St Louis to Reading via New England

In Saint Louis we met up another of Lisa's friend from her high school days, Zach and his wife Katie, and they showed us around Saint Louis. But first things first, we couldn't visit Saint Louis and not pay a visit to the giant playground for adults called the City Museum.

Some of the highlights of this place include a 10 story circular slide, an outdoor maze of holes and tunnels, crevices and slides that you are allowed to get completely lost in.

It's a haphazardly constructed maze formed by combining scrap metal and old airplane parts. There's even a ball pit for adults.

We were suspended some ways up in a metal cage bridge thing, it was just starting to get dark.

Zach and Lisa taking a break from all the climbing and confusion of working out which way to go!

As well as having an outdoor park, inside is a completely different experience. There are three floors of tunnels and mazes that take you into the walls, through floors, going inside trees, between walls, squeezing through tiny crevices and crawling under things.

Katie and Lisa in an old airplane suspended from other scrap metal.

I don't know who these people are but they all looked slightly confused about where to go...

You can crawl into anything that has an opening such as this thing, and you'll end up somewhere else, probably lost.

Also during our stay in Saint Louis we had some downtime watching American sitcoms on Netflix. In between this we did manage to see the Arch (below) and we also went on a tour of the Budweiser factory which presented a fine opportunity to sample some beer on the house.

The Arch looks like something from the future, very surreal!

We drove up to Michigan for one night to stay with the parents of Megan, our couch surfer we met back in Sheridan. They kindly fed us and put us up for the night, before we drove on up to Canada. The drive on the same side as the States, the wrong side that is, but now it's all in km... great.

Niagara Falls is split in two, divided by the US-Canadian border. On the Canadian side you get a better view of everything, whereas on the US side they are sort of behind them and have their own viewing platform for the front shot.

I didn't expect Niagara the town to be so touristy, with so many restaurants and horror museums. There's also a dinosaur-themed crazy golf park!

The bird found a good place for its nest...

That's the American side with the look-out platform.

Niagara Falls has two parts, a long bit and a curvy bit. This is the curvy bit.

If you plan on visiting Niagara Falls you can head into the town and find parking for $5 instead of the $18 they were charging to park next to the falls.

After spending a couple hours looking round and grabbing dinner, we drove to a small town outside of Toronto for one night on our way up to Montreal.

Montreal, named after its one and only mountain/hill, is where we stayed with a French Canadian chap. We had three nights in Montreal, which proved enough time to sample some fine beer, watch some live music, and go for a stroll up Mount Royal to catch a glimpse of the city from about 200 metres up.

We really enjoyed staying in Montreal with our couch surfing host. This gave us a real opportunity to try some of our excellently rusty French on the locals... Oh wait, you guys speak Canadian-French?

The view from Mount Royal.

Montreal near the Old Port.

Along the Old Port is a zipline.

After Montreal, we didn't waste much time getting ourselves back into the States. We landed in Vermount, where we settled ourselves down in Hartford for a few nights – in the middle of nowhere.

The reason why we chose to visit Hartford was that it was very close to the Billings Farm and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller mansion, which is where we learned how they produced milk and reared Jersey cows, made butter, and more importantly, how they made ice cream the old-fashioned way.

We really liked the message this community centre in Hartford was giving out!

Breakfast in the town centre of Woodstock, Vermont before visiting the Billings Farm.

The Billings Farm, a very lovely part of the countryside.

Fully pumped and ready to be milked.

The mansion which was home to rather famous people. Frederick Billings help preserve much of natural beauty of America along with a few other important people of the time.

The tour around the mansion was worth it, seeing the extravagant Victorian decor of the times. They used different types of wood for each room.

We had two nights in Vermont before striding off to New Hampshire to stay in the pleasant countryside in Conway. This was a great opportunity to wind down and go on a short trek through the hills. Oh wait, that's not winding down!

This is a lot smaller than Niagara but there weren't as many tourists so it was all good.

We came across a bear print... run!

We came across two trees hugging a rock, it looked pretty surreal with the roots on top.

Us having dinner with our host in Conway, New Hampshire, in her back garden watching the sun go down. Very pleasant indeed.

Our visit to the Arcadia National Park in Maine offered us an opportunity to catch some rays on a sandy beach and dipping our toes into the Atlantic for the first time since we left.

Arcadia National Park, showing the mighty cold Atlantic ocean.

Our next place on the map was Boston, although we stayed just outside the city in a place called Littleton. We only had two nights here, so that left one full day for seeing Boston, which granted isn't a lot of time! By the time we got public transport into Boston it was already midday, so how can you see Boston in an afternoon?

There's a great touristy thing to do just for people like us. It's called the Freedom Trail and runs from the tourist centre in the main park to the other side of the Charles River. We did most of the trail and found just enough time to have a alcoholic beverage at the end before it was time to get back to Littleton for dinner.

The site of the Boston Massacre. Must have been a cramped massacre...

We noticed two animal statues on top of this building that look very familiar... Oh that's right, on my UK passport cover.

A British ale! Why not

Newport in Rhode Island (the smallest of the 50 states) is a place divided by the stinking rich and the ‘working poor’ as they put. There are countless mansions, each one built bigger than the one built previously. The biggest mansion in Newport is now a museum, as generations of families have come and gone and the bills to keep the place running have outweighed the interests of keeping it as a home.

We had only one night in Newport, but our couch surfing host was kind enough to take us on a tour of the wealthy parts and to visit some of the local beaches – the coastal areas are quite amazing in Newport.

One the many huge homes in Newport, but due the living costs this one is now a museum.

Because of Newport's popularity, weddings are a big thing along the water's edge. It was a Sunday evening and there was a wedding going on outside this beautiful fort. 

The sunset in Newport that evening was beautiful.

I decided it was time to return home to my birthplace. Well, Reading in Pennsylvania. This was our final stop before touching down in Washington DC, and it was quite a useful one. Our host invited us to have some grub with a Argentinian lady who he knew. Reading has a big Hispanic population, and we not only picked up some helpful language skills but also places to see when we reach South America in a couple of weeks.

Reading, the city of Love...

Our host not only showed us around the city, but also took us out to the Amish communities that form much of the surrounding country towns), such as this one, called Intercourse... Only in America!

A town called Intercourse in Pennsylvania... unbelievable.