During the night we left Florida and travelled through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina to the train station in Virginia. I think we're up to 16 states for this journey so far, although I slept through a few!
The drive was through bucolic farmlands with barns bigger than the houses, farmers in their fields on their tractors, healthy cows, green rolling hills, German influences in the architecture.
The landscape was peppered with flowering dogwoods in white and pink, and another tree with no leaves but lovely purple blossoms. There are wildflowers everywhere.
We stopped at Gettysburg, an important battle field of the American civil war, and took the self-guided tour through the memorial park, which was very impressive.
The town of Gettysburg is very pretty - old buildings in excellent, cared for condition. There are lots of museums and tourist shops, but that's to be expected in such a town, and everything is tucked into the original buildings.
I had googled 'best place to eat in Gettysburg' and came up with the Lincoln Diner - an authentic old fashioned American diner. It was the best diner we've been to - we sat at a booth and drank our bottomless coffee. The waitress wrote our order on her notepad and took the check from her apron pocket when we'd finished. Just like on tv.
The day had been overcast but as soon as we turned east towards New York City, it cleared to a beautiful warm day. Navigating the crazy highways to enter the Big Apple after driving all day is not to be recommended. It takes concentration and either deep faith in your gps or a clued in navigator (and faith in them!), and a steely nerved driver.
We took the famed Holland Tunnel onto Manhattan, crossed the island and then took the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, where we'd chosen to stay. We're lucky enough to have been to NY a few times, so we thought we'd check out the view from here.
After a drink at the hotel's rooftop bar, we walked through the streets of Brooklyn to an Italian restaurant, Rucola. This was another recommendation from Claire. Unexpectedly we were seated straight away, and had a lovely dinner.
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