Washington DC

The White House

So the penultimate city.  We stayed in DC for 5 days and spent most of our time in museums.  There are the Smithsonian Museums which are all free to get in and a lot of fun.  We went to the air and space museum followed by the natural history museum then the next day the holocaust museum and the National Geographic museum.  I especially liked seeing the Hope diamond on display in the Natural History Museum, it's beautiful and for the time being is set in an amazing necklace with lots of other diamonds.  I still prefer my engagement ring though!

The Washington Monument in front of the WWII memorial

  

We toured most of the sights and monuments over the 5 days.  Tim was very miffed as they have dug up the reflecting pool (one of the most iconic sights in Washington!) and are currently re-doing it.  Most of the monuments have rangers with them who give little guide talks so you learn a bit about them too- good for me who knows nothing about American history!  

With our mate Abe

There isn't much more I can say about Washington  really, it was mostly museums and monuments for us.  We had the luxury of a kitchen in our hotel room so had home cooked meals for the whole time- after living off fast food and microwave meals for a while that was a real treat!  We caught the bus up to NYC on Saturday ready for the last leg of our journey...

Washington from the Tidal Basin- the Jefferson Monument is on the right.

New England

View of Boston from Bunker Hill

We flew into Boston but only spent a day in the city centre.  We followed the Freedom Trail through the city and climbed the monument on Bunker Hill, all 294 steps of it, to get a good view of the city.  The next couple of days we explored some of the suburbs including Lexington, Bedford and Concord which are beautiful villages with lots of lovely houses.  We also visited the house where the book Little Women was set and the author Louise Alcott lived.

Camden in the evening

We hired a car and set off to explore some of the coastline in New England and the villages there which were full of more lovely houses and lots of little harbours.

We headed up to Acadia National Park after a day shopping in the discount stores! We stayed for a couple of nights by Acadia enough time to explore the roads by car and some of the old carriage ways by bike.  We hired electric bikes which were a lot of fun especially going uphill past all the professionals in their lycra!  The bikes are power assisted so it made pedalling so much easier and meant that we could go 50 miles in one day and practically covered the whole park! The park was really beautiful with coastline and fresh water lakes too.  

Timmy with his big stick chewed by beavers (really) at Jordan Pond

Bubble pond, Acadia

Electric bikes!

Mount Cadillac at sunset, Acadia

From Acadia we headed west towards the White Mountains, another national park area, via Fort Knox.  It was good to see the place that the saying originates from! 

Fort Knox cannon

We headed east to the white mountains where we stayed for a couple of nights.  We spent a day in North Conway and rode the scenic railway there.  It has restored Victorian style carriages and as luck would have it the day we were there was the 165th birthday so we got free lemonade and cake at the station!  

Conway Scenic Railway

We decided to head back out to the coast again and go to a few more of the outlet stores, Tim just couldn't resist the bargains! But it turned out to be a great choice as it gave us the chance to go to the lobster festival at Rockland which was great- lobster galore! 

Yummy Lobster!

   From Maine we drove down the coast to Cape Cod.  We Stayed at Hyannis on the south coast and spent the first day on the beach enjoying the sunshine but not the water! I think we are now beach snobs having seen some beautiful beaches on our trip, we got about knee deep and as we couldn't see our feet got back out again tutting loudly!  

The next day we drove up to Provincetown on the tip of the cod and made a snap decision to go whale watching.  It was late in the day and we were torn between going then or coming back the next day- it turned out to be one of the best decisions we have made ion the whole trip as we saw about 30 humpback whales during our two and a half hour trip and it was as if they were in a seaworld show! 

Chin breech

We saw every type of behaviour they display (tail slapping, fin slapping, full breech- where they jump right out, chin breech and tail breech) and a mum with her calf who was practising jumping out of the water- with limited success.  The little one was lovely and did some adorable sideways and bum wiggly jumps and looked like it hadn't quite got the hang of breeching yet!  As I am not allowed to be in charge of the camera I was free to watch all the whales without worrying about taking photos which was awesome.  From the photos he got you can see exactly why Tim is in charge of the camera! 

Hello from Joy the whale, who wants to be an acrobat! The lump is her eye. 

Full breech

Tail Slapping

We had a fantastic time and just to show us that our decision was the right one it chucked down with rain the next day and we couldn't leave the hotel! Smug doesn't even cover it!

Luckily the weather cleared up enough for us to spend some time in Sandwich the oldest town on Cape Cod and then Chatham on the beaches.   We got about 30 minutes on Lighthouse Beach before a huge fog rolled in and we had to retreat shivering to the car!

The old mill at Sandwich

Lighthouse beach just before the fog

So with only 11 days of the trip left we flew to Washington DC, the penultimate city, to spend five days there.  

Chicago and all that jazz!

We stayed in Chicago for 10 days.  Our hotel was right next to Grant Park which was great as there were loads of summer activities happening like free live music, open air theatre and even a freestyle yo-yo competition! 

Free music concert + a picnic= perfect Monday evening!

The stage in the park with the city behind

The time went really quickly, we spent a few days on the beach enjoying the heatwave and a few evenings in the park taking advantage of the free live events. The park is lovely, it has lots of different areas and amazing sculptures like the cloud gate which reflects the whole city view.   

The cloud gate- awesome!

We also spent a lot of time walking around the city, doing a bit of shopping and just taking in the architecture which is fantastic.  It is truly a beautiful city.

Grant park

We went to the baseball to watch the cubbies,which wasn't as good as the cricket but still a good night.  The cubs got beat 4-2 and as we got there a little bit late we didn't even see them score any runs but the atmosphere was great , don't think I've ever seen so much food consumed in the time frame- helmet full of nachos anyone?!

Wrigley field

Navy Pier was especially good with fireworks twice a week and live music.  The view of the city is fantastic from there.    

The city from Navy Pier

Navy Pier fireworks

Navy Pier- tacky but fun!

Our best evening by far was our trip up the John Hancock Building where the view of the city is really special.  We did only plan to have one drink but the view was so lovely we ended up staying for 3.. bottles of wine!  I blame the sunset!You can see from the photos how good the view was...

The view from the John Hancock Tower- cheers!

The spit of land is the beach we were on during the day

Another bottle please waiter...

Anuver bockle pleeshe waiter...