So the car is booked…

… or a car is booked – a Nissan Versa, Toyota Yaris or similar – for 10 days, from Wilmington, DE, for a little under $230.  There seems to be an extraordinary variation in rates within a small area – the same vehicle, from the same company (Enterprise Rent-a-Car) just up the road in Philadelphia, would cost over $300.  And from JFK airport, over $450.  And we have unlimited mileage east of the Mississippi (how do they tell if you’ve crossed it?)  I just hope we get a half-decent vehicle;

my only previous experience of hiring a car for leisure, in Ireland, provided us with a machine that looked good but had a lawnmower engine.  Although on that occasion the supplier was not Enteprise or Hertz, or Europcar or Avis or even Budget but, thanks to my sister’s unerring nose for a bargain, Dan Dooley Rent-a-Car of Knocklong, Co. Limerick.  So fingers crossed for something with a bit of power: fuel is $4 a gallon, so parp-parp and ho for the open road.

Readers are advised…

…to enjoy as much as possible the photographs of the two lovely ladies on the first page, since a lot of the photos to follow are likely to be of us, i.e.:

(images © Alabama State Penitentiary 2013).

Will the US immigration authorities let two such desperate ruffians in?  The UK passport regulations specify NO SMILING on photographs, and boy, did we take them literally.  Fortunately, the bio-digi-metric alchemy to which they were subject before getting on our passports turned us into:

 

so that should be OK.  In fact, the US authorities seem only too happy to let us in.  Having got the passports (briefly congratulating myself that William’s was cheaper than mine, only to discover that his only lasts 5 years), I applied early for the ESTAs – visas for countries that don’t need visas – thinking that the authorities might want to spend a month or two probing our links to Meibion Glyndŵr, Unison, the Monmouthshire Mafia – but no, they had trousered my $28 and granted us entry almost before I could hit the Refresh button.

And as far as other arrangements go: there are no cheap flights any more.  No £99 deals to New York.  Virgin long ago sold herself to the highest bidder.  Freddie Laker’s Skytrain is rusting in a hanger in Slovakia.  So after a few days of searching, contemplating deals that shaved £50 off the price in return for a day-and-a-half stopover in Reykjavik or a commercial relationship with semi-literate, semi-legal online agents, we dived in, went straight to Aer Lingus and got what looked like an average deal at £450 return for me and £400 for him – plus taxes and charges, admin fee and seating fee.  £1325.  Shudder.

Also booked is 5 nights’ accommodation in NYC – at Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel, which is to be found at East 25th St and 3rd Avenue.  Not – definitely not – to be confused with the Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue, which charges anything from $230 to $2500 per night for 4-star luxury, the Carlton Arms (http://www.carltonarms.com/) is at the cheap and cheerful end of the market, notwithstanding that the whole hotel is a living art project, each room decorated individually by artists local and international.

It’s February 2013…

and almost exactly 5 months until we fly from Heathrow to JFK.  So most of what follows for the next few months will be of little interest to regular travellers, since it’s about getting passports, booking hotels, flights, cars and things – but all new and exciting for us, for whom exotic has previously meant Yorkshire.

What we intend to do is to spend 5 days in New York, then head out of town to find a cheap car rental (cheapest so far on the East Coast seems to be Wilmington, DE), head down the Delaware coast, hop across to Virginia, take a look at the Blue Ridge Mountains and do a bit of walking and camping, then back up round Colonial Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC, return the car… then it gets vaguer, with still 3 days left.  Perhaps those carless days will be DC days.  We’ll see how accommodation and public transport treat us.

G.K. Chesterton said:

“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”