You will have noticed I have made reference to Ubers a lot in these blogs. For the uninitiated (basically mum and dad), this is what they are.  They are people who are using their cars as taxis. You book them via an app on your phone, so you request one, and about a minute later […]

Today was, I suppose, one of the highlights of the holiday. We were off to see a real live bone fide NFL game. Now this isn’t my first game of American football, no sirrree y’all. Nikki, my big sis, was one of the early adopters of gridiron (nope, no idea why it’s called that, just believe […]

“So what brings you to Nashville then?” Seems to be the opening gambit of every uber driver we have encountered since we touched down on Thursday. That’s actually a good question.  I suppose a combination of Rayna James and Bob Harris. Yes I am a big fan of the TV series Nashville but I have […]

Today we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The cultured of you will know it as having one of the best collections of art in the world housed in a stunning neoclassical building. The rest of you will know it as the building with the big steps that Sylvester Stallone runs up at the […]

The dilemma you always have when you come away is “how much cash should we take?”  In the olden days you had to go to the bank and get travellers’ cheques (Google them kids, they were real) and find a bank on holiday and cash them in (but you also had to produce your passport, […]

They don’t half like to run in Philadelphia. Now I am not adverse to a bit of running myself.  Have I told you about my triathlon?  No?  Well you must be the only person I haven’t bored to tears about it. I was even considering bringing my running shoes to keep my hand (foot?) in, […]

I  know I wrote a blog four years ago about how good the service is in America  but they seem to be getting even better. When we were in Washington we went to quite a posh restaurant (well posh for us.  Tablecloths and everything.) The server had the most earnest look I have even seen. […]

We have been doing a lot of traveling around via the metro when we have been visiting cities. Washington has the most modern one and it is only 40 years old. It also has amazing stations which are like underground cathedrals subtly lit with up-lighting. By comparison, the Chicago CTA trains have been running since […]

We have been staying in the Logan Square area of Chicago. Before I came away I spent a couple of nights in an Airbnb in Cambridge and on my second night was joined in the little flat by an American gentleman called Miles. He was in Cambridge at a conference but came from Chicago and […]

I have a love hate relationship with late night American chat shows. They never caught on in the UK (although Channel 5 did try it with Jack Docherty when they launched In 1997) but they have been an institution in the US since the 1960’s. You may remember I blogged about our trip to see Jay […]

Fresh from the success of last week’s ball game, we repeated the experience today. Chicago does like its sport.  I have never seen so many sports shops selling Cubs, Bears, Bulls, White Sox and Gray Skids merchandise. The two baseball teams are the Cubs and the White Sox (yeah I know, can you imagine going […]

Klaxon alet: prepare for a statement of the flaming obvious:  things are big over here. The country is big; the portions are big and as a result a lot of the people are big. But the museums are also big.  Washington has an area just full of national museums which are all free.  I can’t […]

One thing that has struck me this trip is how passionate the Americans are about trying to get enough water into you.  So far every restaurant we have visited has given us a glass or bottle of tap water with our meal.  (Ok I say every restaurant, McDonalds and Nando’s haven’t quite gone that far, […]

Washington is a modern city, well sort of. It was built in the 18th century and designed by a French planner Pierre L’enfant and is largely based on the recently redesigned Paris. The founding fathers liked what they saw in Paris as the planners had cleverly avoided showing them that the the Arc Du Triomphe […]

Those of you die hard blog followers will remember our first experience of a ball game (if you are new to it or have forgotten, you can refresh you memory here). Last night we went to our second game. Yeah we are die hard ball fans. 2 games in 4 years. This time it was […]

For our first day in the capital city of the USA, we thought we would do what any self respecting British tourist from the North East would do and stopped random strangers and asked where the Nissan factory was.  Once we got bored of that game we headed for the Capitol to find out what […]

Well we are off again.  We planned this trip with as much care and planning as ever (basically we wanted to go to Chicago, but it was cheaper to fly to Washington, we liked Nashville the TV show and the internal flights to Philadelphia were cheap as well, so boom, itinerary sorted). We have booked […]