North America

Welcome to my US blog thingy. My three months in America started on the West coast, and ended here in New York, so the pictures are in reverse chronological order as you scroll down.

Apparently it was Bette Midler who once said that when it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. I was in New York for just over two weeks, and started to see what she meant. The first pictures are Manhattan, the last one Brooklyn, where I was staying.

A fun thing to do, and free, is take the Staten Island ferry there and back.

It's a corny photo, but the sight of Manhattan at night is fantastic.

This is the Chrylser Building. It has quite an interesting history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Building

Skyscrapers, with a bit of afternoon sun, somewhere in midtown Manhattan.

Yet another building! This is the Woolworth building, in downtown. As you can see, it's not that different from the Woolworths on Colchester High Street.

Some taxis.

Another freebie - walking along Brooklyn bridge.

Finally, some roller derby. This was taken at the end-of-season championship-decider match between the Bronx Gridlock and the Queens of Pain. It's very grungy and chaotic, and oddly glamorous, in a ripped-tights-and-bad-lipstick kind of way .

Boston felt like a really relaxed city, and it was interesting to soak up all the history there. This is the Old State House, where the declaration of independence was first read.

A fancy bridge.

Build-up to Thanksgiving.

This is the stairwell in Boston's public library.

A bit of trivia to drop into the conversation at your next dinner party - Washington has a greater population than all of Wyoming, and is twinned with Sunderland. How about that?

The front and back of the Capitol building.

Afternoon sun on the Supreme Court.

There are monuments to absolutely everything in Washington. This was the memorial to F. D. Roosevelt with his dog, Fala. It was controversial because it supposedly tried to hide his wheelchair.

Here's the White House.

Parthenon, Nashville.

Some cowboy boots. I bought the red and white pair in the middle.

A picture of a water hydrant.

Late afternoon on the Mississippi.

You can't really capture the razzmatazz of a basketball game (this was the Grizzlies vs the Spurs) with a photo, but try to imagine here a pop band, cheerleaders, fireworks, and somersaulting men in bear suits, and you're practically there.

Arkansas, and before here Mississippi, I explored with a car and a tent. Greyhound buses were fine, but you don't really get to see much of the countryside. You do get to see Greyhound bus stations, however, which deserve a blog of their own, but that's for another time perhaps.

Below are some of the colours along the Buffalo National River, which cuts through the Ozark mountains in the north of Arkansas.

Hot Springs (Bill Clinton's home town) is where Americans would come to in their thousands during the early 1900s for fancy surroundings and cutting edge spa technology.

In the south of the state there were miles and miles and miles of cotton fields.

The civil rights movement in the south is really well documented everywhere you go. In Little Rock there is an excellent museum on the nine black students who were barred from a high school in 1957, and the riots that followed.

For a closer look at what happened, click here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine

Finally, some mountain humour.

This was early morning at my first camp site in southern Mississippi.

There are wonderful Gone With The Wind (I know, wrong state) plantation houses everywhere in this part of the south, this one the only octagonal one, apparently.

Late afternoon along the Mississippi river.

Some colourful New Orleans architecture.

The houses of the French Quarter (above), and ones like this one below in the nearby Garden District, pretty much escaped Katrina.

Within a few miles of the city it starts to get swampy.

Santa Fe is the oldest and highest state capital. It is also one of the brownest.

It is well known for the art that is everywhere you look.

Sign at a downtown florist - Americans seem to have more fun selling things than we do in the UK.

It was good to get out into the country, after the lights of Las Vegas and San Francisco. This is a very small part of the Grand Canyon's west rim. At its widest you could fit Guernsey in three times (I researched that myself)

I also headed off to Canyon de Chelly, towards the New Mexico border, where native Americans used to live in the houses at the base of this cliff.

Some blue sky and a piece of the same canyon.

Vegas was equally hideous and amazing. You couldn't help love the neon.

Here's a bit of Paris, Nevada.