Foreign Perspectives

It’s been a long, long time since I was in New York and so it’s time that I was starting to consider it for a future trip once again.

Funnily enough a flight to New York these days costs much the same as it did when I went the last time way back in the 1980s and, if you’re careful, you can even get it cheaper than it was then! Not only that, but with the dollar being so low (or is it the pound so high?), even the hotels are pretty much at the same prices so overall the holiday would easily come out well below the price from 20 years back.

The city has changed a lot over that time. For one thing the Statue of Liberty isn’t shrouded in scaffolding as it was when I was there, the Twin Towers aren’t there any more and I gather that the city has been cleaned up considerably too thanks to a series of zero tolerance programmes over the intervening years.

Shopping is a “big thing” in any New York trip of course. Sadly, they still don’t actually do breakfast at Tiffany’s but it’s a beautiful store to wander around and whilst there’s an awful lot of stuff there at serious prices there are also many items that you can pick up at very sensible prices. Aside from there, you shouldn’t miss the likes of Macy’s.

Given the prices of both flights and hotels, it’s definitely a great time to be considering a trip to New York.

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Yeah, I know, sometimes our life seems like a holiday but in fact we’ve not had what I’d call a proper holiday for quite a long time now. However, we have been vaguely planning a trip round the US for, hopefully, sometime later this year.

The snag with trips to America is that it’s so darned large and has such a massive range of activities on offer that it’s quite difficult to settle on one particular spot or even range of activities. One area that I’ve not really explored a whole lot is the civil war sites though and it’s an area with rich pickings.

A big plus point with America is the wonderful motorhome (or RV) facilities that they have in the campsites and for that matter the location of the various campsites themselves. The best example that I’ve stayed in on the location front is the one right in the centre of Tombstone which is quite literally a stone’s throw from the OK Corral! However, there are equally fantastic locations around in, for example, Gettysburg camping. That whole area is one of the more historic regions in America and with surprisingly well known attractions in relatively close proximity. Thus, if you’re aiming at Pennsylvania the PA RV camping options give you a very wide selection of attractions from the Appalacian Trail to Washington DC (it’s best to forget about attempting to take the RV into Washington except on Sundays!).

Picking a well-known attraction to base your RV in can serve as something of a focus to your vacation too. Thus RV camping Gettysburg, for example, can give your holiday a civil war theme and help make it that little bit more memorable than an aimless drive around the countryside type of holiday would be. That said, you need to choose an area with a lot of interest in it which isn’t always easy though spots like Gettysburg are ideal for that as they’ve a comparitively high density of tourist attractions.

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I’m something of an addict to browsing university prospectuses though sometimes it’s quite a while between getting the thing and getting around to signing up for a course. Last time it was all the way from picking up a prospectus around 1985 to starting a course in 2002!

At the moment I’m plugging away with a child development course which means that my next logical one is notionally the exploring psychology course which I’d have started last October were it not for the overlap with the final course for the modern languages degree. However, there’s an even worse overlap this year so I’m going to create a gap for myself by not starting the psychology course ’til October 2010 (with probably a little course popped into the first half of that year).

However, for a change, I’ve been looking much further ahead than I usually do and browsing the postgraduate prospectus which has a rather interesting little MSc in psychology that in turn leads on to a PhD.

Crazy, eh? Still, ’twas crazy talk like that which got me from “speaking a little French” to finishing off an honours degree in modern languages.

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