Wednesday 23 June – We set off on our journey to the US on the Tuesday, and the journey went pretty well.

At New York we had a very short time between flights – only an hour and a quarter. Going through immigration took up much of this time, and we had to pick up our hold baggage to take through customs before checking it in once again for the onward flight to Boston. We wound up having a rush by monorail between terminals. We arrived at terminal C running and sweating, only to find, thankfully, that our onward flight was delayed by half an hour.

Once we arrived at Boston, we got our hired car and drove to the HoJo at Kenmore Square. Our hotel room overlooked Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. I went out for a Macdonalds meal which we all ate in the hotel room, and we settled down early, at about 8.30 pm. We slept well – at least until we were woken up by a fire alarm at 4am. It sounded nothing like a fire alarm, but the sound and sight of a fire engine parking outside our window convinced us. So we tossed on dressing gowns (which Jill had packed in our hand baggage precisely because fire alarms can indeed happen on one’s first night abroad), and walked down the 6 storeys to the hotel car park. As soon as we arrived, we were told it was a false alarm, and climbed the 6 flights back to our room. By now of course, our jetlagged bodies were thoroughly convinced that morning had arrived.

After breakfast at the hotel and an aborted attempt to swim in the hotel’s swimming pool (the lifeguard didn’t turn up to work), we decided to set off straight for Hanover. This is a 2 hour drive north and a little west of Boston, along good roads and through beautiful countryside. After an hour or so we stopped, at Warner, for a very ernjoyable lunch. We followed this by a trip to the local pick your own strawberry farm. We went mad, and in what seemed like 5 minutes, picked about 10 lbs of strawberries (which cost $10). Since then we’ve been eating masses of the things at every opportunity!

Onwards we went to Hanover, and arrived at our rental house at about 2.30. Brenda Johnson (our landlady) was still here – she’s off on a long canoeing and hiking holiday while we’re renting her house. She showed us around – the house is pleasant enough though basic, set in 8 acres of forest, with a nice sized lawn for Tom (and me) to play football in. We’re very near the river. Becky and Katy are sharing a bedroom in bunks, and Tom has his own room with a poster of Ronaldo on the wall. Jill and I have the luxury of an en suite bathroom! Downstairs is open plan and comfortable. It will make a great home for us over the next 2 months.

After settling in we went for a swim at Storr’s Pond, a local recreation area. As well as the pond (in which we had a great time) there is a open air swimming pool there, and tennis courts, play areas etc. This looks as though it will be a facility which we will use quite a lot during the early evenings after hot days. We then went shopping in one of Hanover’s two supermarkets for essential provisions to last us till the weekend and had an early night.

Thursday was my first day in work, though inevitably much of the day was taken up in arranging contractual matters – as ever in America, these were unbelievably bureaucratic, including filling out 5 different forms to do with remuneration and tax. In the afternoon we opened a bank account and returned to Storrs Pond. My first classes were on Friday; I have two classes of intermediate microeconomics, each with around 35 students. Each class meets 3 times per week for 65 minute sessions. The students here are unbelievably bright and keen – the quality of the students is well reflected in the fact that the intake is the third best qualified in any American university.

On Friday evening we went to Danny and Sian Blanchflower’s house for a cookout. The children played with Kathryn and John (aka DJ or Deejay). Kathryn is 13 and DJ is 8. Their middle daughter, Jennie, is currently away at camp. We all had a great time and the hours flew by. Danny has a huge house with a vast garden surrounded by woodland. Very nice, but I don’t envy him when it comes to mowing the lawn! They also have two dogs, four cats, two rabbits and miscellaneous other beasts.

The whole area around here is very beautiful – we are surrounded by forests and mountains. After only a few hours in Hanover, we had seen plenty of squirrels and chipmunks in our garden. On Friday morning, a family of deer (mother and two kids) grazed on our lawn, coming to within about 5 metres of the house.

Week beginning Saturday 26 June

On Saturday, we had a pretty relaxing day, buying in provisions and changing to another rented car. Unfortunately we’ve been unable to get a cheap rented car, so this is another Avis vehicle – but we do have the promise of a much cheaper rental from the middle of next week. We also bought some flowers to plant in the garden, a paddling pool, a gas barbeque and bird feeder. On Sunday, we visited the Kearsarge Indian Museum at Warner where there was a Native American Festival taking place. The museum was interesting, with artefacts from various periods explained by guides. There were plenty of Indian craft activities and games for the children. The kids were enchanted in particular by the idea of dream catchers. We finished the day by another visit to the Pond.

Monday and Tuesday were torrid – extremely hot and humid. Our house does not have air conditioning; neither does my office or the classroom in which I teach. I have now arranged to change classrooms for the rest of the summer. The weather eventually became pleasant again on Wednesday, though it has been changeable since. On Thursday, we picked up a new rental car from Jim Roberts’ auto services in Lebanon. At $500 per month including insurance, this is less than half the price of the main rental services – and the car, unbelievably, is virtually brand new! For a whole day, we were a two car family, as we held onto the Avis car till the Friday. On Thursday evening we had arranged to meet Danny and Sian and family at the Pond, but it got to looking stormy (actually the rain never came and it turned to a beautiful evening) so we went and had a sort of Jacobs Join barbeque at the Blanchflowers’ house. Following that, Danny and I went fly-fishing at a pond owned by one of our colleagues at work. We caught nothing!

Jill and the children have been getting increasingly settled over the week. They met Sian and DJ at Ben and Jerry’s ice cream parlour on Wednesday (which made me extremely envious!). On Thursday morning Jill and the children all visited some neighbours, Carmen and Rick Sorensen, who have children (Scott and Laura) roughly the ages of ours. They are, apparently a very serious and houseproud family (they don’t sound like us!). Rick is an airline pilot, flying the transatlantic routes regularly. The children got on very well together. Becky and Tom had their first visit to Playground on Friday – Playground is a summer activity centre in one of the local primary schools – and they enjoyed it immensely. They will have the chance to go regularly from now through the end of August. They engaged themselves in crafts; Tom had hoped to play football there, but the rain came just as they were about to start. About teatime, when Jill and I went to Lebanon airport to return the Avis car, the children again went to play with DJ. Tom has become such an admirer of DJ that he now wants to be known as Teejay, and he has hacked at his hair so that he has a DJ hairstyle!

Week beginning Saturday 3 July

This being the weekend of the 4 July, the Monday was a public holiday. And since this meant no teaching for me, we took advantage and booked a couple of nights at a HoJo in Portsmouth, on the New Hampshire coast. We drove down on the Saturday and enjoyed about two and a half hours of the afternoon on the beach at Wallis Sands. This is a very pleasant stretch of coastline with a long sandy beach and views out to the Isles of Shoals. Becky and I swam in the sea, while the others played in the sand.

On Sunday we visited Strawbery Banke, a living museum comprised of several houses which had been scheduled for demolition in the 1950s, but which local residents had fought to preserve as a monument to American life over the last few centuries. Some of the houses are genuinely quite old, with one dating back to the 17th century. All the houses were furnished according to a theme provided by a different time period, and we had long conversations with (role players playing the part of) a Victorian widow and an 18th century sea captain. We also took a walk through the centre of Portsmouth, which – while pleasant enough – struck us as a town which had never quite recovered from the loss of the port as its major industry. Later in the day we took another visit to the beach at Wallis Sands; this time, once more, Becky and I took the plunge, but the water was freezing!

In the evening, we took a trip to Kittery, Maine (only a couple of miles away) and ate at Sue’s Seafood. I had lobster, Jill had clams, and the children had less exotic variants of a similar theme. Now, Sue’s Seafood is the genuine American article, one of a kind which is all too rapidly vanishing. It is a place full of character, staffed by women full of character, and peopled by a clientele full of character. Salt of the earth is a term which comes to mind. As for the lobster – it was terrific!

We visited Maine again on Sunday morning, stopping in Kittery to call in the numerous factory outlets, and buying a whole wardrobe of clothes, mainly for the children but also for Jill and myself. Many of the outlets are tied to named brands, such as Lee or Reebok, and the discounts are considerable.

We moved on to York, on the Maine coast, and took a quick look around the historic area which dates from the early 18th centrury and which includes a schoolhouse, tavern and jail. Unfortunately we couldn’t do justice to these, as they were closed for visiting on Mondays. But we proceeded to the Nubble Lighthouse at the northern end of York Beach – just to say that we had seen one of Maine’s famous lighthouses. Then we drove home.

On Tuesday, there was an amazing storm. The humidity had been rising through Monday and the early part of Tuesday itself, and at about 3.30 in the afternoon all hell broke loose. Winds gusted to hurricane force, bringing down numerous trees around the college (fortunately, the area around our house was realtively unaffected by this – though the rain, wind and thunder were spectacular there too). I saw one tree fall opposite my office window; it was broken down as if it were a twig. In just a few minutes, the temperature plunged from the mid-90s to around 70 degrees Farenheit. This spectacular storm subsequently afforded us a nice 10 day spell with perfect weather.

During this week, Becky and Tom have continued to spend their mornings at Playground where they are now very well settled. They do plenty of activities including various arts and crafts, play games outside, and do the occasional educational activity (such as drawing maps of New Hampshire). Katy is getting increasingly envious of the fact that the older children are able to go there on a daily basis, while it is still another 2 weeks before she has her one and only week in the Hanover nursery.

After work on Wednesday, I met up with the rest of the family to have an ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s in Hanover. We then went on a walk near Lyme, some 10 miles north of Hanover. We found the route for this walk in a book called Valley Quests, which is a compilation of walks-cum-treasure-hunts. Following a number of clues, you arrive at the ‘treasure’ which is in the form of a stamp. You then stamp the book, and when you have collected 20 stamps, you get a sew-on badge. We’re unlikely to complete 20 walks during our time here, but it does at least provide an incentive for us to get out and about. In our initial burst of enthusiasm, we followed up our first hike by a second quest, this time around Norwich, Vermont, on Thursday.

Week beginning Saturday 10 July

For the weekend, we booked ourselves into a room at the Littleton Motel in the White Mountains. When we arrived there on Saturday, the motel owner was delighted to learn that we were Brits. He immediately mentioned the fact that Bill Bryson had stayed at the hotel and indeed had written about it in glowing terms in his book ‘The Lost Continent’. By coincidence, this is the book I am currently reading, though I had not at that time reached the relevant part of the book. Since I ‘knew Bill Bryson’, he then gave us a $5 discount on our bill! Funnily enough, since coming here to New Hampshire, we have discovered that Bryson now lives in Hanover, having lived in Settle, Yorkshire, for many years. So we are hoping to get the chance to meet him some day!

Anyway, more about our weekend. Before driving to Littleton, we stopped at Franconia Notch. This is a real jewel of an area within the White Mountains. We had a short walk to see the old man of the mountains (a rock feature) and then took another, longer, walk through the Flume. This is an area of truly exceptional beauty, featuring cascades, waterfalls, and a narrow gorge with cliff faces some 200 feet high. This small area is a drop of sheer perfection, very reminiscent in many ways of the larger scale Yosemite National Park in California. The following day we returned to Franconia Notch for another walk in the woods, seeing the Baisin (another waterfall) and cascades.

Staying overnight in the charming town of Littleton, we dined at the Littleton diner (one of a sadly dying breed), and took a walk around the shopping area. We found a superb bookshop which also had a fine selection of toys and music, and we stopped to take a look inside the Thayers Hotel. We were amazed to find that this is a remarkable historic building, dating back to the early 19th century. Inside were photographs of the early history of the hotel, including an 1869 photograph of Ulysses Grant, as president, visiting the hotel. The owner urged us to go upstairs to the cupola, a tower of glass, from which exquisite views of the surrounding area could be obtained. We came down and immediately booked ourselves another weekend in Littleton!

While we had a fantastic weekend in the White Mountains, this short vacation was marred somewhat by the performance of our rental car. From the time we left Hanover on Saturday, the automatic transmission was behaving erratically. By Sunday afternoon, we could hardly get out of second gear, and we ended up cutting our visit a little short in order to be sure of making it back to Hanover. We called in Lebanon to get some toys for the children, and then I managed to get us most hopelessly lost on the (easy) route back to Hanover. A simple 5 mile journey, surrealistically, turned into a 40 mile expedition, as we detoured via White River Junction (twice!) and (barely credibly) Springfield, Vermont. We were hindered by only having a New Hampshire map with us, and also by having a car which, by now, was randomly alternating between second gear and neutral, and which was refusing to reverse at all! We finally made it home two hours later. The children were amazingly patient with us, and enjoyed the evening playing with their new toys. The next day, I got the rental company to change the car.

On Thursday, in the early evening, we went to the Big Apple Circus, which has located itself round the corner, about 2 miles from our house. This was the childrens’ and Jill’s first ever experience of a circus – and my first for over 30 years. It was immensely entertaining, the acrobats, a tightrope walker, and a monocyclist being particularly outstanding. The animal participants included dogs, budgies, horses and elephants (or, as Katy insisted, mammoths). The show lasted over 2 hours and provided very good value. Ever since, Katy has insisted on calling the Big Top the Big Lid!

Life on most weekdays continues much as usual. Becky and Tom have continued to go to Playground most days, and are enjoying it immensely. Tom has played soccer there, as well as a game called elimination. Both are starting to make new friends and, with their increasing confidence, are obviously well settled by now. Katy is itching to go to something similar, but there is still another couple of weeks before she can go to the Hanover nursery. Jill occupies herself ferrying me to work, the older kids to and from Playground, and looking after Katy during the mornings. While I am at work, the others occasionally go on a Valley Quest, or meet up with Sian in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream parlour or somewhere else – making me envious! On many days we go swimming together after I have finished work – either to Storr’s Pond, or to a place about a mile from the house where we can swim in the Connecticut River. Other times we all go on a Valley Quest.

It is probably time for me to say something more about Hanover. It is a small town which exists purely because of Dartmouth College – the population of the town is about 10000, a third of whom are students. Add to that the staff and faculty of the college and their families, plus the various services that spring around (bookshop, bank, post office, a handful of shops and restaurants) and you soon account for the total population. There is a larger shopping centre in West Lebanon, a few miles away; the demograhic characteristics of Hanover and Lebanon are quite marked. At the centre of Hanover is the green, an open lawned space of about 6 acres, around which are scattered the main college buildings and the Hanover Inn (a plush hotel owned by the college). A little further out are more college buildings, including the fraternities and the sports facilities. Some of these buildings date back as far as the mid 18th century, when the college was founded. The whole town is built on the eastern bank of the beautiful Connecticut River, and affords views up the valley towards the White Mountains. It is extremely pleasant.

Now is a good time also to describe our rented house in greater detail. It is comfortable enough, though by no means luxurious. Upstairs there are three bedrooms and a study. Tom and Becky share, in bunks. Jill and I have an (unfinished) en suite bathroom. Downstairs, almost everything is in one room, with the staircase and fireplace in the centre – this effectively divides the space into living and dining/kitchen areas. There is also a small laundry room anc cloakroom.

Over the last week we have been plagued by mice – so far I have caught six in traps which I have bought at Dan and Whit’s. Ah, yes, Dan and Whit’s. This is a marvellous, marvellous general store located in Norwich, Vermont (a small town just across the river from Hanover – about 5 miles from our house). Walking through the doors of this store is like walking through a time warp. The store has unpolished wooden floors, and gives the general impression of something in a town on the western frontier. It stocks everything. Indeed, it has the motto – ‘if we don’t have it, you don’t need it’, and that is not hype. Its stock ranges from sandwiches, through foodstuffs and fine wines, clothing, craft needs, toys, hardware, garden equipment, birdfood, anything else you could imagine. It is a small scale private operation, and is to shopping what Sue’s Seafood is to eating out. If you wanted to capture the real America in one store (at least the real America that is fast disappearing under the weight of corporate planet earth), then this would be the store to choose. And they sell excellent mouse traps!

Week beginning Saturday 17 July 1999

We decided at an early stage that this would be a weekend to spend in the local area. After 10 days of glorious weather, the humidity started to build up again, so we were keen not to be too active. On Saturday, we spent most of our time at Lake Sunapee, a state park about 40 minutes south of Hanover. There we found a lovely beach where we could play games and swim in the beautifully warm and clear water. This was a memorable day indeed, because Katy learned to swim on her own for the first time. Through our time there, she became remarkably confident in the water, and was clearly delighted to have the opportunity to swim in warm water which was at just the right depth for her. On our way back from Sunapee, we stopped at Hanover to visit the Street Fest, an event which was very reminiscent of the regular French town markets.

On Sunday, we visited the Montshire Museum in Norwich. This is a wonderful hands-on science museum with plenty of activities for the children. Since this local facility is likely to be a useful place for Jill and the children to visit again during our stay here, we bought a season ticket, and found that this entitles us to admission to various other science museums, including Boston and Toronto – and Techniquest in Cardiff! Particularly striking exhibits were an optical illusion where you could wipe the smile off your friend’s face, a bouncing ball which illustrated chaotic dynamics, and an encounter with a boa constrictor. Tom especially enjoyed making large soap bubbles, and Becky excelled herself on an exercise bike, generating enough power to raise the museum’s elevator from the first floor to the second floor. (Jill and I both miserably failed to replicate her feat.)

The weekdays have continued along a familiar pattern. On Tuesday evening, we met up with Danny and his children, plus another family (Bob and Maureen) at Storrs Pond, where we had a barbecue, swam in the lake, and played some games. Sian, Kathryn, Jennie and DJ were going to camp out overnight at the pond (Danny likes his home comforts too much to have joined them).

On Wednesday, I gave my students their first midterm test. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the textbook which I have adopted for the course comes along with some software which allows one to set customised and randomised tests of quantitative questions. Using this, I devised what I thought was a pretty tough test of multiple choice questions covering all aspects of the course so far. These are questions which do not check for knowledge, but for understanding and ability to manipulate quite esoteric pieces of theory. The students excelled – out of 15 questions, almost half the class got at least 13 right. I would guess that the bottom decile of my Dartmouth students would be at about the same level as the top decile of my Lancaster students. Certainly, Dartmouth students are bright (they have the third best intake of any university in the USA at present), but Lancaster students are by no means of poor ability either – the bulk of the difference has to be that the British students we get are just plain lazy. One says that with a considerable measure of anger, a profound sense of shame, and some measure of concern for the future of our country.

Most of my research here has been a continuation of work which I have been doing for the last year. I am investigating the differences between men and women in their responsiveness to wage signals – in particular, how responsive are different groups of people to expected wage differentials between occupations when they are choosing which occupations to enter? There are a lot of statistical problems involved in such research, so it is not easy to arrive at well specified models. The data which I have been working on comes from the International Social Survey Programme, and I am able to work with comparable data for Germany, the UK and the USA. I have at last, this week, succeeded in specifying a model which works well for all three countries – so I am pleased with progress in this respect too.

We have completed three Valley Quests this week, at Fairlee, Quechee and Lebanon. The first of these, in particular, gave us great views down the Connecticut valley towards Mount Ascutney. Our visit to Quechee resulted from the fact that we have finally succeeded in finding accommodation for the last two weeks of our stay at Dartmouth. It has to be said that the housing office at Dartmouth College has been worse than useless throughout in helping us find accommodation. (Having promised to find college accommodation for us over a year ago, it was only through nagging that we discovered, only 6 weeks before coming to America, that they would not be able to honour that pledge. They are clearly more interested in ensuring that their own properties are occupied than in genuinely helping visiting faculty. Shame on them. And, while we have been here searching for accommodation for our last two weeks, the best they could do was suggest we try staying at the Hanover Inn, a $250 per night hotel owned by – guess who? End of rant.) The house in Quechee is a 2 bedroom holiday cottage – indeed Quechee seems to be full of holiday cottages. It is an exceptionally pretty village in Vermont, about 15 miles from Hanover. There is a lake where we will be able to swim and a play area, both near the house.

Towards the end of the week, the weather turned stormy. On Thursday evening there was a prolonged thunderstorm which resulted in a power cut which lasted from mid-evening to past our bedtime. Fortunately, Jill had spotted some candles in the house, and after each use of the barbecue I had been uncharacteristically systematic in replacing the matches in a known location! So we wound up reading by candlelight, an experience which I have not had since doing school homework during the power cuts imposed as a result of the 3-day week of the early 1970s.

The road on which our house is located is, in some respects, residential. There are houses every so often, but each is packaged with a considerable amount of land. One consequence of this is that there is a 30mph speed limit along the road, but, since the aspect is so rural, it is one to which it is very difficult to adhere. While driving me into work one day this week, Jill was doing a stately 40, when she turned a corner to see the blue flashing lights of a police car. Fortunately, the kind policeman was merely giving a warning – very fortunately, since from what we can gather the underworked police of New Hampshire have little else to do with their time than book drivers who are speeding by as little as 3 miles per hour.

This was the first of two brushes which Jill had with the law this week. On Friday afternoon she found a purse on the sidewalk in Hanover town centre. She took it into a nearby store, where they called the police, but suggested that Jill should stay to provide the cops with full details. The police arrived very quickly (since they had nothing better to do) and undertook to nip round to the home of the owner of the purse to return it. Small town America is so different from the image portrayed by what we know of the large cities!

Week beginning Saturday 24 July

Having booked a night at the Thayers Inn in Littleton, we were disappointed to wake to find that the rain was sheeting down. A quick look at the internet to check the weather forecast confirmed that we could expect heavy rain and thunderstorms throughout the weekend. Nevertheless, undaunted and with spirits high, we set off for upstate New Hampshire, and dropped our luggage at the hotel at about midday.

We then spent much of the rest of the day in the car, sheltering from the rain. We drove first to Bretton Woods to see the Mount Washington Hotel, site of the famous conference in 1944 which fixed exchange rates and set up the World Bank. What was once just one of many grand hotels in the White Mountains now remains as the only one of its kind, but it still looks extremely imposing. We had thought of having afternoon tea there (in pictures, it looks that kind of a place), but a quick glance at the real thing persuded us that the place was far too posh for the likes of us!

We proceeded to Crawford Notch where we had a lovely 1½ mile there and back walk to Ripley Falls, a spectacular cascade some 200 feet high. This walk came with a penalty – soon after leaving the car, the heavens opened. There were no raindrops – the rain fell in sheets. Within seconds we were drenched to the skin. The luxury which this afforded us was that it subsequently mattered not a jot if we walked through puddles, streams, or rivers. Despite getting back to the car in a partially dissolved state, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves (at least the middle-aged parents did – the more fastidious kids were very disapproving). Once we arrived back at the car, Jill’s talents were stretched to the limits to find us all some sort of dry clothing – but of course, she succeeded.

It did not take us long to decide to spend the rest of the day under cover. I had read that the road just south of Errol, towards Berlin, was a good place to see moose. So we drove there. This was quite a lengthy journey, but we were well rewarded with the splendid sight of a female moose wading is a pond by the side of the road. This was the first time Jill and I had seen moose since we went rafting down the Snake River in Wyoming in 1989; for the children, it was of course their first moose, and they were all thrilled to bits!

After driving back to our base for the night and drying off, we ate another excellent mealat the Littleton Diner. We then spent the rest of the evening watching baseball on our TV in the hotel room (the Phillies beat the Braves 4-3) - it's a change to be able to watch TV since the house in Hanover gets only 2 very uninspiring channels, and those with extremely snowy reception. The Thayers Hotel more than lived up to expectations. We had one room for Jill and myself and a separate, adjoining room for the kids, the two rooms separated by a shared bathroom. The rooms were extremely comfortable; as befits an old building, the floors sloped in all sorts of eccentric directions, and the whole placed oozed charm. Most atypically for an American hotel, a continental breakfast was served in the morning. All in all, this is one of our all time favourite hotels, ranking with the Parisiana in Paris as candidate for the very best.

On Sunday, we dodged the thunderstorms rather more successfully (though there were plenty to dodge). In the morning we returned to Franconia Notch. I climbed up to Artist’s Bluff and Bald Mountain while Jill and the children went to the beach at Echo Lake. The views from Bald Mountain were sensational. Unfortunately though, I did not catch sight of any bears which apparently frequent the ski slopes on Cannon Mountain. Mine was a short walk, so I was able to join the others for a swim before we headed off to find some lunch. By lunchtime the rain had settled in, so we returned to Hanover in the early afternoon.

We have discovered some nice sources of local supplies, including a maple syrup farm and a farm shop, both in Orford, just a few miles up the valley from us. The latter stocks the most unbelievably delicious corn on the cob and truly awesome blueberries. These are now regular stops for us whenever we head north.

During the week we completed some more Valley Quests, at Enfield (an early centre of the Shaker sect in New Hampshire) and at Orford. At the latter location we found Indian Pond, a wonderful lake in which we could swim. It is rather remote, located several miles down a dirt track, and is surrounded by hills and forests. We also went swimming, during the course of this week, in the river near our house and at Storrs Pond.

This week was keenly awaited especially by Katy. She has had to watch her older siblings go almost daily to Playground, the day camp located at Rays School which they have enjoyed tremendously. Each day, Katy has endured the wonderful tales of activities which Tom and Becky have enjoyed while she – the most gregarious of the three – has been unable to participate in anything of the ilk thus far. Well, her time of waiting is over – we booked her in for a week at the Hanover Nursery, and this spell started on Monday. We had only booked a week partly because we were not sure how much she would enjoy it, and partly because we were not sure how well her attendance there would fit in with our other commitments. As it turned out, she loved every minute, and once she got home would not stop talking about her wonderful nursery. It has really been the week that Katy has settled over here. By the end of the week, her delight at her new daytime surroudings was so clear that we asked if there were any vacancies for next week – we thought this would be unlikely because when we booked Katy’s place way back in early June, there were few spaces left. And so we were not surprised to be told that there were indeed no vacancies for next week – but we were thrilled to be told that she was such a good girl that they would take her for the extra week anyway! Unfortunately, while Playground only costs $75 per child for the whole summer, Nursery costs $75 per week – but this seems to us to be money well spent.

Becky and Tom continue to enjoy Playground. Becky is now making her own friends, something which she has found quite difficult in the foreign environment, and we are sure that this will add much to her self-confidence. Tom, through playing a lot of team sports, has found making friends at Playground relatively easy.

Jill has enjoyed the time which she has had to herself this week, and has explored the shops in Hanover and the Baker Library of Dartmouth College. She has also recently discovered the Howe Library – this is the local public library which has, amongst much else, an excellent childrens’ section. As well as books, the children have been able to borrow videos from the library, and this has been a nice bonus for them since Brenda’s house is not connected to cable TV and receives only a poor television signal. (Fortunately, she nevertheless has a VCR.) We also discovered a video rental shop in town this week, and were able to borrow Mulan for only $1.50. Not only that, but it came with a free rental of a second video, so Jill and I enjoyed an evening of Agatha Christie!

Week beginning Saturday 31 July

On Saturday and Sunday we visited Burlington VT. Saturday was one of those, thankfully rare, hazy hot and humid days, with temperatures soaring into the mid 90s and humidity bringing the visibility down to 5 miles. We set off quite early (enjoying the air conditioning in the car!), and had a break after an hour or so at Waterbury. This is famous for being the home of the main factory producing Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, so we stopped off for a tour of the factory. This was very interesting, especially the free samples which were handed out at the end!

One of the main reasons for visiting Burlington was the nearby Shelburne Museum. This is partly a folk museum, with old houses, shops, school, smithy and the like, which have relocated from around Vermont to the park in which the museum is located. But it combines this with much more – it has an art gallery with a superb collection of impressionist art (5 paintings by Monet, 3 by Manet, several by Degas, a Cassat etc.), and also serves as home to an old paddle steamer and locomotive. The whole ‘village’ is located in a beautiful setting overlooking Lake Champlain, with a fabulous outlook towards the Adirondacks of upstate New York. We spent a couple of hours in the museum on Saturday, and a further 3½ hours there on Sunday. We left with an extremely favourable impression – folk museums are really a dime a dozen in the States, but this one really is something quite special.

On both Saturday and Sunday, we found spots along the shoreline of Lake Champlain where we could take a swim (Kingsland Bay on Saturday, and North Beach in Burlington itself on Sunday). The water was beautifully warm and clean, and North Beach in particular offered fantastic views both of the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. On Saturday evening, we ate at the Ice House restaurant in Burlington (Jill and I had crab sandwiches, and I had the house speciality of hot cheesecake for dessert). We also had a special meal out on the Sunday, when we broke our journey back to Hanover at the state capital of Vermont, Montpelier – we ate at the Main Street Grill, which is operated by the students of the local catering college; they served up a superb meal, and we left persuaded that their enterprise fully deserved the 3* rating which they received from the AAA. We returned to New Hampshire having had a truly memorable weekend in Vermont.

At the beginning of this week there was a labour economics conference at work, with (amongst others) Steve Nickell and Andrew Oswald visiting from the UK. The conference produced some interesting papers, not least one by two young economists from MIT and Princeton (Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand). On the Monday evening, Danny held a barbecue at his house for all the conference participants, members of the department at Dartmouth, and their families. This was a pot luck affair, and Jill was asked to produce a macaroni salad. This request had us scurrying to the internet to look for recipes! But she coped wonderfully (as always) and made a great salad. The evening was very pleasant, and gave Jill the chance to meet many members of the department for the first time.

On Tuesday, I had a bad day with keys. First of all I managed to lose my office key. Fortunately Julie (one of the administrative people in the department) had a replacement. But worse, I managed to lock the car key in the car! I had just dropped Becky and Tom at Playground, and Jill and Katy at Nursery. Jill suggested that I should go straight to work, leaving the keys in the car and the car door unlocked so that she could walk into town and pick the car up later. (Notice that you can do things like leave keys in an unlocked car around here, without any danger of the car being stolen.) Now I got the first part right, but my reflexes got the better of me as I opened the car door, pressed the lock and shut the door behind me – it must have taken all of a half second for me to realise my mistake! As soon as I got into work, I phoned Jim Roberts (from whom we had rented the car) and he kindly drove out to open the door. He was almost – but not quite - quick enough in doing this for me to get away with the whole escapade without Jill noticing!

The evenings of the remainder of the week were spent in a fairly relaxed manner – we visited Storrs Pond a couple of times. The rate of evaporation of the pond has been quite dramatic of late, and the water level is now much lower than when we first arrived. We saw a huge turtle, about two feet long, in the water on one day – these can apparently bite, so we stayed well away!

Katy has continued to enjoy nursery. This week the theme was puppets and plays, and she very much enjoyed participating the the drama activities. We heard that she played a starring role – especially with one line, recited in a strong American accent: ‘Ah just cairn’t git mah turrrdle to move!’ Katy’s confidence, already sky high, has become quite stratospheric as she has fitted in so well and made friends so easily in her new environment. Yet she is the one of the three who still claims to be missing Brookhouse.

Week beginning Saturday 7 August (well, Friday 6 August really)

We had a wonderful weekend away in Canada this weekend. Travelling up to the Montreal area on the Friday afternoon, we had booked two nights at the Days Inn in Brossard, just 3 miles away from Montreal’s downtown. While stuck in traffic about 2 miles away from the hotel, we saw a beaver at the side of the road. This was to be the first of two beaver sightings over the course of the weekend – the second was on the lawn of the hotel just as we left!

On Saturday, we started a packed day by visiting the Basilica of Notre Dame in the old area of Montreal. This was apparently modelled on its Paris namesake, but really is quite different. The inside is spectacular, with a wall behind the altar subtly illuminated in blue and heavily decorated in gold. Later, we visited the Marche Bonsecours and the Chapel of Notre Dame de Bonsecours, which dates back to 1657. By then we had walked virtually down to the waterfront – despite being 1000 miles from the sea, Montreal is a major port, located as it is on the St. Lawrence river. By the time it has reached Montreal, the St. Lawrence is already very wide indeed. As is the case in many other cities, the waterfront area has been developed in Montreal and is now a bustling area with restaurants and other attractions. We climbed the clock tower which afforded spectacular views over the city, and then hired a couple of pedalos to go boating on a little stretch of water hived off from the river. Later we returned to the cathedral and took the ultimate naff tourist ride – in a horse drawn carriage – around old Montreal.

Informed by our guide on the horse ride, we decided to spend much of the rest of the afternoon in the new museum at the Pointe de Callière. This is a wonderful museum where the history of Montreal and the methods of archaeology are brought together and brought to life in a most impressive manner. We began with a 20 minute audio-visual presentation which itself was well worth several times the price of admission. We were then taken on a guided tour of the site of a recent archeological dig which was located underneath the museum building and the adjacent road. The guide was absolutely superb. She had clearly taken part in the archeological work herself, and had an intimate understanding of the methods used. She showed us windows of buildings which had been pulled down a couple of hundred years ago, and even part of the fortified wall which had once surrounded the city. In all we must have spent about 2½ hours in this museum and we all enjoyed every minute (except Katy – who fell asleep!).

We later drove up Mount Royal and took a little walk around the top of the mountain. Although the elevation is modest (Montreal is, after all built on an island), the views from Mount Royal are spectacular. We could see to the Adirondacks, Green Mountains and White Mountains – and, much closer, the main landmarks of this fine city.

In contrast to Saturday, the weather on Sunday was dismal. Yet we found that Montreal has as much to offer in the rain as it does in the sunshine. In the morning we drove over to the Olympic Park, where we visited the Biodome. This is a large building in which four natural environments are recreated – a rainforest, a Laurentian forest, a maritime scene and an arctic scene. In each environment, the temperature and other climatic conditions are artificially reconstructed, and a variety of the plant and animal life typical of the environment is allowed to flourish. Hence, for example, in the rainforest area (which is huge) birds and monkeys roam free, while crocodiles (thankfully) roam slightly less free. We walked right through these four environments – it was terrific!

We had lunch at the Biodome’s café, and then discovered that, right next door in the Olympic Stadium, the Montreal Expos were about to start a baseball game against the San Diego Padres. So we walked over to the ticket office and bought ourselves tickets (only $7 for Jill and me and $5 for the kids!). We then had a whale of a time for most of the afternoon. (Jill and I have, for years, been keen baseball fans). Since we had a long journey back to Hanover, we had to leave before the end (at the seventh inning stretch); so while we missed seeing the winning runs scored by the Expos (both homers as we later discovered), we did see the game up to the point where it was neatly poised at 2-2. It was great to see another major league baseball fixture – it must be nearly 10 years since we last watched the Phillies.

All in all, we had a terrific weekend. Despite having filled every minute of our time in Montreal, we left being well aware that we have barely scratched the surface. There is, we understand, a splendind botanical garden and an insectarium in the Olympic Park, and the modern centre of the town has several underground shopping malls (based on an idea attributed to Leonardo de Vinci). Moreover there are several fine museums which we simply did not have time to visit. All this we shall have to leave to another time. We left the city well satisfied with our brief stay there.

Jill and I had, of course, visited Montreal before – in 1987. Our visit then had been even more brief than our most recent stay, and we remembered pitifully little. Yet we both felt this time that the French culture was stronger. This gives the city much of its European flavour and makes it distinctive from other large North American cities. Hopefully it is something which can be preserved.

On the way back we took the interstate down to New York state, and then took the Lake Chaplain ferry over to Grand Isle in Vermont. This short ferry trip, and the pleasant ride through Burlington and back to Hanover, made the perfect end to a perfect weekend.

Having left Montral in the late afternoon, we had warned the children that it would be pitch black by the time we got back home. They obviously took this on board. About 15 miles shy of Hanover, Katy looked out of the car window and exclaimed: ‘Oh my gosh it’s the middle of the night. It’s dark peach outside!!!’

The week which followed was fairly uneventful. We did a few Valley Quests, notably in the area around Cornish NH and Windsor VT, where the longest covered bridge in the Western Hempisphere spans the Connecticut river. Windsor is notable as the birthplace of Vermont as an independent country; the sparsely populated state did not join the union at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but remained independent for about 14 years.

On Friday I gave my students their second midterm test. They excelled, with just under half of them getting every single question right, on what I had thought was a pretty searching test. I shall clearly have to dream up something pretty vicious for the final!

On the same day, Becky and Tom went to Playground for the last time – it will not be open for the rest of the summer, and of course we are moving away from Hanover shortly in any event. Both of the older children have enjoyed this faciltiy enormously, and it has given them ample opportunity to develop their own interests and to meet with American children of their own age. We rarely go to Storrs Pond nowadays without the children striking up conversations with other children who they have met at Playground. What a wonderful facility it is!

Week beginning Saturday 17 August

We did not go away this weekend, but spent some time around the Hanover area. We were now nearing the end of our rental period in the house at River Road, and would need the weekend to sort things out. Jill, as ever, did a great job of the packing, while I ferried suitcases to my office – which we used as a staging post (as we had to vacate River Road a few hours before being admitted to our new accommodation). Over the weekend, we did some more Valley Quests, including one at Lebanon – a town about 5 miles from Hanover which we had not previously visited. We also visited Storrs Pond, though by now we are spending more time in the swimming pool there than in the pond itself, owing to the evaporation of the water in the latter.

Our move to Quechee VT took place on Tuesday. Jill completed the packing and tidying up, while I (having taken most of the day off work) ensured that three little people did not follow her undoing all of her good work! Since it proved impossible to fit everything into our little rented car, I took some more stuff into my office in the morning, and later in the afternoon – once we had installed ourselves in our new home - retrieved it.

Quechee is about 15 miles out of Hanover, and is very obviously a vacation village. There are numerous clusters of condominiums on one side of the Ottauquechee river, while the much smaller, and older, village of Quechee itself occupies the opposite bank. We are in one of the condos. While this means that we are paying expensive, holiday-makers’ rates for the accommodation, it is without a doubt extremely comfortable, and makes a nice change after the spartan accommodation in River Road. The house is carpeted throughout, has a large living room and two bedrooms. We share a back garden with other condos, and have all the facilities we could wish for. In contrast to River Road, the television works properly and offers a reasonable selection of channels! Particularly pleasant is the fact that our house is located just 5 minutes walk from Lake Pinneo, where there is a lovely sandy beach and play area. It is also possible to rent canoes and pedalos there. We went to this beach before our evening meal and had a long swim. This will clearly be a frequent destination for us over the coming fortnight – especially for Jill and the children now that Playground has finished and they will not have the use of the car.

One evening this week, on my way back to the car park from my office, I noticed that a building known as Webster Cottage was open for viewing. I entered, as this had always struck me as an interesting building. It dates from 1780, and was the home, during his student years at Dartmouth, of one Daniel Webster. Webster was a student here excactly 200 years ago, and has become something of a folk hero to subsequent generations of students. The house contained a number of Webster’s possessions, including a desk and other furniture. He served as secretary of state to no less than three presidents of the United States. But he is held in veneration by people in this area for something much more interesting than that.

Dartmouth College was the last institution of higher education to be given its charter by George III – and the last to be given its charter during the period of colonial rule. In the early part of the 19th century, the state of New Hampshire attempted to declare this charter null and void, and in its place argued that the college should be a state institution and called Dartmouth University. Effectively this meant nationalisation and forced acquisition of the college assets by the state. Daniel Webster successfully defended the college against this in a court of law. So Dartmouth remains a private institution – and despite providing an eclectic range of subjects and being an Ivy League institution (one of the best institutions of higher education in the world) it remains a ‘college’, not a ‘university’ in title. No doubt much of Dartmouth’s subsequent success is due to Webster’s successful defence of the institution.

Another museum which I have visited on a couple of occasions during my lunch hour is the Hood Museum – this is Dartmouth’s art museum, and it includes fine works by Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, and Vuillard as well as some exceptional pieces of old Native American pottery.

On Thursday evening we did a couple of Valley Quests in Woodstock, a village some 4 miles west of Quechee. In so doing we completed our 20th quest, a feat which allowed us to claim a certificate and a sew-on patch for each of the children. Woodstock is a delightful village, rated by National Geographic as one of the five prettiest villages in the country. It comprises a lively shopping area, clearly aimed as much at the tourist as the resident, and numerous large and exquisitely designed houses, all nestling amongst trees and plentiful areas of parkland. The Ottauquechee river flows through the town, which nestles amongst forested hills. A more lovely place to live would be difficult to imagine. When our numbers come up on the lottery, it’s by moving to Woodstock that we shall change our lifestyles!

I gave my last classes on Friday. There is another week before the students take their final exam, but they will spend this time revising, and I have arranged office hours for them to come and consult with me next week. It has been a privilege to work with such able and diligent people.

Also on Friday, I heard the news from Lancaster that I have been promoted to the post of reader in economics. This was underwhelming news, not least because this is a very British promotion – which involves no pay rise whatsoever!

Week beginning Saturday 21 August

Our weekend began with a visit to Billings Farm Museum in Woodstock. This turned out to be a really historic place. The farm was first owned by George Marsh in the early part of the 19th century, then later sold on to Frederick Billings. Marsh was an early environmentalist, who – having, while a diplomat in Turkey, witnessed the harm that can be done to land by overexploitation of natural resources – wrote a seminal treatise on the subject. He was influential in inspiring the reforestation of Vermont. (The state is now 80% forest, but this proportion had in the early 19th century fallen as low as 25% owing to a deforestation programme of holocaust proportions.) Billings was a lawyer and industrialist who, having grown up in Woodstock, migrated to California during the Gold Rush years. He later invested heavily in the transcontinental railroad, an enterprise which he saved from bankruptcy. This gave him the opportunity also to invest in enterprises scattered in towns built alongside the railroad, and in his honour the town of Billings, Montana was named. After his death in 1890, the farm passed through two further generations of his family. His granddaugher married Lawrance Rockefeller (brother of Nelson), who embraced the ideals of environmentalism with which his predecessors at the farm had been associated. He passed the running of the farm over to the federal government only 8 years ago, in the hope that it may stand as a symbol of environmental responsibility.

In addition to providing us with this history lesson, our time at the farm allowed us to learn about many aspects of modern and historic farm life in Vermont. Moreover, we were fortunate to have timed our visit to coincide with an exhibition of contemporary quilting. We saw a demonstration of quilting techniques, the children listened to (and participated in) a quilting story, and we very much enjoyed browsing the many fine quilts on display.

Later in the day, we visited Quechee Gorge, a spectacular 165 foot deep gorge near the village, carved out by the Ottauquechee River. We walked down to the gorge bottom (and back up!) – and managed to collect yet another stamp for the Valley Quests book.

Having finished my teaching, I felt able to take a little time off work this week. With a fine weather forecast, we travelled up to Mount Washington on Tuesday. This is the highest of the White Mountains, and is indeed the highest mountain in the north east states, at 6**** feet. We drove up the historic auto route, which opened to carriages in 1861 and along which an automobile first climbed to the summit exactly 100 years ago this month. The route up the mountain is a spectacular toll road, partly unpaved and in places quite exposed, and as such it made for a thrilling drive. The views from the summit of the mountain were truly sensational. While it was a little hazy, we could nonetheless see 90 miles to Portland ME and the Atlantic coast. In the opposite direction, we could see over to the Green Mountains of Vermont. On a clear day, the higher mountains of the Adirondacks, including Whiteface Mountain, are visible, though we could not be sure of exactly what we were seeing in the haze. Closer to us, the views over the Presidential Range and the remaining White Mountains were wonderful, with layer after layer of fells spread before us as far as the eye could see. With such a vast area of relatively unpopulated mountain wilderness, this is surely one of the most magnificent sights one can behold.

On the way to Mount Washington, we once more stopped at Littleton, where we called in the village book store. We had shopped here before; for a small town shop it has an amazing stock of books and also CDs and toys. In short, it is a browser’s paradise. Jill and the children have become besotted by Beanie Babies while we have been in America, and inevitably a couple more of the little creatures were added to various people’s collections on this visit to the bookstore!

On our way back from Mount Washington, we once more went to the beach at Echo Lake in Franconia Notch, and had a lovely time swimming in the lake. We looked out for bears which apparently frequent the ski slopes on nearby Cannon Mountain during the late afternoon, but failed to see any.

Some time ago, one of my students (Kristin Verdiani) had told me that she was taking part, as a member of the chorous, in Opera North’s production of the Magic Flute. I subsequently discovered that a youth matinee of this opera was being performed, at the Lebanon Opera House, on Wednesday afternoon. The main parts were to be played by understudies, all of whom are young professionals who spend a few weeks of the year with this local opera company. (For the remaining performances, guests from New York City Opera and other major companies sing the leading roles; the company has a policy of running an extensive young artists’ programme where the understudies gain from working with more established professionals.) Tickets for the youth matinee sold for just $5 each, so we all went along and had a tremendous afternoon’s entertainment. The production was superb – indeed it was surely the best of the 4 productions of the Magic Flute I have seen. Particularly impressive were Colleen McGrath (Queen of the Night), Saundra DeAthos (Pamina), and Kevin Kees (Papageno). In addition to witnessing a first rate performance, we felt we had excellent value for money, because the programmes were free, we were given free refreshments at the intermission, and the children were given free Mozart badges as we left. In addition the singers all came to the foyer as we left the theatre to sign autographs and chat with the children. We left with the feeling that this is a really worthwhile opera company which deserves every support.

On Thursday evening we had the Blanchflowers over for a meal – barbequed burgers and salads. We had left it this late in our stay before inviting them because our house at River Road wasn’t really comfortable enough for us to feel like having guests there, and because Sian and the children have spent the last 2 weeks on holiday in the UK. Probably as a result of this, Kathryn fell asleep on our settee, but despite that a good time was had by all!

Week beginning Saturday 29 August – or strictly speaking, the previous day

We set out on Friday afternoon for a weekend in Boston. On the way, we stopped near the border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts to visit America’s Stonehenge – a mysterious set of prehistoric remains which include numerous dolmens and a circle of large standing stones which are so aligned as to chart out the apparent location of sunrise and sunset at various key points in the year (midsummer, midwinter, the equinoxes etc.). This is fascinating, not least because of the parallels with similar European sites, a similarity which begs serious questions of most theories of when Europeans first settled the Americas. Numerous carvings in the stones also bring to mind similar work in European sites of the same ilk; these included a most impressive carving of a running deer.

Accommodation in Boston is typically very expensive. Indeed we had failed to find any of the chains or AAA recommended hotels offering us a room for under $200 per night. We therefore did a little web surfing, and found a place called the Farrington Inn which offered accommodation for us all at only $90 per night; the drawback was the we had to share a bathroom. We found the place easily, and quickly established that this was really a backpackers’ hotel. While the accommodation was fairly basic and they could certainly put the vacuum cleaner to better use, it turned out to suit us well. We had a couple of adjoining rooms – one with a phone, fridge, microwave and bed-settee; the other (the main bedroom) with TV. The Farrington also provided a free breakfast and parking, and was located within 5 minutes’ walk of several eateries and the main tram/subway (the T) line into central Boston.

We took the T into the city centre on Saturday morning, and arrived at Boston Common. After a quick paddle in the frog pond, we wandered over to see the famous Bull & Finch pub (inspiration for the Cheers TV series) and then strolled through the public gardens. These are very attractive, and along with the common, give Boston a superb area of parkland in the centre of the city. The public gardens were the inspiration for the children’s book, ‘Make way for ducklings’ by Robert McCloskey, and a sculputre of a mother duck and her 8 ducklings has been placed in the park in honour of this.

Our leisurely walk then took us to the harbour, and the site of the Boston Tea Party Museum. I had visited this in 1984, but this time found the experience much improved. The museum is located on a boat which dates back to the same period as the Tea Party boats, and the story of the events of 16 December 1773 is brought to life by a comic dramatisation of the town meeting (which really took place in the Old South Church - which we were to visit on Sunday) and by actually throwing tea chests into the harbour. This was, for the children in particular, a very vivid way of getting the story across, and I’m sure we all remembered much more of the story then otherwise we would have done as a result of the lively presentation. For the rest of the weekend, the kids would burst into the chant ‘Dump the tea into the sea’, much to the bemusement of various passers-by!

We then walked to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market and (rather perversely in a place where there is so much good food all around us) ate lunch at McDonalds. From there, we walked a little way along the Freedom Trail (a path of red bricks which links together the main historical sights of central Boston). Alongside this trail, we saw the house of Paul Revere, famous for having warned American Revolutionaries that the British were coming. We also visited the Old North Church, which predates the Revolution, and which played a key part in the run-up to the War of Independence as lanterns were hung from the steeple as a warning that the British were about to advance.

Then came the highlight of the day – we took the T out to Fenway Park (which is about half way between the city centre and our hotel) and managed to get tickets for the baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the Anaheim Angels. This was a much more lively affair than the game we had been to in Montreal; the Boston fans are real fans, and the game was a sell-out (our tickets were late returns, so we were very luck to get in). The atmosphere was unbelievable – as indeed was the game itself. The Sox took an early lead, but went 4-1 down at the top of the 3rd inning. They recovered to lead by 6-4 until the 8th, when the Angels pulled even. At the bottom of the 8th, the Sox scored the winning run. To say that this was an exciting game would be a real understatement, and we left thrilled by the experience. (Well, Tom, Jill and I did anyway – Becky enjoyed it too, but didn’t really understand what was going on; Katy was seriously underwhelmed by the whole affair!)

On Sunday morning we drove in and parked alongside the public gardens, then walked through the common to take the T to the Childrens’ Museum. We then spent about 3 hours in this magical museum which is crammed full of exhibits of many kinds. These include scientific experiments similar to those at the Montshire, but also much simpler things such as a shop, a set of tools (playing with a spanner and some nuts and bolts gave Becky much pleasure for ages), and a room where the children could spend time weaving. One of the more surprising (and more surprisingly enjoyable) exhibits was a Japanese house - this house, which also featured a shop front, once stood on the main street of Kyoto, but was donated and relocated to the museum about 25 years ago. The museum also featured a fine indoor play area.

We walked back to Quincy Market for a lunch of bagels, and then walked a little more of the Freedom Trail until we found ourselves back at the car. By this time, it was about 4.30pm, and so we set off back to Quechee, stopping for an excellent evening meal at the North End Pub in New London.

My students’ final exam tool place on Monday, and finished at 6pm. I spent the rest of the evening at home grading scripts, and was able to complete the task of averaging marks and submitting them to the college on Tuesday morning. On the afternoon of the same day, we had arranged to change rental cars – the Neon which we had rented for 2 months from Jim Roberts would be too small for us as we lugged all our luggage around the northeast states with us, and in any event we need now to go with a major rental firm as we shall want to drop the car off in a couple of weeks’ time at Logan airport in Boston. The changeover went smoothly, and we then drove in our Plymouth Sable to meet Sian and Danny on the boat dock in Hanover, just off Lyme Road. Danny had long promised us a ride on his boat, and on our last evening in New Hampshire our treat finally awaited us!

Danny took us all upriver for about a mile, past the house in which we had lived at River Road. We then all jumped in the river for a swim. (At Danny’s insistence we were all wearing lifejackets, so Katy was able to join us in the water without any problem.) His boat is a 7-seater speed boat, and the ride was great fun. But more fun was to follow. We returned to the dock and dropped Jill and Katy off, and picked up Kathryn. We then went a little way downriver, and in turn Kathryn, Jenny, Becky and I had a turn in the ‘chariot’, a rubber trailer which gets towed behind the boat at great speed – through the wake of the boat and making sharp turns. Becky went on the chariot alongside Kathryn, and throughout wore an expression of blissful terror! Afterwards she described it as really good – the best thing she’s ever done. It was certainly an exciting ride, and quite difficult to stay on the chariot. Indeed Becky was thrown into the water twice, and I was similarly dumped three times!

More fun was provided a little later, when Tom (who had opted out of the chariot ride) decided to stand on the edge of the boat (which was stationary at the time) and relieve himself over the side. Danny – ever mindful of the prudish American mind set and the absurd laws which go along with it – told him he couldn’t do that, and that he had to jump into the river to wee. Tom replied to the effect that he couldn’t because he had already started, whereupon Danny gave him a hefty shove in the back! Tom landed in the water and surfaced to find everyone else laughing their heads off. He immediately joined in, and Danny has been his greatest hero ever since!

Our holiday began on Wednesday, the 1st of September. We drove from Quechee to Queensbury NY, just outside Lake George. Along the way we stopped at Fort Ticonderoga, on the southern tip of Lake Champlain. This 18th century fort was first constructed by the French, and later taken over by the British. The importance of the British victories over the French at this time are, of course, quite profound, not least because it could quite easily have been French rather than English which became the universal language of today. Later still, it was captured by Ethan Allan and the Green Mountain Boys (essentially a group of brigands whose motives were unclear; they were Vermonters and so did not join the Union immediately upon the Decleration of Independence) – this was the first battle to be won by Americans in the War of Independence. Finally the fort was recaptured by the British before being abandoned in the aftermath of the war. The story was recounted to us by an Abenaki Indian named Red Hawk , in the oral tradition of the Native Americans. On our visit we also saw a group playing pipe and drum music from the Colonial time, and a demonstration of musket and canon firing. The fort, which has been partially reconstructed after falling into ruin, also houses an excellent museum. The views over Lake Champlain, the Adirondacks, and the Green Mountains are stunning.

Wednesday night we stayed at the Days Inn in Queensbury – a nice hotel with an indoor swimming pool and a very good adjoining restaurant. We made good use of both in the evening.

After breakfast at a local diner, we set off on our journey through the Adirondacks on Thursday morning. We took a long route around to Utica along route 28, and stopped at Blue Mountain Lake to spend a wonderful hour rowing on the lake. Blue Mountain, at over 3700 feet, is one of the higher peaks in the Adirondacks, and the lake which is situated at its base is truly a beauty, surrounded as it is by fells and woodland. The lake has many inlets and islands, and our little voyage involved (me in) rowing around a little rocky island about a mile away from the boat rental station. We felt we got excellent value for the $8 rental on the boat!

By the time we finished, the sun was getting quite hot, so we rove on a few more miles to Lake Raquette, where we found a sandy beach. We stayed there for a couple of hours, paddling and swimming and generally having a lazy time. The Adirondacks region is remarkably unspoilt. The fells are more modest than those of the White Mountains, and their tops are more rounded and forested. There are countless lakes and ponds. On a beautiful, clear, sunny day like today, the whole area is exceptionally beautiful. (Actually the weather which we have had for most of our stay in the States has been similar – fine days with temperatures peaking anywhere from 70 to 85 degrees – with only a handful of rainy days and another handful of hot and humid days. This makes for quite a contrast with the persistently hazy, hot and humid summer days with which we became accustomed on our earlier travels in Eastern Pennsylvania.)

At Utica, we stayed at a very attractive and clean motel, the Country Motel – one of the old style motels where you park your car right outside your bedroom door, and terrific value at $55. We ate at Mr McGill’s, a restaurant-come-pub about a half mile away from the motel; this restaurant boasted the most generous portions in upstate New York, and after eating a huge lasagne (me) and an ocean’s worth of scallops (Jill) we would not disagree!

While Jill has driven a lot around Hanover on this stay, the vacation and weekend driving is all down to me; Jill meanwhile navigates, not a task which comes naturally to her, but one which (so far, at least) she is executing with immense panache and accuracy. One of my jobs is to write this diary, and this is a job which I jealously guard for myself, though there are infrequent occasions (such as earlier in this paragraph) when Jill has some input!

On Friday we travelled on to Niagara Falls and at lunchtime checked in at the HoJo which is just 2 blocks away from the falls themselves. In the afternoon we walked over Rainbow Bridge over to the Canadian side and got fantastic views of the falls. We took a ride on the Maid of the Mist, which took us right into the cauldron of water at the base of the Horseshoe Falls; this really is a truly awesome experience, with spray flying all around, and the falls themselves towering above in an arc of about 220 degrees. The noise of the water, its sheer force, the amazing height of the falls, and the constantly changing view, with rainbows coming and going, all serve to make this an experience which words are totally inadequate to convey. In the evening we had a swim in the hotel pool (which also has a sauna), and ate at the HoJo restaurant before returning to the falls (the American side this time) to see them illuminated. We were also treated to a stunning display of fireworks, a show which is put on every Friday evening in the summer.

I’ve always been a big fan of the American Falls. The Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side are certainly stunning too, but are almost too perfect. The American Falls, by way of contrast, are less regular in shape, with many rocks at the bottom which provide a cascade in addition to the waterfall proper. Nevertheless, it has to be said that both sets of falls are best viewed from the Canadian side of the border.

I am writing this, in rather decadent style, at the hotel poolside while the children are swimming. It is Katy’s 5th birthday today, and she is now swimming quite well, comfortably coping with the width of the pool. Becky and Tom have had their first taste of a sauna here at Niagara Falls and have much enjoyed it! Katy’s birthday celebrations will really wait until we return to the UK, but we did get her one small present to open here, and with which she was thrilled – a game based on the story of the rainbow fish. She’s been really big about not being able to celebrate fully on the day itself.

Over the remaining 2 days of our stay at Niagara, we did a whole bunch of other touristy activities. On Saturday, we again walked over to Canada, and went up to the top of the Skylon Tower for great views over the falls and up the Niagara River to Lake Erie. The Horseshoe Falls in particular look their best when viewed from up above, as the spray is then less intrusive. We also went down through the tunnels that have been dug behind the Horseshoe Falls so that we could look out from the portals behind the spray. This does not offer such a spectacular view, but the viewing platform located right at the foot of the falls near the tunnels probably affords one of the best outlooks of all.

The ultimate means of viewing the falls, however, at least on the American side, is the Caves of the Wind trip. This leaves from Goat Island, in the middle of the river; this is accessible from the US mainland by way of a short bridge. The trip is a walk around the base of the American and Bridal Veil Falls. That sounds tame enough, but the truth is far different! The wooden walkway actually traverses some of the tempestuous rivulets at the bottom of the Bridal Veil Falls, and for a time you are paddling through the water as it cascades over the rocks. But the best experience comes a little later, on the so-called Hurricane Deck. Here, you are actually in the falls themselves, being rained on. You can see sporadically as a gust clears the spray away from the spot where you are standing, but most of the time you are actually there in the guts of the falls.

Becky loved all of this, of course. Katy needed nursing through, but was OK. Tom just freaked! On the Hurricane Deck, he screamed incessantly. A little later, as we took the elevator up to the exit, we asked Tom if he had enjoyed it. He said ‘yes’. So we pursued the matter further, and asked what he had enjoyed about it most. The reply, without a hint of irony, came… ‘Surviving’!!! All in all, if anyone reading this has the chance to visit Niagara Falls but has only time to do one thing there, we would strongly recommend that it should be the Cave of the Winds.

On our way back the hotel, we wandered over to the other main outlooks over the falls from Goat Island, including Terrapin Point, which is probably the best view of the Horseshoe Falls from the American side of the border.

After a lunchtime swim on Sunday, we visited Old Fort Niagara. This fort, constructed by the French in the 18th century, was caputured by the British, then the Americans towards the end of that century. In the war of 1812, the British took control again before the Americans recaptured the fort at the end of that war. It is located at the point where the Niagara River enters Lake Ontario, so this visit gave the children their first chance to see one of the Great Lakes at close quarters. To all intents and purposes, these lakes are oceans; they serve as major shipping routes, and certainly it is not possible to see the ‘other’ shore. Old Fort Niagara was interesting, not least because of the well-preserved French ‘castle’ at its centre; this served as a trading post with local native Americans during the period of French rule, as well as providing a military stonghold. The castle is the oldest building in inland Eastern America. It is fascinating indeed to think of castles and forts, such as this one and Ticonderoga, being constructed in the New World – this land is not so new as to be lacking in the monuments of older forms of warfare. A couple of redoubts served as further ‘forts within a fort’. Throughout, the fort was furnished as it would have been during the mid 18th century; the long beds in which 30 soldiers slept, and the underground chambers from which canons could be shot over the lake were especially interesting.

Monday was a travelling day, though not a terribly long journey. After a short walk to see the falls for the last time, we headed off from Niagara to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. On the way we went through Buffalo and caught a view of Lake Erie. We arrived in Geneva and checked into the Chanticleer Motel in the early afternoon. Most of the remainder of the day was spent at the Seneca Lake State Park, where we found a beach on the largest of the Finger Lakes. At this northerly point, the Finger Lakes are not really all that attractive. They get considerably more appealing further south, away from the plain which surrounds Lake Ontario; at the southerly end there is a great deal of undulation in the terrain, and the lakes themselves benefit in no small measure.

Our first stop on Tuesday was one of the Finger Lakes wineries – the Fox Run vineyard – where we sampled the produce, which is particularly highly rated by Oz Clarke. We did not buy any wine, not least because we feel that the car is rather full already, and because we don’t have a corkscrew to consume the stuff in the evenings as we travel! We then journeyed along roads to the west of Lake Seneca, through an area which has become populated by Amish. This was a sort of nostalgic trip for Jill and myself, since one of the largest concentrations of Amish is in Eastern Pennsylvania where we have spent a lot of time in the past. But the Finger Lakes region of New York also has a concentration of this religious group, whose plain dress and simple farming lifestyle, without many of the conveniences of the modern world such as electricity and mechanised transport, is distinctive. We saw several groups of Amish people going about their daily business, including a family travelling with their horse and buggy.

Another piece of nostalgia came with our visit to Ithaca, at the southern tip of Lake Cayuga. We headed straight for Buttermilk Falls State Park, where waterfalls and cascades tumble into a deep pool where we could swim. The setting is beautiful indeed, and after our swim we walked up the length of the cascades, which tumble through a deep and long gorge. Tom in particular enjoyed himself skimming stones.

We spent about 3 hours at Buttermilk Falls. A highlight occurred when Becky somehow managed to fall into the pool while fully dressed! This was one of those occasions when one would just have loved to have had the camcorder running! Poor Becky will take a long time to live this one down. Actually, she had a rough day, because a little earlier she had suffered a bout of travel sickness and thrown up all over the car.

Our overnight stop on Tuesday was at a very pleasant Days Inn at Syracuse. We ate at the adjoining Denny’s Restaurant in the evening, and were delighted to find that Tuesday was ‘kids eat free’ night. The peanut butter pie at Dennys is awesome – we must get a recipe from somewhere.

Wednesday’s drive was one of the longest of our trip, and we finished the day at Pownal VT, in the Berkshires, just a little way north of Williamstown MA. The Berkshires are often upstaged by their neighbours, the Green and White Mountains and the Adirondacks. But they are nonetheless serious fells, reaching well over 3000 feet in places. They are also extremely beautiful, and it was good to return to mountainous scenery after several days in the flat environs of Lake Ontario. We stayed in a great motel called the Ladd Brook Inn, where we were given a suite of rooms (2 bedrooms, a kitchenette, large hallway and bathroom) for just $99 per night; the hotel has play areas for the children and a lovely little swimming pool, all combining to make this one of the most pleasant stays on our travels. It also serves the best complimentary breakfasts that we have had on our travels. In the evening we ate at the Water Street Grill in Williamstown, and enjoyed a truly wonderful meal there.

Our day was punctuated by a visit to Cooperstown NY, a charming little place which is home to baseball’s Hall of Fame. We visited this museum and were impressed by how well it presented the history of the game, rendering it an extremely interesting visit. I couldn’t help feeling that the contribution of some players who have performed an immense service to the game is underplayed by the museum – most notably Roger Maris (who has always seemed something of a pariah as a result of committing what Americans perceive to be the cardinal sin of breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record) and the always outspoken Pete Rose. In my view it is shameful that neither of these greats is a member of the Hall of Fame. It also seems rather curious that this is a national hall of fame, despite the fact that, apart from Japan, baseball is only really a serious sport in North America. This means that the two major league Canadian teams are noticeable only by their almost complete absence. Since they play in the same leagues as the players represented in the Hall of Fame, this seems rather absurd.

Thursday was a really lazy day, giving the children a chance to recuperate after some heavy travelling. In the morning we visited the Clark Institute of Art in Williamstown, a museum packed with art treasures which is amazing both for its remote location and the quality and size of its collection. The museum is probably blessed with the finest collection of paintings by Renoir anywhere. But it also has great pictures by, amongst others, Reubens, Manet, Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Pissaro, Sisley, Sargent, Bonnard, Constable, Turner and Alma-Tadema. It is a truly great collection, to rank with the best that we have ever seen.

We then wandered around the streets of Williamstown, and felt very much at home because of its similarity to Hanover. Williamstown too is a college town, home to Williams College, another of the excellent New England liberal arts colleges. Like Hanover, it has spacious areas of green and numerous fine college buildings. The student population, at just 2000, is about half that of Dartmouth’s, and the town too is slightly smaller than Hanover. The college was founded more recently than Dartmouth – but only just, as it dates from the latter part of the 18th century (1793).

The afternoon of Thursday was especially relaxed, as we returned to the motel and spent a few hours by the poolside. While Jill and I read, the children played in the pool, and Becky was particularly pleased to learn how to dive properly (and remarkably elegantly) for the first time. The children also spent some time playing with the children of the motel owner. In the evening we again ate at the River Street Grill, once more enjoying excellent food there. Williamstown is a place to which we would love to return some day.

One funny incident which occurred at our motel in Pownal is worth recounting. The motel owner, who lives on the premises, clearly likes German shepherd dogs, and had a couple of statues of such hounds, one on either side of his front door. Tom was out playing soon after our arrival at the motel, and suddenly ran back into our rooms like a bat out of hell, crying ‘One of the dog statues has come alive and was running after me!!!’ Of course, the owner’s real dog, an extremely docile and friendly being, had just been let out for a runaround. From then on, we continued the pretence that the statues sometimes came alive, and Tom remains a little uncertain!

Our drive to Salem, just north of Boston, on Friday should have been fairly staightforward, but long traffic jams and awful weather virtually doubled the length of the trip to 6 hours. The weather truly was appalling, as we caught the tail end of Hurricane Dennis. It rained heavily throughout the day, and this ruled out our intended route over the Mohawk Trail, since the views for which this road is famed would have been entirely lost on us. Instead we cut down to Stockbridge and followed the I90 into the Boston area. While at Stockbridge, an extremely pleasant small Berkshires town, we called in at the Norman Rockwell museum. We had learned about this from guidebooks and brochures, the latter of which was splendidly illustrated with a painting by Rockwell of Stockbridge Main Street. Having visited the museum, however, we left with the impression that he is an extremely overrated artist. While undoubtedly a fine illustrator, and (as Stockbridge Main Street and pictures of a few wizened faces indicate) not completely without talent as a painter, his work is wholly unoriginal and furthermore largely twee and unchallenging, pandering to the comfortable prejudices of the middle America of his era. All in all, the museum left intact our view that, apart from Jackson Pollock, America has yet to produce major figures in the world of art.

In the middle of Friday night, we were woken by a fire alarm. This seems to happen to us when staying in hotels around Boston (I somehow doubt whether the Farrington stretched to a fire alarm!). This time, Jill did not pass us our dressing gowns, although she claims to have known where they were. Once more it proved to be a false alarm, not surprisingly as the rain was still pelting down so hard that it would be difficult for any flame to grow beyond the status of a spark. About half an hour later, we were woken up once again by the telephone ringing. Jill answered to find no-one at the other end of the line. Infuriating. So we ripped out the line and hooked up to the internet instead!

Salem is, of course, notorious as the setting of the infamous witch trials of 1692. On Saturday we visited the city of Salem and enjoyed a visit to the witch museum there. The museum provided a very informative multimedia presentation of the history of the witch hunt. Particularly effective was the portrayal of how witches, the innocuous followers of ancient pagan religions (especially Wicca), were demonised by the established Church. This probably served to provide a context in which innocent parties, such as those indicted in 1692, could be victimised as a result of mass hysteria.

In Salem we also enjoyed a trip around the town on an amphibious vehicle. This originally served as a cargo carrier in the Vietnam war, and the guided tour took us around the downtown streets to see the main sights and, for about half an hour, on a trip around the beautiful harbour. It is a surprise to find that we can describe the harbour as beautiful despite the presence there of a huge coal powered electricity generating plant; somehow it fits in. Or maybe it’s just that the weather on Saturday was the complete antithesis of that on the previous day – it was as perfect a summer’s day as one could ever wish for, without a cloud in the sky and with temperatures just touching the low 80s. We saw, amongst much else, the Customs House where Nathaniel Hawthorne once worked, and the House of Seven Gables which inspired his eponymous book.

We proceeded to Cape Cod on Sunday. Driving through Boston was easy on the day of rest, in spite of the construction on the I93 bridge over the Charles River. Boston traffic on other days of the week is dreadful, the sheer volume of it serving to strangle a great city. We stopped at Plymouth to see Plymouth Rock and take a tour around the Mayflower II. Plymouth Rock is reputed to have been used as a landing stage by the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, though in view of the fact that it lies within a great natural harbour, it is unlikely that this was in fact the first point at which they reached land. I had visited this place some 15 years ago, and so was prepared for the disappointment which many first-time visitors feel at the discovery that Plymouth Rock is really more like Plymouth Pebble. If this was indeed the first piece of American land upon which the Pilgrims set foot, they must have done it one by one! The Mayflower II is an exact copy of the original Mayflower; it was constructed in England and sailed across the Atlantic to its present location where it is kept as a museum.

The Pilgrim Fathers have a special status in American history, although they were not the first European settlers. Virginia was settled shortly before Massachusetts, and in any event the north east seaboard had for many years been used as fishing grounds for British fishermen, whose traditional grounds had been rendered unavailable owing to a dispute with (who else but) Iceland. The Pilgrims were Separatists from the Church of England; unlike the Puritans who sought to purify the Church from within, they sought a more austere form of worship and challenged the authority of the king to be head of the Church. In so doing, they were regarded within Britain as traitors. Many fled initially to Holland, and almost one half of the Mayflower’s passengers fell into this category. The decision to move to the New World involved the Pilgrims in raising finance by negotiation with merchants; the merchants would advance the cost of the trip so long as the Pilgrims would supply them with goods, notably pelts, over the years after their arrival in America. Many of the Pilgrims died in the first winter after arrival in the New World, but their numbers were supplemented over the next few years as the merchants sent extra people over to the colony in addition to supplies. The initial complement of 102 Pilgrims had originally intended to sail in 2 ships, the second being the Speedwell which was deemed unseaworthy, so conditions on the boat were inevitably cramped and uncomfortable for the duration of the 66 day voyage.

Our next stop was Plimoth Plantation. This living museum is located just a couple of miles from Plymouth itself, that is a couple of miles from where the original village founded by the Pilgrims was located. In every other respect, it is an exact replica of the village as it existed some seven years after the Mayflower arrived. By that time, the population was nearing 200. While some of the inhabitants had been professionals or tradesmen during their time in Britain, all were now agricultural workers. Some of those with expertise in other areas, such as a doctor or a smith, would practice their skills when needed, but this would be subsidiary to their main work of farming. Although trade occurred with both the local native Americans and with Europe, there was no village store. The population was fundamentally self-sufficient. Other than houses, the only communal building was a meeting house or church which doubled up as a fortress designed to defend the village against attack from local natives. The buildings in the village were therefore less interesting than its people and the stories which they had to tell. And therein lies the strength of this living museum. The role players are superb. One of those whom we met asked us where we came from, and when she heard we were from Lancaster in England, she engaged us in a conversation about the Pendle Witches (about which she clearly knew much). Another played the part of a lady (Mrs Standish) who had migrated from Ormskirk, and she likewise had clearly been well briefed on the area in England from which she had come. Each role player played the part of someone who actually had lived in Plymouth in the early years following 1620, and each knew their character’s history and personality extremely well. Each spoke in the accent and language of the time, which was very much closer to modern English than current American. Largely because of the quality of the role playing, we rated Plimoth Plantation as the very best living museum we have ever visited. As a bonus, the location is gorgeous.

We moved on to Hyannis on Cape Cod, where we have rented a cottage for the last 4 nights of our holiday. Tom’s description of the cottage is best: ‘a nice dinky cottage’. It certainly is nice, and it certainly is dinky! We have a living room with kitchenette; this room doubles up as a bedroom for Jill and myself, thanks to a bed-settee. The children’s beds fill a second room, off which there is a small shower room. The cottage is one of a group called Glo-Min cottages which the owners have, as far as we can tell, constructed in their large garden. We share a lovely swimming pool and play area. The whole lot is situated a couple of hundred yards from both Hyannis centre and the beach, so the location, like the accommodation itself, is pretty much ideal.

In the evening we ate well at Baxters Fish and Chips on Hyannis harbour. The harbour is really beautiful picture book stuff. On a clear fine day like today, this made the perfect end to a perfect day.

The next day, Monday, was just as perfect. We booked ourselves onto a whale watching trip leaving Barnstable Harbour near Hyannis. This left at about 11.15 and we returned at 3.30. The trip took us out through the enormous Cape Cod Bay into the open sea beyond, where we were delighted by over a dozen whales. These were mainly humpbacks, but there were also a few minkes. Some came so close to the boat that they were only a couple of metres away from us. We felt as though we could have stretched out our arms and stroked them. For a long time, they swam around and underneath our boat, flapping their flippers and sending their tails into the air. These are beautiful creatures. The children were all enraptured – as indeed were we all.

After returning to the cottage, we swam in the swimming pool, and later took a walk to the beach. The waterfront at Hyannis is lovely and completely unspoilt. As the coolness of the autumn evening came with the early dusk, the view across the water to the lights of the few fishing boats and ferries, with a thin crescent moon in the sky, etched a picture which will long endure in our memories.

Tuesday was a lazy day, much needed by the children. We spent about 4 hours on Kalmus beach in Hyannis, about a mile from our cottage. Becky, Tom and I all swam in the sea, one of the warmest in my experience. This was Tom’s first time swimming, as opposed to paddling, in the sea, a measure of how his confidence has increased over the summer. The sea was like a millpond, this part of the coastline being sheltered by the island of Nantucket.

Later we drove up the arm of Cape Cod, reaching Nauset Light Beach, named after the famous nearby lighthouse. There, the sands stretched for miles in each direction. While the sea was calm at Kalmus beach, at Nauset Light (which faces the open Atlantic and where the beach is steep) the surf was high, and many waves exceeded 8-10 feet in height. This is spectactular stuff, and the children had a fantastic time paddling at the edge of the water. It did not take long for both Katy and Becky to be knocked off their feet by the surf – and both were laughing hysterically at the experience! It was extremely difficult to tear the kids away from this great new source of fun, which Tom described (rather heroically) as even better than Niagara Falls. Indeed, we enjoyed Nauset Light Beach so much that we returned there on Wednesday, when I could not resist the temptation to go in for a swim (several times). The experience of swimming amongst such amazing waves is exhilirating, not least when you return to the beach, semi-surfing, being swept along by wave after wave; although being dragged along the newly washed-up pebbles and grit is not so pleasant, the few cuts and bruises we well worth it! Meanwhile the children tried to build a sandcastle which would withstand the pounding of the waves. Needless to say this was a losing battle, but it kept them, and numerous onlookers, amused for about three-quarters of an hour. Katy in particular was to be seen doing some sort of sea-tide ritual dance and chant, which promted one onlooker to ask me whether she ever got hoarse!

Back to Tuesday, on our return to the cottage, we all went for a swim in the swimming pool, and Katy ventured for the first time into the deep end; she is now comfortably swimming several lengths of the pool. This seems amazing progress for a girl who, a little over a week ago could not swim more than a few strokes and who could not swim at all before this summer.

In addition to Nauset Light Beach, we visited a beach at Dennis on the Wednesday, and dined in the evening at Friendly’s restaurant. The children then took a ride on a wonderful carousel which is located right on Main Street in Hyannis.

Thursday is the day we start our overnight journey back to Britain. As we prepare for the journey, Hurricane Floyd is starting to cause havoc all the way up the eastern seaboard. On Wednesday evening it started to rain on Cape Cod, and the eye of the hurricane, then just off the coast near the border between Georgia and South Carolina, was gently moving in a NNE direction. Our fears about disruption to our travel plans were realised early in the afternoon of Thursday when, having driven through the rain to Logan airport and having hung around for a few hours, we learned that Newark airport (through which we were due to pass) had closed.

Rearranging travel for five people was sure to be rather difficult, and initially we were pretty pleased with the way things panned out. No flights to Manchester were available until Saturday night, so we got a couple of extra days in the USA, hotels and transit paid for by Continental Airlines. For Thursday night, they put us up at the very luxurious Crowne Plaza Hotel in Woburn, a hotel with a lovely warm indoor swimming pool and hot spa. On Friday morning we travelled on to Newark, and waited in the New York area (as it turned out, in a very nice suite in the Newark Hilton) until Saturday evening, when we flew out to Manchester. Our flight on the Friday morning was cancelled, but the delay we suffered at that stage turned out to be minimal since we were able to catch another plane just 2 hours later. Our initial impression of Continental was thus quite favourable, though this was soon to change on the Saturday night. We had been confirmed as passengers on Continental’s flight from Newark to Manchester, but since the airline only had first class tickets available we were to be upgraded. But when we got to the airport, they told us that our flights were not confirmed (contrary to what we had been told at Boston), and we ended up having to reroute via Paris on flights by Tower Air (a new company for us, but one with which we ended up being very impressed) and Air France. In fact, when we got to both Tower Air and Air France, they told us that our flights were not confirmed, again contrary to what Continental told us. To take the Tower Air flight from New York to Paris, we had to take a taxi from Newark to JFK. Fortunately, Continental paid for this (but of course they never pay for the tips). All of this added some 12 hours to our journey, but we ended up home on Sunday night. Either Continenal’s computer system has some serious bugs or their staff seriously need retraining, or both. Either way, we shall never fly with them again, and we urge anyone else reading this not to do so either. To this saga, I really must add that, over the 4 days of our travels home, really not the easiest of times, the children were magnificently behaved. We are very proud of them.

The plus side of our hellish journey home, indeed quite a big plus side, was that we were able to spend a few hours on Manhattan on Saturday. We took a taxi to and from the hotel, and explored downtown, starting and ending with a look at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from Battery Park. We then walked to the World Trade Center and went up to the roof to get a superb view over the city, Long Island and north up to the rural areas towards the Catskills. The World Trade Center visit now also includes a very good simulated helicopter ride over the city. We identified and pointed out such landmarks as the UN Building, Woolworth Building, Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, Central Park, and Madison Square Garden. The views really were spectacular, and for the first time in my 3 visits to this vantage point, it was possible to see the sea to the north of Long Island as well as to the south. From the World Trade Center we walked to Wall Street and back to Battery Park. On the way, we stopped by at the Americn Indian Museum, where there is a pretty good collection of Indian crafts, including pottery, bead and quill work, and clothing. While there is clearly much more of New York than this to see, it gave the children in particular a nice taster.

At the end of this diary, it is appropriate to make some observations about America as the turn of the century approaches. It is a much happier, more balanced, more secure place than it was 15 years ago on my first visit. The fall in crime statistics is mirrored by a lessening of tension, especially in large cities such as New York. People seem less eager to judge others by their wealth, more so by an overall assessment of qualities. It is a country where people are encouraged to excel and where no stigma is attached to success. Put another way, America is a country where things are possible – it really is easier to achieve things there, partly because the resource base is greater, but also in large measure because there is a culture in which achievement is encouraged. New England, in particular, we liked; the people are especially tolerant, and the scenery is exceptionally beautiful. I wonder whether the latter has mellowed the former. Some things remain extremely irritating – the dumb bureaucracy, the poor quality of public lawned areas, the poor road markings and signs, the humbug about freedom (when in fact there are a lot of irritating and silly byelaws everywhere) - things which are not tolerated in Canada or Western European countries. These qualities and drawbacks are all things which set America apart. All things considered, it is a great country, and one which we feel proud to live in, albeit for brief spells. We hope that we shall return there before long.