Breathing a sigh of relief as we tiptoed away in the dead of night from the mental asylum that was our hostel, we returned to the warm, protective embrace of Megabus to take us to a very out of season Norfolk, Va.

This day was to see Tom's holiday age plummet to 6 as he appeared to completely lose his brain. On the Megabus he announced gladly to Trudy that he was pleased to be leaving Switzerland! Later in Norfolk when we were treating ourselves to pizza at Dominoes, he bafflingly decided to tell the server our PIN code whilst handing him our bank card. Seconds later he lost our room key, meaning that anyone could pick it up and get into our room with a minimum of fuss. All of this was after he shrank our clothes in the wash (on the plus side, Trudy can now fit her clothes into her rucksack).

Needing to get up early the next day to go to Jamestown which was 3 hours and 6 buses away, Tom's madness continued when he set the alarm for 7pm. This was to have serious repurcussions when we were stranded in the Jamestown mesuem (William, see photographs which link directly to this section of the blog) carpark in the dark waiting for the wolves to attack. Awaiting a taxi, Trudy turned down a lift from a kindly stranger due to the ever-present threat of chloroform and torture ("Tom, their windows were blacked out, of course they wanted to murder us"). This journey ended up with us missing the last bus home at Newport News and being told by the station manager "Nothing good happens in Newport News" - but he was very cool and gave us a lift all the way to our motel door (big shout out here!).

Having learned our lesson about the buses we decided to go to Virginia Beach. This particular trip took a walk of one and a half hours followed by two buses of two and a half hours and enabled us to spend a thoroughly lovely 60 seconds on the beach before having to return to our motel. It transpired that the reason for our bus torment was that Tom misunderstood the scale of the tourist map. In suggesting that we take a lovely walk to Virginia Beach Tom was actually suggesting the equivalent of a lovely Sunday stroll across the entirety of London!

We spent one night in Richmond and managed to see quite alot of this city, mainly because we spent 4 hours searching for a bus to our motel. When we found the hidden, practically invisible bus stop it was enornmously iritating that it was only a 10 minute walk away from where the Megabus had originally dropped us off! Trudging around for 4 hours in the heat and carrying our own bodyweight in clothes etc really made us realise that we need to get a car.