USA

We landed at JFK late at night and stayed in Midtown, a few blocks from Times Square. Over five days we walked most of Manhattan: the steam rising from the streets, grand vaulted halls, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Lincoln Center and tulips in the Midtown plazas.

We crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and walked the High Line, stood at the 9/11 memorial under the new One World Trade Center and saw the crushed fire engine in the museum below. We went to the Guggenheim and MoMA, watched the city light up from the top of the Empire State Building, and the next morning looked back at it from the Rockefeller Center. Spring was just arriving in Central Park, with cherry blossom under still-bare elms.

On the last morning a ferry took us to the Statue of Liberty.

A short flight took us to Fort Lauderdale, where we picked up the car. The next day we drove the Overseas Highway, more than a hundred miles of bridges hopping from island to island, to Key West, the southernmost point of the continental United States, closer to Havana than to Miami. In the evening we went down to Mallory Square on the waterfront.

On the way back north we stopped at Bahia Honda, where the old railway bridge of Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad breaks off in mid-air above the turquoise water, and again on Long Key and Key Largo.

Two days in Miami: the wide beach of South Beach with its colourful lifeguard huts, the pastel Art Deco hotels of Ocean Drive and an evening in Little Havana.

Heading west along the Tamiami Trail we stopped in the Everglades, the great “river of grass”, and rode an airboat across the sawgrass marshes.

Then north up the Gulf Coast of Florida, through Naples, to Siesta Key, whose beach of fine white quartz sand stays cool underfoot even in the sun. We drove on past St. Petersburg and slept in Orlando.

A whole day at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral: a bus tour out to the launch pads and the vast assembly building, and the Saturn V hall with the lunar module and the history of the Apollo missions.

In the evening we drove up the coast to Daytona Beach and walked out on the pier in the last light, before a long night drive west across northern Florida.

We arrived in Panama City Beach on the Florida Panhandle in the middle of the night, and woke up to the Gulf of Mexico. A day of rest by the sea, and a walk out along the long fishing pier.

The next day we followed the coast west, past the pastel houses of Seaside and the white beaches of Pensacola, crossed into Alabama and Mississippi, and stopped for the evening in Biloxi before the last stretch to New Orleans.

New Orleans was the end of the road trip. We stayed near the French Quarter and spent the days walking: along the Mississippi, where the steamboat Natchez still runs, through Jackson Square under St Louis Cathedral, past shady courtyards and iron balconies, and to the gates of Louis Armstrong Park. We saw the costumes of Mardi Gras in a museum and the big oak-lined houses of the Garden District.

We flew home via Detroit, and with a few hours to spare we left the airport for Dearborn and The Henry Ford, a huge museum of American life and invention, full of old railway carriages, cars and period rooms.