Week starting 28th July – New York to a Disaster in Delaware
We spent two days in New York recovering our land legs after the voyage (yes everything did seem to sway for a day or so). We were much impressed by the older architecture – many very impressive Art Deco style buildings (albeit that the street level parts are now largely modern brutalist glass and plastic facades). The newer skyscrapers are impressive, but don’t have much human perspective, I feel. We also met up with a friend from Ealing who happened to be in NY at the time and ate in an Italian restaurant (where the maitre d’ also came from Ealing – it’s a small world). On Monday we picked up a hire car (enormous Toyota SUV called a 4Runner – you need a stepladder to get in, it is so high, but with our 10 cases it was fairly full).
We went North first of all almost as far as the Great Lakes, to a region called Finger Lakes. Beautiful rolling countryside carefully cultivated in relatively small farms – not quite English, but very attractive. Surprisingly, we took the opportunity to visit a number of the vineyards for which the area is noted.
Then we started South, going down to Pennsylvania. The country region is called Dutch – but it really is should be Deutsche (many of the original settlers from Europe were German religious refugees). We saw straw-hatted Amish farmers driving their horse carriages and wagons – machines including cars are irreligious. The slightly more freethinking Mennonite sect is OK with cars though, so long as they are black. Old red-painted wooden barns have large naïve art paintings as well as circular patterned plaques as decoration. But the wines in the Lehigh valley are pretty rubbish IMHO.
We arrived in Wilmington, Delaware on Friday evening. Delaware doesn’t seem to have a lot to recommend itself apart from being a very low tax state – so all the major US companies have a nameplate headquarters company here to avoid taxes. And disaster struck here – we were walking along the side of the river and Lisa tripped on a small curb (about a quarter of an inch). She has broken a bone in her foot, as revealed by x-rays at the local medical express centre, and is currently in a “soft cast” boot until we can get to see a full orthopaedic doctor to establish if she needs a full cast of remain in this boot thing. It has rather thrown a spanner in the works of our trip plans as she can’t walk or drive at present. We were able to buy a cheap wheelchair for her as there was no other alternative – it comes in a fetching shade of metallic purple. But we will head down to Virginia on Sunday anyway, with an appointment planned later in the week to find out the worst about the foot.