The following journals describe the travels I undertook during two months working in Boston, MA.USA.

 As with Korea, I only had a weeks advance notice of an impending two months in Boston. During that week I gave my notice to my landlord Colin, and moved out of my rented room in Twyford, Berkshire. This was no big shame. I'd moved to Twyford when I started work for Parametric Technology in Bracknell. Julie and I had spent long and tedious weekends trying to find somewhere that fitted in to my small range of places that were both what I wanted and what I could afford. Twyford didn't fit into that range but it was available, and it was near Bracknell, and as time got nearer to my first working day, then those two criteria became the most important.

 I had nearly a week to distribute my belongings amongst half a dozen different places. My leather swivel chair into my office at work, my plants to Bob who I shared the office with, my compact discs to Julie, my shelves to Alex in St Albans, a pile of stuff to Julie's brothers, and mum looked after all the rest. And, of course - I was working all that week. Thankfully, the previous plan of flying on the Saturday had been put back until the Monday.

 The flight to Boston was around eight hours or so. I settled down to a quiet few hours nervous thoughts about how I was going to get on over there, but before long I got talking to the chap sitting next to me. Maybe he got talking to me, which is perhaps more likely, however, it's unusual for me to keep a conversation going for long with a neighbour on a plane. Perhaps this guy was just more interesting than most. He'd started off designing submarine missile guidance systems, had gone on to design guidance systems for some of the Apollo rocket missions, and then on to oceanographic instruments. Mr Apollo (I never caught his real name!) said he had often played squash with Jim Lovell, one of the famed survivors
of the Apollo 13 mission.
 
 As I remember it, then Mr Apollo said an awful lot compared to me, but I did happen to mention that I was going to be hiring a car when I arrived at the airport. This fact he took more than a passing interest in, and on discovering that I had never driven in Boston before, he offered to help me out by showing me the route out of the airport, in exchange for a ride to MIT where he worked. It's possible that he was more interested in the free ride than helping me out, but he was soon to change his mind. I'm not sure whether I happened to mention that I had never driven in the USA at all! In any case, whatever his motives, I was glad he was there when he was.

 When we landed at Logan airport, we split up, arranging to meet at the Alamo car rental counter. He was in the meantime going to phone his wife to let him know when she should meet him. Only now as I recall the events rather more calmly than as they occurred, do I make the connection that he was arranging to meet his wife at a railway station, despite having told me he wanted a lift to MIT. We crossed paths several time before getting to the car rental counter. The first time was at customs. I'd asked an official which of the dozen or so queues to join and had been told I was fine where I was. Mr Apollo had also joined a queue. I assumed that his stories of frequent travels for a month or so at a time to Saudi meant that he was a seasoned traveller, and knew what he was doing, but after queueing for some fifteen minutes, then he seemed to discover that he was in the wrong queue and had to start all over again.

 The woman behind me in my queue was not afraid of speaking her mind about the long wait and how long the customs official was taking with each immigrant. She seemed to be speaking to everybody but at nobody in particular, although I suspect the customs official herself was the main target of her wrath. She should have tried going to New York. Maybe then she would appreciate that the queues weren't so long after all. When my turn came to be interrogated as to my visiting purposes and length of stay, then I was very polite, as one should be with such powerful people as customs. The official was equally polite back, but with that aura of coldness and power that only customs officials and driving test examiners have been able to perfect.
 
 Just before she'd finished, she said 'Maybe I should have taken longer' and tilting her head towards the woman behind me, she added 'I didn't say that, OK?'. 'Say what?' I asked knowingly, which got me a smile. A smile from a customs and immigrations official. There's a first time for everything!

 I collected my bags from the carousel and headed off to the Alamo counter to sort out the car, hoping that Parametric had sorted everything out properly. Another queue. Who says queues are just a British thing? After five minutes I saw Mr Apollo go by and make his phone call. He returned after a few minutes, just as I realized that Alamo was the car rental company with which I'd pre-booked a car for arrival in Miami at Christmas in a few months time. I wanted Avis. I explained this to Mr Apollo, and we wandered over to the empty Avis counter. There was no queue here, but then there was nobody behind the counter either, just a sign telling us to get the bus from outside the arrival lounge.

 We eventually found an Avis bus which took us to the car pickup point, and after a few misunderstandings at the counter regarding who was actually paying, eventually walked away with the keys to a car. The girl behind the counter had radioed to someone outside to give me a nice car, since I was a really nice English guy who had been very polite to her. Bob at work, who had been the previous person coming out to Boston before me, must have been very polite to her as well, because I ended up with exactly the same car as him. Andy was the next person to come out after me, and must have been less polite because he ended up with a tank of a Buick with suspension like a water bed.

 I asked Mr Apollo to look after my bags while I went to the restroom. A risky step, I know, but I figured the bags were so heavy that I could easily go to the loo and catch up with anybody who tried to make off with any of them.

 We went to find the car. It was a new white Chevrolet Corsica, with a horrible red interior, but my only worry was cast aside once I'd found it was an automatic. We got in the car, and I started sifting through my maps to check out where I should be heading towards. At this point, Mr Apollo looked frustrated and asked me if we could get going since he was already going to be late for meeting his wife. I thought this was rather rude, but we got going anyway.

 I guess that was the point when he wished he'd just got the train from the airport, instead of getting a ride with me. I'd moved the car about three feet, when I first tried the brakes. Unlike my car, where there's a huge travel distance in the brake pedal, these power brakes only needed dusting with a feather to bring the car lurching to a halt. The brakes took more getting used to than any other factor about driving the car, except perhaps looking over the other shoulder to see what traffic was behind me. I unintentionally changed a few lanes and cut a few people up in the process, but we did manage to make it out of the airport alive and into the tunnel linking the airport and Boston city centre.

 As we entered the tunnel, my lights came on and I exclaimed to Mr Apollo that they'd come on without my touching them. I wondered if I'd be able to turn them off. It turned out that the car had automatic lights, that required no user interaction at all. I must have been easily impressed at that moment. After a jerky few minutes ride through the tunnel, Mr Apollo requested that I pull over to the right and let him out near the train station, so that he could get a train from there. I wonder what happened to his plan to go to MIT. I shall never know whether he really worked there, but I did know that I didn't have a clue where I was. I drove around for a while looking for somewhere that matched a road on the map Avis had given me.

 After a while I found myself on a freeway heading out of town. I found this on my map and decided that I would take the freeway some thirty miles right round the northern half of the city. That would give me some practice driving and get me to where I was going without having to navigate the city itself. What a good idea. I'm glad I thought of doing that.Shame it wasn't intentional though.

 It worked out rather well in the end - I got to work just in time to go home. Of course, this particular home was somewhere I hadn't been before, but was where I was to spend the next two months. I was quickly introduced to a few people and then Sharon the receptionist led the way home with me tailing her huge Oldsmobile through the now dark city streets. I was never going to remember the way back, but fortunately she came by the next morning when it was light and I followed her back into work.

 Sharon had always lived in Waltham and had an almost too exaggerated drawl to her words, with some vowels stretched so much that you almost had trouble remembering what the first part of the word was. Waltham became Wollll-thaaaaaaam and apartment became apaaaaartmeeeeeeent. It grated on the nerves, and when it had finished grating on those, then it started on whatever else was handy to grate on.

 The apartment was OK - it had a lounge, bedroom and kitchen, all of similar size. Not modern, but equipped well enough to make it liveable in for a couple of months at least. The first night I think I went to bed pretty early in an attempt to catch up on some well needed sleep. I only say I think I did because I can't remember doing anything between getting to the apartment, sorting out a few important priorities like unpacking a few bags, checking the TV worked and waking up the next morning.

 I checked that the TV worked most evenings of the first week.It still seemed to be working OK but you can never be too sure. I was still not confident enough of driving in Boston to go out and explore the area, but I did go and check out the nearest supermarkets to buy a stack of provisions. It wasn't long before I decided I was not at all keen on the American style of frozen meals which you heat up and serve. They seemed so bland and pulpy that I never finished a single meal of that type. I ended up cooking something myself or eating out most of the time. After that, for the first few days, I was just falling asleep in the reclining chair, and waking up about two or three in the morning, and moving to the bedroom to continue my jet lagged slumber.
 

 

 The first weekend was taken up with Chris and the boys coming up to Boston to stay the weekend. They were getting the Long Island Ferry to New London, Conneticut and I was driving down from Boston to meet them. Leaving at three thirty, I thought three hours was plenty of time, but of course, I hadn't taken into account that bit where I start off going in the wrong direction and ask for directions which took me on an unnecessarily long route in order to get back onto the Interstate 95. I had no firm directions, but figured that meeting the ferry from Long Island in New London couldn't be hard. Wrong!

 Once I got near to New London then I started looking out for signs to the ferry. When I saw a sign for New London I headed into the town, only to find myself on the wrong side of the River Thames. I stopped and asked for directions at a gas station. A chap next to me at the counter boomed at me.

 'Yer neet a follerm signs fert Noo Luntern aftert bridge on nint five.' He said this barely distinguishably, but I got the gist. He was a big chap, very big. He was also very smelly, very drunk and very there. There was no chance of pretending he wasn't there. Presumably the girl behind the counter had figured this out too, because she never said a word the whole time.

 'Yes, that's what I did. I came off...' I started to explain that I had indeed followed the signs, but I'd just ended up in the right town, but wrong side of the river.

 'No yer dint. Yer neet a git arn nint five ant follerm signs fert Noo Luntern.'

 I was about to repeat my claim, but since he was five times my size and seemed to have an IQ in inverse proportion to his size, then I believed him. Besides - I kind of new what he was going to tell me by now. I thanked him politely and ignored his repeated advice as I left the gas station.

 I did see the signs for New London  and the sign for a ferry as I had been told. How was I to know that Gales Ferry was a small village with no apparent sign of a ferry ever being in existence on account of the lack of nearby water. I asked for more directions. It seemed I needed to look out for a much larger bridge than the one I had turned off at. Back to the I-95. Back off the I-95. I spent a while touring the ferry points in New London, and somehow managed to get myself into a one way system which got me back on the I-95 heading back North over the bridge. One junction later and another junction South again I was back to the ferry points and eventually found Chris and the boys and the place I was looking for. I was so relieved because Chris had said that if I hadn't arrived by the time the last ferry went back to Long Island, then they might get it back if I hadn't arrived. It was very good indeed to see chris again after some eighteen months or so since they'd come over to England.

 The trip back was uneventful, thank goodness. We stopped near Mystic Seaport for a meal in a restaurant. I had the buffet. I wish I hadn't. The buffet consisted of helping yourself out of the cauldron of soup, as much as you want from the salad bar, and from the fruit bowl. The soup had a skin so thick you would have had to call on oil company to drill a bore hole in search for liquid soup. If I'd had to guess how long the soup had been sitting there, then I'd be hard put to get it to the nearest day. The tomatoes were mushy, the lettuce limp and lifeless - positively weary with age. The whole bar was distasteful, but I was hungry. If it was a ploy to prevent people from eating too much, despite being offered an attractive deal of a potentially unlimited supply of food, then it was working.

 We were all glad to get back to Boston and bed. Saturday morning we made our plans for the weekend, and headed off for the drive into the centre of Boston and the Boston Science Museum. We got stopped by the police on the way into town. The road split into three lanes at a junction. Two lanes for going straight ahead, and one for turning left. I'd managed to get into the left turn lane, but went straight ahead anyway. This was a reasonably normal thing to do in england, but this was not, it seemed, the case here. The next thing I knew was I could here a police siren, and a police car was flagging me down to the side of the road. I'd actually seen the police car behind me some distance away, so I was unlikely to have deliberately broken the law, so I was in a good position to plead ignorance. The cop walked along to my door and bent down.

 'Hello officer', I said in that tone of voice you reserve for policemen. Those two words said paragraphs. They said I was being nice and polite, and didn't want to cause any trouble, and I'm sorry if I've done anything wrong, and I won't do it again, and If you let me go without charging me, then I'd be eternally grateful.

 I was asked for my licence, which I dutifully gave to him.

 'What's this?'

 'It's my driving licence. It's a UK licence. We've just arrived here in Boston. This is a rental car.' I nearly said hire car, but I'd been warned they didn't understand that over here.

 'Don't you have a card with your photograph on it?'

 'No. I'm afraid not.'

 'Is this for real?' He looked at me disbelievingly. 'It says it expires in 2037!'

 'Oh yes. In England the licence expires when you're seventy'

  He gave the licence a good looking over before giving it back to me, and then got to the point. 'There's a two hundred dollar fine for not turning left in a turn left lane.'

 'Really.' Genuine surprise. 'I didn't know that. I'm sorry. I'm still getting used to driving on the American roads.'

 'Well, you want to be careful. I've been following you for a mile or so. I saw you go through a red light back there.'

 This was news to me. We had gone through a couple of sets of traffic lights, but I was convinced they were green, and Chris hadn't noticed anything earlier. I knew that the police car had been quite a way behind, and I reckon that perhaps they had changed just as I had gone through, but from a distance it would have been hard to tell where I was in relation to the lights. I didn't argue though. I expressed surprise and the fact that it obviously wasn't intentional.

 We were let off with a warning to watch the roads and the signs. That was only the first of three times I had contact with the police during my stay. As we drove off, Chris said I had handled it very calmly and she doubted she would have handled it as well. I was a little nervous at the next set of lights, when the police car pulled up alongside, and I resisted any temptation to race it away from the lights.

 Boston town centre is a nightmare to drive in. It's not so bad if you're like me and you don't care if you take a wrong turning, because you just take a slightly alternative route to the one you might otherwise have taken. But if you start to panic about getting off your intended path, then it's a nightmare. If you don't know exactly which lane you need to be in at which point then you haven't a hope of staying on route. I've never driven anywhere else where it's been quite so essential to be in the right lane at the right time. Dozens of times I ended up being forced to go in another direction than the one I wanted. I don't think my sign reading was so bad that it was all entirely my fault either. I never had the problem in Miami - it all seemed to make sense there.

 Anyway, we got to the science museum without further mishap. This particular science museum was definitely one of the best I've been to. There's easily a whole day's worth of things to see and do, with various extremely well executed demonstrations on different topics. The exhibits are well presented, well maintained, and for the most part they can be interacted with. I think the museum tries to impart a sense of wonder and discovery, rather than a sense of historical interest which the London Science Museum seems to. It was a refreshingly interesting place to visit. We went to a couple of the demonstrations - the liquid nitrogen show, and the Tesla show which was extremely impressive to watch.

 We also spent much time, not to mention money, in the museum shop. I bought an eclectic mix of oddities which attracted my attention, but most of my interest was in the various rocks, and minerals. I fell in love with a hefty pair of amethyst bookends, which I naturally couldn't leave in the shop to fall into some other uncaring owners grasp. There were toys and gadgets and books and ornaments galore - just my kind of shop.

 We had booked a film at the Omnimax theatre, the 360 degree viewing arena, but we had an hour or so to kill before the film was due to start. We made an impulsive decision to go to the John Hancock Tower to see a view of the city by night. The impulse had died by the time we got to the MBTA station, but not before we had bought ourselves all enough train tokens for the journey and the return. I ended up with the tokens, but never ended up using them, and instead gave them to a colleague at work some six months later, before he went out to Boston himself.

 We went back to the museum, browsed the museum shop a little more and then sat near an ingenious contraption for fifteen minutes before the film came on. The contraption was a Heath Robinson style device which lifted pool balls from the bottom to the top and sent them on myriad unpredictable routes along channels, down tubes, slides and chutes, to their final destination at the bottom of the machine where they would be lifted up again. As each ball followed its path then at various points it caused sounds to be made according to what was hit, knocked or spun round. The whole thing resulted in a fantastic concoction of colour, sound and motion that you could watch for hours on end.

 The Omnimax film was called Stormchasers and followed the work of a team of people whose goal, it seemed was to observe, film, and measure tornadoes, from as close a distance as they considered safe. the screen was was a full hemisphere of action, creating an excellent sense of presence. Definitely an impressive presentation.

 After Omnimax, food was high on the agenda, and Legal Seafoods of Cambridge was the destination. Legal Seafoods is a famous chain of excellent seafood restaurants around Boston. The one in Cambridge seemed to be the most trendy and most expensive looking one in the chain. I felt very underdressed the moment we walked in. We were told we might have to wait half an hour or so, and were given a pager which we were told would vibrate when our table was ready. Unfortunately, the novelty of this method of being informed was not to materialise since we changed our minds on eating there when we saw the prices on the menu.

 Our next most desirable location at which to eat was in Harvard Square. Parking here was a nightmare. For an area with so many restaurants and other places to visit, there were very few areas in which to park. This didn't seem to phase the filthy rich by all accounts, since they just parked their stretched limousines wherever they wanted and ate whilst the chauffeurs looked after the cars. The restaurant we went in to had no pagers, decent prices, and not unsurprisingly for a Saturday night, long queues, and after waiting for fifteen minutes without making any headway in estimated time of arrival at a table, we went over the road to a nearly empty pizza parlour and got served straight away.

 Sunday, an icy cold blast of wind welcomed us to the John Hancock Tower. We'd stopped off at MIT to see the disappointingly visually uninspiring university. I took a few photos in any case, although mostly of the river rather than MIT itself. I reserve judgement on MIT, however, on the basis that I suspect we only saw a tiny part of it. The John Hancock Tower, on the other hand was most definitely impressive from all angles. The tower is rhomboid in cross section, and takes up the whole of one block, with the exception of an extremely out of place looking old church. The tower is 768 feet tall, just fifteen feet taller than the Prudential building just a couple of blocks away. The tower was also closed. We were an hour too early.

 We consoled ourselves by spending the hour having brunch at a place called 'Small Planet', a trendy snack and grill bar, with what promised a great atmosphere in the darker hours of the day. I liked the place for its oddities, and the food was good too. Rupert was a little fussy about what he wanted, and when asked if it was possible to mix a couple of the courses on the menu, the friendly waiter told us that the chefs weren't very experienced, and didn't have the 'set up' to be  able to mix things very easily. At least he was honest. Several times he came back and apologetically told us that he didn't have this that and the other, and then when we got the bill at the end, then the final total including the things anyway. Chris put that right, of course, and Rupert got his meal free in the end. But the food was good - I had a Mexican breakfast, and I'd recommend this place as worth a visit.

 Back to the now open Hancock tower. The view of the city was terrific, even if the terrain is a little flat and uninteresting. On the top floor was a recorded story of the battles between the British and the Americans, helped along by a model layout of the area, detailed with spotlights and led trails of soldiers paths. It's an excellent description of the Paul Revere story, and the history of the city.

 We also visited the famous international news stand at Harvard Square. Most of the English papers were there, as were most of the worlds major papers in fact. This place would be excellent if you miss British news and the British reporting style.I didn't buy any papers, but I did buy a mass of postcards to add to my collection.

  And that was the end of the weekend. I took them back to New London, having a much less eventful trip down to Conneticut than a couple of days earlier. The return trip was not entirely without mishap, however. About halfway back to Boston, it was starting to get dark and my automatic lights came on. Somehow, I'd also managed to switch on the main beam light, and I just couldn't work out how to switch it off. Rather than blinding the car in front, I manually turned the lights off and pulled over at the next junction and stopped off the road at the end of the slip road in a position that I considered safe enough.

 From nowhere, a police car appeared and the policeman questioned my sanity and asked me if I wanted to be hit from behind, (the car that is!). He told me to pull off the slip road and drive to a convenient side road in town. By this time it was quite dark and I couldn't drive without lights any more, and every car that went past on the way flashed their lights at me.

 I found somewhere else to pull over, and set about trying to work out how to turn the main beam off, without turning all the lights off. I tried pushing, pulling, twisting and turning everything in sight, and was coming to the conclusion that I would have to ring the rental company. Naturally this was going to be an absolutely last resort. Finally I found a dial on the left of the dashboard which when pressed turned the main beam on and off. Somehow I'd missed that particular action during all my fiddling. Crises over and I was back on my way to bed.
 

Peter's birthday on Long Island

 Over the following few evenings, I visited some of the numerous shopping malls in the area. They varied immensely in quality. The two nearest ones to Waltham were on opposite sides of the road to each other, Arsenal Mall and Watertown Mall. One was cheap and nasty and populated by both security guards and unsavoury characters in almost equal proportions it seemed. The other was at least worth a visit, but nothing special. Burlington Mall is impressive in size and quality - most definitely the best of all the malls I went to. I went there many times during my stay, unfortunately for my credit cards. The North Shore Mall was also very large and worth visiting, but isn't anywhere near as convenient, being in Peabody (pronounced very fast as if there are no vowels) some fifteen or twenty miles from the centre of Boston.The Cambridge Galleria is also worth visiting in Cambridge, just on the north bank of the river, not far from the Boston Museum of Science. And if it's top notch designer shops you want then Copley Square is the place to go, with many designer clothes shops, and the only Nieman Marcus store in Boston.

 Most of the malls were open late until around 10 pm, which made it so easy to leave work and still have several hours shopping time available. Unfortunately, with the favourable prices compared to England, then the lightening of my wallet was by far outweighed by the extra baggage I'd have to take home. I must have spent half my money within that week of browsing around the malls, so I tried not to be attracted by the shops quite so much for the rest of the holiday. I say holiday because that is how it seemed to me. The work itself was hectic and involved but seems a blur now, whereas all the new experiences and travelling is as clear now as the day it happened.

 The second weekend, it was my turn to go and visit Chris and Peter and the boys on Long Island. The occasion was Peter's birthday party. (Forty something). I left at 7.15 on the Saturday morning and headed off to New York City via Hertford, Conneticut and New Haven. I was already bored of the I-95 route. The distance to NYC was almost exactly 200 miles, but fortunately I didn't have to go very far into the city. I skirted through the Bronx and  over the Throgg's Neck Bridge, (anybody know what a Throgg is?) and then along Long Island to Center Moriches. The whole journey only took four and a quarter hours. I must have broken the speed limit for a little way.

 We prepared for the party, and did a little shopping. I bought a card and found some real alcoholic cider, which was quite a find. Later when Peter opened the cards in front of everyone, someone had got him exactly the same card, which was quite uncanny. The same person, Paul, was also quite partial to my cider, being surprised that I'd been able to get any in Center Moriches. I think he even took a bottle home with him at the end of the evening. It was a good party. Many of the people I'd actually met before which was nice because they weren't all total strangers to me. We ate and then played Balderdash. I don't remember who won, but I expect it was Pete, since he always wins at Balderdash.

 As for the meal, well, there would have been some special bluefish pate if I hadn't messed up. I got a lot of stick for this. Chris had meant, the weekend before, to try and get some bluefish pate for Peter from the Legal Seafoods restaurant. When that hadn't happened, I said to Chris that I could get some for the following weekend, for Peter's birthday party. So I specially went into town one evening and browsed around the Copley Square Mall one evening and bought a takeaway portion of this bluefish pate while I was at it. Chris had been ever so pleased that I'd managed to get some, and then when I came down on the Saturday, I'd forgotten to bring it with me. Big mistake. Chris was most put out, and despite any attempts to find a replacement pate or cheese of some kind, it just wasn't the same.

 During the evening Peter recounted a story which is worth repeating here. A friend or colleague of Peter's had been driving through the Bronx, when she'd broken down, and had to stop. Not being the type of person prone to a reputation more suitable to a helpless damsel in distress, she knew enough about cars to have a look at the engine compartment to see what was wrong. As she was peering over the engine with the bonnet up, she felt the car rocking from side to side. She looked around from under the bonnet to see what was going on, to see a guy jacking the car up. On questioning the guy, presumably fairly vehemently, the guy said; "Listen lady, you get the battery, and I'll get the wheels." Unbelievable, but apparently, true!

 Sunday, Chris, myself and the boys went to some funland arcade place for a few hours in the afternoon before I left. We played quasar - the American equivalent of LaserQuest in the UK. It was as good, but then, it didn't cost as much either. We had two games, and I won the second out of about 20 people or so. The arcade was one of those places where the machine gave out great long strings of tickets instead of money as prizes. It's a bit of a con really, because it's not possible to come out with more money than you went in. You just have to swap however many tickets you have, for prizes. I forget how many tickets were required for a television, but it was quite a few thousand, and barely worth the time that would be involved in collecting that many tickets, let alone the amount of money you would have to shove in the machines in the first place. We all collected tickets for Edward, who had a couple of hundred or so to swap for a bag of goodies. Of course, it was all a complete waste of money, as are all arcades, but the skiing simulator was quite good.

 Soon I was heading back West along the LIE, the Long Island Expressway, towards Manhatten, and the sunset over the New York skyline. Unfortunately, by the time I was close enough, it was too late to get any good pictures of the orange and black skyline, but on some unexplainable impulse, instead of just heading home, I drove into the city instead. I parked, and walked around for a while, taking in Broadway, Fifth Avenue, 42nd Street and the theatre district. I found a shop selling a great set of postcards of New York scenes, which was probably my main impetus behind going into the city. My goal achieved, I drove around Manhatten for a while, before heading back North off the Island. Driving in NYC is not for the faint hearted. It wasn't so bad just cruising around not caring which direction I went in, but if it mattered which road I wanted and which lane I needed to be in then I had a long way to go. In the Bronx area, I nearly had to resort to stopping to look at a map, which could have been fatal in that area, but I eventually found my way to the good old I-95. By 11pm I was back in Boston after a 600 mile round trip, and I was most definitely ready for my bed.

Niagara Falls, Toronto and Lake Ontario.

 The third weekend was my first chance to venture further afield. I was planning to drive to Canada that weekend. Unfortunately, I was unavoidably kept late at work on the Friday evening, which blew my intentions of getting home at 6pm to get a few hours sleep before leaving at midnight. I left work at 11pm, went home and packed and left at midnight anyway. I had to be in Niagra, on the Canadian side of the falls at 10.00 Saturday morning, to meet Glenn and Merril, who were living in Guelph, just North West of Lake Ontario. I'd planned on going to Niagara anyway, but when I was looking at the map, I saw how relatively close it was to where Glenn and Merril lived. Not having a telephone number or an address, I'd use the World Wide Web at work, to find a telephone number for Glenn's particular department at the Guelph University. From there, I'd managed to get a telephone number for Glenn and finally got in touch, and had arranged to meet up in Niagara.

 It's around 450 miles from Boston to Niagara, and that's a long long drive to attempt overnight after a very long day at work. I stopped many times to wake myself up a little and to stretch my legs at the various rest areas along the way. Over four hundred miles of the trek is along the same road, so it was a very tedious route without being able to see any of the views in the darkness. I kept myself awake by eating sweets and dipping into a bag of m&m's. Outrageously, I got through a kilo bag of m&m's during the trip to buffalo at the American side of the Falls.

 I was fooled not once, but twice, by heading off the Massachussetts Turnpike for a signposted 24 hour service area, only to find that it was the other side of a toll point. Fortunately, I was able to reverse and turn round without having to pay. It seemed that the only service areas available to turnpike users are those actually on the edge of the Turnpike as opposed to those reached by taking an exit. I was amazed to find that at some service areas, then there was a drive through McDonalds. Having been driving for five or six hours, the last thing you want when you pull in to a service area is to stay in the car in order to get a meal served to you. It defeats the whole point of having these 'rest areas' as they're called in the USA.

 As I headed further West, then the roadsides became more and more covered in snow. There had been a little snow in Boston but nothing that hadn't melted before noon. Towards Albany, New York and on to Buffalo, the snow increased until in some rest areas, there was a couple of feet of snow. And of course it grew colder, the further West I drove. At times, I was opening the car windows in order to get a cold blast of air to keep me awake. I reached Buffalo just after 8am. To get to this point I'd had to pay fifteen dollars at the tolls - almost as much as I'd paid in fuel to get there. If I'd had an extra half a day to get to Niagara, I might have taken al alternate route, but it's a long enough drive overnight as it is.

 By nine I'd crossed the border into Canada and was watching the cascading falls from the waters edge. I was aiming to meet Glenn and Merril at  about 10am, but when they hadn't arrived by 10.30 I left a message, as pre-arranged, with the clerk at the information office, and wandered off to see if there were any other shopping areas where Glenn could have meant to meet. There were other shopping areas, six or seven of them, and I walked round them all looking for any sign of Glenn. I did get a chance to get a good view of the Falls, and took a few photos. By this time I was a mess. I was cold, very tired, hungry, lonely, and very wet from the spray which the Falls sent up into the air, in addition to the rain which was now falling. I was soaked and my hair was all over the place.

 I returned to the original cheap and tasteless tourist shopping centre by the falls, to find from the information officer that Glenn and Merril had arrived, and found them a few minutes later. They got coffees while I went to dry off a little in the rest rooms. It was good to see them again, and soon it was as though we'd only seen each other a few days earlier. We went off to Denny's to eat. This was a great idea - I badly needed food to settle my stomach, and it made me feel much less tired. I'd experienced a Denny's restaurant before in America and had been impressed by the breakfast, but the rest of the meals didn't seem anywhere near as good. the salad was limp and lifeless albeit in enormous quantities.

 From Niagara, we drove to Niagara On The Lake, Merril driving her car and leading the way, with Glenn and I following in my car, catching up on a year's worth of gossip. We passed some really pretty views down onto Lake Ontario, and stopped for a few required photo opportunities, and to browse round another cheap tourist shop. Niagra On The Lake is a very neat and very quaint historic old Canadian town, an atmospheric place full of tasteful shops selling a plethora of oddities. There was an affordable antique shop ( usually a contradiction in terms ), a quaint old bookshop, where I bought a book entitle 'How to travel with a salmon' by Umberto Eco, and we found a little shop dedicated to Winnie the Pooh. We had hot chocolate in a little cafe, and I bought some Canadian pure maple syrup, which seemed to be the thing to buy here.

 From there we headed back to glenn and Merril's place in Guelph, at the University there. We ate and played Trivial Pursuit, trying to tease wrong answers out of each other. Merril and I took great delight in Glenn‘s angst of being last. I think it turned out to be a draw in the end, but the result wasn't important. And by that time, six hundred miles from home, I was ready to sleep for a week. If only I could!

 Sunday we walked into the town centre taking the path through the woods for a few snowball fights. When I saw the price of compact discs, I bought half a dozen or so. Later I worked out that although they were still cheaper, or at least, no more expensive than back in Boston,  then they weren't as cheap as I previously thought due to the fact that there were two dollops of tax to be added on top - a province tax, and another state or national tax, which amounted to fifteen percent between them. We browsed round some of the shops and wandered back. After lunch, we parted with a heartfelt goodbye, and I was back on the road again.

 But that wasn't the end of my trip for the weekend, not by a long shot. It was early afternoon on Sunday and I had a six hundred mile drive to get home. You would think I'd take the direct route to even hope to be in work by Monday morning. But not I. As I got nearer to The North West tip of Lake Ontario, there was a group of workmen re-surfacing the road, and three lanes narrowed into one for a short while. As I sat in the queue of traffic, slowly trundling along, I saw some signs for Toronto. The signs indicated Toronto was about 50 kilometres away, admittedly in the wrong direction, but when you have to drive a thousand kilometres then 50 doesn't seem so far - only half an hour away. Here was my chance to visit another city, that I might never have the chance of visiting again. As I reached the point of no return, where the road divided to go to the USA or up and around Lake Ontario, I was still thinking, and impulsively took the road North again. I wasn't going home yet.

 Soon I reached the outskirts of Toronto. I knew where I was heading. I'd been able to see it for quite a few miles before reaching the city. Toronto is the home of the CN Tower. The tower is the world's tallest free standing structure at an incredible height of 1815 feet. I have this quest, always on my travels, to go to the highest point. In so many cities, where the skyline looms upwards all around you, I've always wanted to go the top of the tallest skyscraper. In Manhatten, going to the top of the Empire State Building just wasn't the same as going to the top of the World Trade Centre, the tallest skyscraper in the World at a height of around 1300 or 1400 feet. I'd already been up the tallest skyscraper in Boston. In Korea I'd been to the top of the Golden Tower Building and the Soeul Tower in Korea - the tallest free standing structure in Asia. In Paris I'd been up to the top of the Tour Montparnasse, somewhat taller than the Eiffel Tower. Here was my chance to better them all, and go to the top of the tallest free standing structure in the World. A chance not to be missed.

 The tower pierced upwards from the flat lakeside like a giant skewer thrusting skywards. A third of a mile high, it almost disappeared into the slowly thickening mist coming off the Lake. Eerie green spotlights cut their way through the mist, shining directly downwards from underneath the Worlds largest and highest revolving restaurant. I was in awe of the sheer audacity of the building to be so tall amongst its dwarfed neighbouring skyscrapers. It had no right to be there. It knew it and it knew nothing was going to argue with it. I paid my fee with ten American Dollars and went straight to the lift. I wandered how many hours of queueing I'd saved by not coming on a Saturday afternoon, or maybe the end of October just isn't a busy time anyway, with it being so cold.

 The first stage is at around 1200 feet, and I stopped there to have look at the tiny lights below. South lay a huge expanse of blackness - Lake Ontario. I didn't hang around here - I was anxious to get to the highest stage, which was another lift and another few dollars, and another 300 feet higher. Canadian dollars this time, since I'd got my previous change in Canadian money. This stage was much much smaller. You could walk right around it in twenty paces or less. Although the view was pretty amazing, it would have been better if it were lighter, and if the surrounding terrain was a little less flat.

 Back down to the first stage, the lift went to the lower floor of the stage - the glass floor. Here, an expanse of floor was made of glass. About ten by twenty feet, the section of floor was made of extremely thick glass, which meant that you could step out on to the glass, to see the streets 1200 feet below. It was an unnerving first step on to the glass. There were a few girls there, running straight across the glass, without stopping, and screaming as they went. Another girl was screaming as her friends tried to push her onto the glass. I laid down on the glass to take a few photos of a most unusual view.

 Back down at the bottom, I bought some goodies in the gift shop, before heading back to the car. I drove around the centre of Toronto for a while, and decided that since I had already started going round Lake Ontario, then it was now a shorter trip back to follow the shore of the Lake all the way along the top, until I reached the northern tip of New York state and could cross the border back into the USA. So, for the next 200 miles, I followed the long dark monotonous road along the shore. At the tip of the lake I crossed back over the border, via a pretty steel bridge covered with snow and icicles. The typically winter views of frosted trees, frozen water and reflected moon was quite a sight. The border guard was characteristically grumpy but let me through.

 From now on I was in no mans land, it seemed. I didn't see a single vehicle for over an hour, let alone a moving one. I also needed some fuel. I wouldn't last another hour of driving, so I came off the main road in the hope that I might find some civilization if I followed the signs to some of the towns. The last thing I wanted was to run out of gas in this cold. The area seemed to have been hit by a lot of snow very recently, and although the main roads had been mostly cleared, the walkways were piled high with snow, and many roads were still treacherous. I drove through several white ghost towns without seeing a single person, and certainly no gas stations. I passed through towns that should have been called Coldtown and Iceville. I eventually found a gas station in Watertown, and luckily for me, it was open, despite there being no-one around, and it being after one o'clock in the morning.

 Crisis over and I continued my trek South Eastwards going from town to town, until a couple of hours later I reached a little skiing village in the mountains, and a sign towards the Mass. Turnpike, on which I'd started this long journey. Another couple of hours later, and I was back in Boston desperately needing my bed. For some crazy reason, I went not back to my apartment, but to work. It was five thirty on Monday morning, I'd just driven nearly 1300 miles, and I was going straight to work. I forget my logic at the time. Presumably I wanted to carry on with what I'd been doing on the Friday night, and I figured there wasn't much point in sleeping for two hours. At any rate, my password didn't work on the electronic keypad, so I couldn't get into work, and so I went home to bed anyway. I think I complained the next day that I'd been unable to get into work when I wanted to at 5.30am, and the problem was fixed fairly quickly.

 I shall never forget that weekend, thanks to the sheer amount of travelling I managed to squeeze into two days. But, it's not as if that weekend was particularly special in that respect. There were several more weekends along similar styles, and which were equally impulsive and at least as adventurous.
 

Thanksgiving on Long Island

Less than a week later, I was back in the car and heading back to Long Island again, for Thanksgiving. We had Thursday and Friday off, Thursday being Thanksgiving. I left at 9am on the Thursday, which meant that I was reaching NYC around midday. The journey was fine up to that point, but it rapidly got worse. I had driven the first 200 miles in about three hours, but spent nearly two hours covering the next four miles due to the holiday traffic bottlenecking itself onto Long Island, over the Throgg's Neck Bridge. Fortunately, chris had planned the Thanksgiving meal for the evening instead of lunch time, just in case of such problems. Even, once I was over the bridge, it took half an hour to move the next couple of miles before getting onto the LIE.

 It was a nice quiet, relaxing few days, and I got plenty of much needed sleep. We ate mountains of turkey, went to the movies a few times. We saw Goldeneye, Toy Story and Ace Ventura, Pet Detective II. Goldeneye was a superb film in the inimitably unrealistic style for which Bond is famous for. As for Ace Ventura, well, Jim Carey is just soooo gross.

 I left a little earlier than I might otherwise have on the Sunday, since Peter had mentioned a particular lake in Massachussetts. Peter had been given Bill Bryson's 'Made in America' for his birthday, and the book mentioned Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. An impressively sounding name by any standards, the name is a Nipmuck indian name meaning 'You fish on that side, I'll fish on this side and no one will fish in the middle'. The story goes that the sign painter got a little confused over the syllables and accidentally stuck on extra 'gaugg' in the middle. On learning that my route back to Boston could be diverted a little in order to go past the lake, I decided immediately that I would go there. In particular, I was after a postcard with the name of the lake on it.

 The Lake is beside a small town called Webster. I took a slower cross country route in order to get there, to avoid the expressways which were filled with traffic returning home from the Thanksgiving weekend. It was just getting towards dusk when I arrived in Webster. I found the lake without any problems, but there was nothing else to see. I found no signs, no tourist information and not even any cheap and tacky tourist shops selling indian wares with the name of the lake on them. And no postcards either. I stopped at a few places to ask questions, and did find a woman who knew that the lake had a long indian name, but told me the lake was now just called Lake Webster. A disappointing detour home, but at least I got to see the lake with the longest name in the World.

 Incidentally, whilst I was in Webster, I happened to see a place called 'The Fuzzy Grape'. This joint of somewhat less than respectable reputation had been mentioned by my boss before I left the UK. He'd asked me to get him a Fuzzy Grape T-Shirt. Fortunately the very purple building didn't look open yet, so I was unable to help him. Shame, that!
 

Montreal and The Adirondack Region

 I had two more weekends before I was due to return to England, and I still had plenty to see, and see plenty, I did. The next weekend, I left Boston at 9.30 on the Saturday morning. I drove along the Mass Turnpike, following the same route to Buffalo that I had a couple of weeks earlier. At Albany, the capital of New York State, I deviated from the route, heading North to Lake George, on the border betwen New York and Vermont.

 Once I was away from Albany, the views turned more and more spectacular. Lake George is known as the Queen of the Lakes, and deservedly so. The road follows the rolling hills along the shore of the lake with excellent viewpoints displaying breathtakingly beautiful vistas of blue water and fir tree covered islands by the dozen. At the time I was travelling around the lake, the sun was getting lower on the horizon, giving a spectacular silver shimmer on the rippling water. There were many pretty places to stop, and I took advantage of as many as I could in addition to the limited 'official' stopping areas.

 A little further North, a huge bridge crossed the river to Vermont, and the snow topped mountains in the distance. Further still was Lake Champlain. All the time, the road followed the course of the river and the shores of the lakes. Halfway up the West side of Lake Champlain, the Ausable River cuts South West, and here is the Ausable Chasm, a 200 foot gorge cut out over the centuries by the flowing river. This was my main destination for the day. I parked the car in a little car park, just before the road crossed the bridge of the chasm. It was bitterly cold and the ground was covered in a sheet of ice, and I was sliding all over the place. I walked around for a while, but I was unable to see the chasm properly due to the fact that it was all fenced off and closed up for the winter. However, I did get a good view of some completely frozen waterfalls and a frozen weir, which looked very pretty. A water mill was all frozen up as well, with dirty white frothy looking icicles  dangling all the way down into the chasm. The chasm would be a great place to visit during the summer. From a higher view point, I watched the sun set behind the little lake which fed the frozen weir, and then headed off to my next point of interest, Montreal.

 Montreal is about fifty miles North of the US border at Blackpool, in the province of Quebec. Customs here was very annoying, since I had to wait in the customs office for half an hour so that someone could stamp a little bit of paper to approve my crossing of the border. In Niagra it had been just a customary look at the passport and I was waved through. As with Toronto, I headed downtown, to the skyscraper district, hoping for a view of the city from the top of the tallest, but I was sorely disappointed. Not a single building had the facility to allow public viewing from the top apart from one, and in that building, there was a party going on on the top floor, and I would only be able to go up by special invitation only. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to bring my invite, so that was that.

 Being in Quebec province, of course everyone in Montreal spoke French. My french is so rusty it fell apart years ago, but it seemed most people spoke English as well, just not out of choice. I might as well have been in a major French city for all I knew. Maybe I was there at the wrong time of year, or Montreal just isn't much of a tourist trap, but I didn't get any feeling of being welcome as a tourist in any way. I felt very lonely and isolated. It seemed a serious city, unlike somewhere like San Francisco. I found a Burger King or some such equivalent to eat, and then found a shop where I bought a whole heap of postcards, which indicated interesting sights to see. The Olympic Stadium seemed an impressive building to see, so I headed off there.

 In Montreal it was even colder than it had been at the Ausable chasm. The various electronic time and temperature indicators around the city indicated that it was -10 Centigrade at 9pm. I parked in a nearly empty stadium visitors car park, and trudged through the snow which was several feet thick to walk around the stadium. It's a strange looking structure, with a huge covered oval arena which has the roof supported by wires stemming from the tip of a support which towers upwards at and angle of 50 degrees or so from one end of the arena. Orange hidden lighting at the other end of the building creates a glowing effect which looks like a stereotypical flying saucer and created an eerie effect in the powdered snow. I spent quite a bit of time admiring the structure and taking photos. The Montreal Casino is another incredible building to look at, and which I think was designed by the same person as the stadium.

 I had thought about staying the night in a motel in Montreal, and heading off somewhere else in the morning, but I decided in the end to head back to the USA, where it would be cheaper to stay in a motel there. I'd only spent six hours in Canada, and although Montreal seemed a little cold, (in two senses of the word), then it's definitely worth a visit. Back in the USA, and half an hour's drive south of the border I stopped in rest area.

 By now it was 2am, it was 12 Centigrade below zero, and although I'd originally intended to stop in a motel, It seemed pointless, when I really wanted to be away by 6am in the morning anyway, in order to visit all the places I wanted. So I tried to sleep in the car for a while. Unfortunately I had no blankets or anything of the sort with me, and although I did manage to get about an hour's very poor sleep, I woke up simply because it was too cold to sleep, the warmth of the car didn't last very long at all in these temperatures. Not that it was particularly comfortable either.

 I drove on South to the next rest area, which was about half an hour's drive. I kept the car heater at full blast, and by the time I stopped again, th temperature sensor on my alarm clock was reading 40 Centigrade inside the car. I hoped this might be enough warmth to allow me to sleep a bit longer, but I was only able to manage another hour, before the cold woke me up again. By 5 am, I'd had enough of trying to sleep, and the drivers seat was so uncomfortable. I decided to head off to my next port of call, and then find somewhere to eat.

 Lake Placid was my next objective, former site of the Winter Olympics, and one of the larger towns in this area of the Adirondack National Park. The driving conditions were atrocious, The roads were already covered in very slippery snow and ice, which made the roads leading into the mountains very tricky indeed to negotiate. Fortunately the particular route I was taking was not as steep as some other might have been, but it had it's moments where I knew that I had no control over the car whatsoever. On top of this, the snow was falling harder and harder, making traction even harder and visibility next to nil. I kept going however, on the basis, that I was actually safer at this time of the morning, while there was no other traffic around. The trip to Lake Placid was only 25 or 30 miles, but it took me an hour and a half, which I thought was pretty good considering the conditions, and the potential for losing my way.

 I reached the outskirts of the town as dawn was approaching. I saw the former Olympic skating rink, and the frozen lake itself, which just looked like a snow covered field. The only place open was a McDonalds, just starting it's slow wind up to another day, so I stopped there for a most welcome breakfast. When I left and got back into the car in the car park, I reversed out of my parking spot, taking care to avoid the truck parked a little way behind me, and tried driving off, only to find I was going nowhere. I realised that I still had the hand brake on, and that I must have moved out of my parking spot simply by sliding out under the traction of two wheels, and no control over the other two. The snow had stopped falling, but the fresh snow was freezing quickly, making the roads more slippery than ever.

 Already, the snowploughs were out, clearing the night's snow and gritting the road, which was just as well for my next part of my journey into the mountains of the Adirondack. The first was Whiteface Mountain, the road to the top of which, was blocked off, but following the road right round the mountain and Westwards again, I watched the sun rise up over the mountain. This was a spectacular sight as the winds blew the fresh powdered snow off the slopes to create glowing orange clouds rolling down the mountain side in the morning sun. I took some photos, but they never did the sight justice at all. As I was busy taking pictures, I'd failed to notice an oncoming snowplough, and I only just made it back into the car and moved off before it reached me. I'm sure it would have stopped, but those things just look so menacing that you can't be sure.

 I drove around the lakes and mountains for some time in the Adirondack Park, following the chain of lakes like beads of a necklace, first West, and then South towards the Hudson River. The scenery was breathtakingly beautiful all around, but I have to say that one frozen lake is much like another. Despite that, the area was so graceful and mood provoking, that I loved every minute. I'd like to go back during the summer or even better, in the fall, to see how it looks during the rest of the year. Very different, but equally beautiful, I'm sure.

 As I reached the end of the chain of Lakes, and got near the Hudson River, I found the Adirondack Park Shop, open for just another week or two, before winter made the area too inhospitable to attract many visitors. There was a wealth of books and information on the area, but I settled for an excellent detailed and contoured map of the entire park area. From here I followed the Hudson South East, stopping for walks where roadside parking facilities allowed. At one point I trekked through some thick woods in search of the Hudson. I could hear the rushing water fed by the thawing snow, so it wasn't hard to find.

 I then beared East, back past the South shore of Lake George, to the crossing point of the enormous figure of eight that I was destined to do this weekend. As I crossed into Vermont, at the southern tip of the lake I spotted a sign pointed out the distance to a small, but interestingly named town. It said 'Pilot's Knob 1/2 mile'. Away from the mountains, the driving was now much much better. There was very little evidence of any snow at all, until I got back into the mountains again, as I crossed the Appalachians and the Green Mountains skiing area, into New Hampshire, and back down into the Boston area, and civilisation once more. I was back home by 7.30pm. The trip had lasted a mere 34 hours, and I'd driven over 1000 miles. I was shattered, but very very happy to have squeezed so many interesting sights and locations into such a short space of time.

Mount Washington Valley

 The following weekend wasn't quite so 'on the go' all the time, but it was no less interesting, no less eventful, and I covered no fewer miles. I set out at 8.30 on the Saturday morning again, but started the day with a good old Denny's breakfast to keep me going for the day. As I finished breakfast, the snow was just starting to fall again as I drove off, heading up the coast. My first port of call this time was just exactly that. Portsmouth, like the place of the same name in England, is a large port in Hampshire. Actually it's just on the border of Hampshire and Maine. I stopped for a good walk around to see what the Portsmouth of New England was like. There wasn't really that much to see in fact, but there did appear to be a large number of what looked to be fairly good restaurants, although many I suspect had a majority of fish based meals. I spoke to a woman in a shop who told me she'd been to Portsmouth in England and simply adored it, and that I'd like it here in the USA too during the summer, when it was warmer and more hospitable.

 From Portsmouth I drove North West, to Dover, and on to Laconia in the South of the New Hampshire Lakes Region. I stopped for a quick lunch at McDonalds. Laconia is built on the shore of one of the Lakes, and again, I'm sure would be very picturesque during the fall, but that day, it was white. Everything was white, and when everything is white like that, then things just don't stand out like they might do otherwise, so I wasn't that impressed. From there, I headed North to the Mount Washington Valley area, where I serendipitously found a whole bunch of factory outlet stores in the town of Conway.

 I spent several hours here, browsing the shops, dithering over designer items which were much reduced, but often no more affordable. I did give in on a few items of clothing, and a 'Le Sac' sports bag. The bag, I was assured, was an astute buy since it was the thing to have, after Quintain Tarantino, had been seen getting off a plane in Paris, carrying a sports bag, and she had just confirmed with head office that it had been a 'Le Sac'. I didn't mention that I just wanted an extra bag for my trip home, and my choice of bag had just been the cheapest bag of the size I wanted. Unfortunately, I'd already bought three pairs of jeans. If only I had been more patient - they were even cheaper here.

 By this time, it was dark, so I started to head West to get back on the I-93 to whizz on down back to Boston for the night. The road I'd chosen to take was obviously less well used, since the snow had not been properly cleared. The further I went, the deeper the snow. I turned round and started going back the way I had come for a quarter of a mile, and then thought again. I had the choice of risking being able to follow the road through the mountains until I came out on the I-93, or taking the much longer and more tedious rout back the way I had come, or just staying in a local motel back in conway. What to do? I risked the road through the mountains. Once I reached the I-93 I could be home in a couple of hours. So I turned round, and headed back West again.

 During this weekend and the last I must have experienced all the worst possible winter driving conditions. The particular problem on this road was that the snow was very fine and powdery, and as the wind whistled long the valleys between the mountains, then the powder was blowing around over the surface of the ground, snaking its way along in streams that made the road appear like a moving surface. The sides of the roads were barely visible, and driving on this apparently fluid road was very hard. Every now and then, a gust of wind would blow the snow so as to engulf the car entirely, making visibility zero for an instant.

 In the mountain area of the Adirondacks my wiper blades had been rendered useless after they had become encase in a tube of ice. Turning my heating on full towards the windscreen didn't have any effect. As the blades got heavier with the weight of the ice, they just slapped themselves straight off the edge of the windscreen, with a horrible noise as they did so. The problem was that they just weren't clearing the windscreen at all, so I just had to stop every now and then and break the blades out of their little cocoons to form two perfect moulds of each half of the wipers. In some areas, I'd driven through freezing rain, where ice had built up around the windscreen, making the area of vision much smaller. Elsewhere, the freezing rain was forming icicles which came off the sides of the windscreen, and then tailed back down past the front side windows, so that I could open the windows and just break them off. At one point I ran out of washer bottle fluid. I had to stay away from following cars in front, and I had to stop every mile or so to wash the windscreen with snow from the roadside, to get rid of the salt and grit, until I reached a service station where I refilled the washer bottle.

 Finally, I reached the pass between the mountains, and headed back down towards the I-93. The Expressway at this point had only one lane cleared of snow, which meant that there were huge banks of snow on either side of the lane. There was no room for mistake. It was like a long straight bob sleigh run. As I was driving along I saw something in the lane in front of me, but too late. I felt a soft thud underneath the car as it caught under the car. I had no idea what I had hit, but I could hear it scraping along the road, ploughing up snow in front of and to the sides of the car. With the light of tailing cars in the mirror, there was no way I could stop without risking an accident, so I drove on until I came to the next exit a couple of miles later.

 As I left the Expressway I saw that I was turning off into some woods and a camp site, and I stopped a couple of hundred yards away, in the camping car park. I tried to manoeuvre so as to release the thing from under the car. I tried reversing and cornering and all sorts, and finally it came free. As I reversed over it, I had visions of the fact that it had been some old guy who had collapsed in the road. It wasn't worth thinking about. I got out of the car to inspect the object and of course it wasn't. It appeared to be a double seat cushion off of a snowmobile or some such vehicle. What it was doing in the middle of the road, I don't know. Maybe it had been caught under several cars before it decided to attach itself to mine. I shifted the seat to the edge of the car park and went to get back into the car. Except that the door had locked behind me and I couldn't.

 How could I have been so dumb to have locked myself out of the car. I cursed the car for having it's 'oh so clever' locking system. Everything on the car was automatic. When you start the engine, the lights come on if necessary, and the doors lock. When you turn the engine off, then the doors unlock. It's a nice safety feature. Normally. But in this case, I'd left the engine running while I got out of the car to shift the seat cushion to the edge of the car park. The door had shut behind me, and of course the doors were in locked mode because the engine was running. So here I am, to my knowledge, miles from anywhere, and without a coat or even a jumper and locked out of my car, with the inside of the car nice and toasty warm with the engine running and heater full on, and the temperature outside the car at around 10 Centigrade below zero. It took a little while for my predicament to sink in, as I went round the car trying all the other doors.

 The situation could have been worse. I could have been stuck in these sub freezing conditions for more than the hour or so that I was. Beside the car park was a building that I presumed to be the camp site headquarters. Being the middle of winter, of course, there was nobody there, but there was a public telephone attached to the outside. If that hadn't been there, I'm not sure what my alternatives were apart from to try and flag down a car on the expressway. I had no money, so my only hope was to ring the police on 911 and see if they could help. I described my position and they said they would send someone along. Forty five minutes later a breakdown truck arrived, and within minutes, had the car door open using a nifty little wire tool. It looked like something fashioned from an old wire coat hanger, but the chap assured me that the tool had cost him fifty dollars. That was just ten dollars more than he charged me for his services.

 During the meantime, before he arrived, my one and only objective was to keep warm. It was snowing again by this time, and without proper clothing, I'm sure it was cold enough to kill if I didn't keep warm, especially with the bitterly cold winds. I tried to clear a path in the snow around the car, to stop it being so slippery, and just continuously jogged around the car, or did exercises to keep my muscles working. I was so relieved when I saw the flashing amber lights approaching the slip road off the expressway. When I paid the chap, I asked for a receipt in the vague hope that I might have been able to claim it back on expenses at work, but when I told the whole story to Dan, my boss at work, then he just fell about laughing, and said 'no way'.

 The car was very hot inside by now, but I was certainly not going to complain. I was lucky to be inside the car at all. The rest of the journey back was uneventful. The snow became freezing rain, and then sleet and rain, and by the time I reached Boston, it was just drizzling, and there was barely any sign of the snow that purveyed only an hour or two's drive North. After the experience with being locked out of the car, I was telling myself that I would spend Sunday having a nice pleasant relaxing day doing nothing. Such mundane thoughts didn't last long.

 The next day I decided I wasn't going to be beaten. I was just going to be more careful when I got out of the car. I drove all the way back up the I-93, to Loon Mountain. My aim was, if possible, to rent a snowmobile for an hour or so, but at 45 dollars I decided I couldn't afford it. Instead, I took a cable car to the top of the mountain to see the excellent views, and have a rum and hot chocolate in the mountain top cafe, whilst watching the world go by. That was the pleasant relaxing bit of the day that I must have meant.

 From Loon I went to The Old Man Of The Mountain. This is a high outcrop of rock with the rock face jutting out so that when viewed from a particular angle, then the shape is clearly silhouetted to be that of a face. This famous view was one that I'd seen in books and on postcards many a time, but when I discovered that it was in the area, I just had to go and see it. The Old Man was much smaller than I thought, and even with the zoom lens on my camera, I couldn't get a good close up of it.

 From Mount Washington National Park I headed back through Laconia National Park towards Boston. I had one more place to visit - the Laconia Lakes Factory Outlets. Here, there were some excellent shops, and I spent most of the time in the Ralph Lauren shop. I couldn't believe the bargains that were available. I wanted to buy loads, but made do with a couple of polo roll neck tops and a Polo Bear Towel.

 Next stop Boston, and that was my final weekend, and another 1000 miles covered in the two days. I drove over 6000 miles during my time in Boston, most of it at the weekends, and I enjoyed seeing the sights of New England and Canada very much. I now need to go back in the fall, and do it all over again, apart, perhaps, from the bit where I got locked out of the car. For anybody who hadn't been to America, perhaps because they're not sure they'll like it, then I thoroughly recommend New England. It's a wonderful area, full of so many interesting places to visit. More than you could ever do in a two week holiday.