quite taken with them....

O Canada

Well there no two ways about it, we kind of accidentally went into Canada. Only for a few minutes, but enough to have a 'conversation' with US immigration. Christina did her best to throw him off the scent say we landed into Salt Lake City, even though our visas were from JFK. Anyhow, they liked our hybrid and let us back in to get to the baseball.

The Vermont Lake Monsters were playing Brooklyn in a minor league game. The crowd entertainment is half the fun- mainly the Vermont Monster mascot jumping on the roof of the Brooklyn dugout. Seems to be a silly game;
1 the pitch is so fast you can hardly see it
2 the batters rarely hit it anyhow
3 if they hit it and it drops a few metres short of going out of the ground, they'll probably be caught out

Basketball was much more fun!

Day of the doughnut

We set off today up the Cascade Mountain (staying true to our London roots), one of the Adirondack peaks. It was up through forest all the way, until we finally broke out of the trees to a great 360 degree view. It was a bit more of a hike than we'd realised when we set off from the car - it was a good job we had Pete's early morning purchase of some mini doughnuts to keep us going ;-)

We're staying in a motel right by Lake Saranac, and this evening we borrowed a paddle boat to go out onto the lake. It's beautiful, really peaceful, with forest all around. There's even an island in the middle of the lake with some little holiday cottages.

Tomorrow we're heading east into Vermont, and will be going within about 5 miles of the Canadian border. We've been debating whether it's worth popping over into Canada, or whether that will in some way invalidate our American visas and bring down the wrath of the border police. We have a healthy respect for the police here; we've seen lots of cars getting pulled over on the freeways and I'm torn between a temptation to drive fast and fear of seeing those flashing lights in my wing mirror!