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Sorry, another stock photo after another photo-less day (yesterday, in fact, since I'm writing this on the morning after).
The journey back went well - no delays or queues, the flight smooth and about 20 mins early, home by 9pm and very pleased indeed not to have to lug those very heavy suitcases around any more. Better for me than Chloe, though, because having had a tough time the previous night she was virtually comatose throughout, just about managing to wake her self to stagger pale-faced through the necessary air travel procedures but then relapsing into the deepest of sleeps within seconds.
(The deepness had in fact given me a scary start to the day, when to make surer she was awake at 5am I'd texted her, called her on the mobile twice and also on the deafeningly loud room phone twice and received no reply: thank goodness, when I actually went to her room on the floor below and hammered on the door, I did get a drowsy response.)
Anyway, apart from that and the packed-full-ness of the plane, it was all fine.
And so the great adventure ends: and what are my conclusions?
1. Most importantly, as a dad-and-daughter bonding thing it went well. We had no rows or arguments, enjoyed each other's company and had the opportunity to talk far more than usual.
2. Almost as importantly, Chloe was generally happy to spend so much time out and about. It was good that the schedule allowed for quite large chunks of "me time," in the morning, early evening and after dinner, but in between she was pretty happy to be dragged around from place to place.
3. For most of the holiday, she was OK with keeping what were for her wildly antisocial hours (with a standard 9am breakfast rendezvous). This schedule came under some pressure in the last few days, but until then worked fine.
4. New England is quite a hard area to get to love. We really liked Boston, which apart from the coldness of its winters seemed not far from being a perfect city. But our lengthy tour around the rural areas was disappointing. We hardly ever managed to get out of sight of clapboard houses, telephone wires and auto parts centers. Using the satnav to navigate probably didn't help - Dashboard Eva (as in Braun, the travellers' equivalent of Bonfire Hitler) was a huge Interstate enthusiast, and would always steer you away from interesting-looking minor roads to get you back on the I-95.
5. Also, Spring on the east coast is at least a month to six weeks behind the UK. We had a couple of nice days, but the weather was pretty average. And until we got back to New York in the last couple of days, we didn't see any trace of fresh Spring greenery - further north, as you can see in some of the pictures, it was still absolutely winter.
6. The trip would have been impossible without Eva, wireless internet and Trip Advisor. Without Eva telling us where to go, and Trip Advisor telling us where to stay and where to eat, it would have been a logistical nightmare.
7. You do go a bit stir-crazy staying in motels every night. They do all rather blur into one, and after a while even respectable middle-aged gents like me experience a slight urge to throw a TV out of the window or drive a car into the pool. This is partly because they are indeed all incredibly similar (every single one, for example, with the same stupidly small and useless bath and the same soft rock playing as you unload your bags under the portico). On the upside, they were all clean and comfortable, and in our limited dealings the staff were all friendly and helpful.
8. You can eat fairly well in America, but eating really well is hard. Despite using Trip Advisor to select the most highly rated restaurants in every town, pretty much regardless of expense (except in New York and Boston), we had several good meals but not a single excellent or outstanding one. If you're interested, have a look at these glowing reviews for the place where we ate in New York on the last night: http://www.opentable.com/murano-ristorante. It was no better than a branch of ASK, probably not as good - and three times the price.
9. And finally, I just cannot type on a laptop keyboard. I didn't go on about it, but I guess that my big stubby fingers just don't hit the keys accurately enough. This is a huge problem with zxcvbnm, the keys on the bottom row, because for some inexplicable reason the slightest finger-placement inaccuracy makes the cursor jump back a few lines so that your new typing suddenly starts appearing in the sentence before last. (Believe me when I say that this would often happen 50 or more times during a single entry.) One reason why this entry is so wearingly long is just the sheer joy of typing on a proper keyboard.
That's it. Holiday over. Blog over. Back to reality. Thanks for reading.
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