Foreign Perspectives

Anyway, as part of the pre-trip plans, I’ve started tidying up and updating the outline guides that I used to run up for the big trips and they’ll be starting to appear on the trips section of this site in due course.

The first one is for New England which I spent about four weeks going round way back in mid-September 1996. That’s quite an unusual area for America in that it has quite a bit of history behind it and is quite compact too. So compact in fact that we ended up spending almost three weeks within 150 miles of Boston.

The unexpected highlight of the trip for me was Concord Massachusetts which is where the War of Independence started or, as we would refer to it, the rebellion. Whilst in the rest of America us brits feel very much at home, this is the place where our history books diverged. So, whilst they would say something like “American patriots killed two of the occupying British forces” we would say, using present day terms, “American terrorists murdered two British soldiers”. It’s a very peculiar place to be if you’re British as you feel very much as though you are intruding and shouldn’t be there.

As I say, it’s very historic and filled with a wide assortment of living history museums. You can experience life in the early 1700s in Plimouth Plantation, the 1800s in Old Sturbridge Village and into the 1900s in the mansions of Newport Rhode Island. It’s so compact that you could quite easily base yourself in Boston and see most of the sights as day trips.