I’ve always thought of traveling in the US as a gigantic undertaking. I imagined road trips over interminable deserts, on empty, sunbaked interstates that shimmer into the endless distance, across inhospitable mountain ranges, through dusty suspicious towns, and on and on across the continent to the ocean. Romantic, but time consuming. And as Bill Bryson has pointed out, most of the romantic roads have now been replaced with anonymous interstates, where you battle with delivery trucks driving too fast and try not to crash in the chaos of lane switching and under/over taking.
So what I’m really saying is that DC can be the perfect starting point to an East Coast American adventure. Certainly two of our family members found this to be true when they embarked from DC, in a white convertible mustang, on an autumn road-trip through upstate New York, New England and Maine. I was incredibly jealous of their itinerary, which took in the Finger Lakes, the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory, and fall foliage in Maine’s Acadia National Park before ending in Boston, where they got their flight back to the UK.
We do still think about the epic, cross-continental road trip, and might get the chance to do this when a couple of our friends get married later this year in California (and if we have enough holiday…). But in the meantime, there’s still plenty of America on our doorstep to explore.