we were hiding from the rain, we were riding on a train

Last Tuesday in Concord we didn't do much of anything. Well, we discovered that we'd booked a hostel in Charleston, South Carolina and a train ticket to Charleston, West Virginia, which was slightly less than ideal. So we spent the afternoon re-jigging that part of the trip. The hostel hadn't been paid for, so we cancelled that and got another train ticket to Cincinnati, so we're going there instead of Charleston, WV and are staying in a Travelodge that's costing us £18 each for the night. We're actually saving money as the train is at such antisocial hours. We get in at 1am and leave at 1am, so that saves two nights' accommodation :P

On Tuesday we were going to go to the beach but it was apparently going to rain, so we went to the aquarium with the Concord Cownies instead - Boris took some time off work so we could have a fun family outing. We had a tasty lunch in Quincy market, where the waitress couldn't understand Oz's English pronunciation of "ranch dressing". Then we went to the aquarium and saw fish and penguins and got to touch some stingrays (with their stings removed) and some extremely small sharks. Afterwards we went back to the market for ice creams and a wander. It was dark when we got back but Oz and I took Blackie to the lake because he'd been indoors all day.

Maureen drove us to the station on Wednesday morning. We chose the right day to leave Concord, as it was raining a lot and was forecast to do so for the next few days. We got to the station early as we had to pick up our extra tickets, and we wanted to make sure we knew what we were doing. But Boston South is easy to navigate and we soon found ourselves on board the Acela regional, which runs from Boston South station to Washington, DC Union station. From Boston to NYC is 431 miles, and we went through Rhode Island and Connecticut on the way. I spent most of the time looking out of the window at the scenery. It might not sound too thrilling but it was so very different from the English landscape that it seemed to be worth looking at: all forests and swamps and lakes and bridges, until you could see the skyscrapers crowning the distance and we went into a tunnel and came out on the other side in New York City.