Connecticut to Virginia in Photos

For the casual reader of this blog, the link may be hard to spot, but I can assure you that for the last eleven months there has been a direct correction between the urbanity of the areas through which we are travelling, and the frequency of the blog posts. When we are visiting national parks and areas of wilderness, we tend to spend the first half of the day hiking, and our afternoons relaxing in or around the truck; this gives me plenty of time to sit at the computer and write about our recent exploits. When we are visiting cities, the same is not true. Unlike forests, at night cities tend to be well lit and filled with things to do and places to visit once the sun has set, consequently the time that I normally spend writing the blog, is occupied by eating, drinking, and occasionally with listening to loud music.

Up until recently, our visits to cities have been interspersed with time spent in the back-country. However since arriving on the East Coast, the gaps between the cities have got so small, that our driving has merely been from one city to another. This has been great in terms of our cultural intake, but diabolically bad for the level of blogging productivity. In fact, it has been so long since I last had sufficient time to sit down and write about our travels, that in the intervening period we have finished our travels, dropped the truck at Baltimore docks and flown back to London.

If I was a diligent blogger, I would (mentally) revisit the places we visited during the last three weeks of our travels, and update the blog with detailed accounts of our activities. Sadly my enthusiasm doesn't stretch far enough, which is probably just as well for readers of the blog, because detailed accounts of the bars we got drunk at, and the galleries we visited would be of little interest to most people. It seems cruel, but when I'm reading the blogs of other overland travelers, the entries that I find most interesting are about the times the vehicle broke/got stuck/rolled over, or the travelers got ill/arrested/kidnapped. I would certainly not wish these unfortunate events on anyone, but I find that reading about travels that go exactly as planned can be almost unreadable boring. Thankfully there are clearly some readers of this blog that do not feel the same way, as I still get a satisfying number of hits despite having had no drama for a considerably long time. Nevertheless I am not going to inflict a detailed account of how I spent my time in some of the most visited cities in the world on the internet.

The following is a bare bones account of our final few weeks in America, filled with photos that will probably look very much like photos found all over the interwebnets from other people that have visited these places. After leaving New haven, we drove straight to New York City. Not wishing to provoke a terror alert, we elected to stay at the busy but conveniently sited Liberty Harbour RV park, where for around $55/night we got a dry site just across the Hudson from the south end of Manhattan. We spent about nine days in the city, mostly walking around doing touristy things, but also spending time with an old friend of mine from London.

After leaving New York City, we spent a a couple of days parked by the side of the road in Philadelphia, before heading on towards Baltimore.


We stopped off at a pet relocation company to pick up a crate that they had built for us to fly Boris back to the UK in. We could have collected the crate nearer our return date, but we wanted to give Boris the chance to get used to it first, and so we elected to spend our last ten days in America with a huge crate occupying the space where we normally eat.

We had intended to then drive directly to Washington DC, and spend the last few days of our holiday in the nation's capital, but we decided that we had enough time to make a final trip into the mountains first. We spent the next day in the small but attractive Catoctin Mountain National Park....

.... followed by a further three days in the larger and stunningly beautiful Shenandoah National Park.

We then proceeded to Washington DC, where we only managed a couple of days of sightseeing in between undertaking the multitude of (largely mundane) tasks necessary for sending two humans, one dog and a truck from America to England.