These stars originated with German farmers and were initially built into the fabric of wooden barns across Pennsylvania.

Cycling through Lancaster county we began to see more and more of them.  Attached to houses and to barns, painted in stars and stripes, shining in silver, arranged in small constellations.

I was fond of this quietly rusting specimen I found at the top of a steep hill, and grateful of the chance to stop cycling for a few moments to take its picture and catch my breath.

Our guidebook says you can’t help hearing the West Wing theme tune playing in your head when you see the White House.

Perhaps the lawn wasn’t closed off for repair when they saw it. And maybe it didn’t have this proud looking duck in the way.

I found myself thinking about that sequence from Independence Day more…

On our way back from visiting the sights in DC the sun finally came out and it looked regal and imposing. Just how they had intended it to be I suspect.

It’s incredibly spaced out. It takes ages to walk from the White House to Congress.

And even longer to then leg it from there to the station when you realise you’re about to miss your train back to Baltimore…

For our first day’s ride out of Richmond, just for once, we had it easy. The wind was behind us, the trail was (relatively) smooth and we flew through the 49 miles much quicker than we had anticipated.

I had the luxury of cooking dinner outside the tent before it got dark and watched a blazing red firestorm of a sunset over the beautiful Chickahominy river.

The Outer Banks are a gorgeous, thin, line of barrier islands off the North Carolina coast.

Basically sand banks, they feel temporary, shifting, impermanent - even though there is history at the northern end, where heavier than air flight was invented by the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk.

We camped amongst the dunes on Bodie Island in a beautiful National Parks Service campground. The guy who ran it claimed it was the best job he’d ever had - and I can understand why.

Sometimes when you’re cycling, you see something in the road up ahead that causes a slight degree of trepidation.

Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated in the Caribbean and off the coast of what were the North American colonies.

Although he tried to go straight, taking the king’s pardon, marrying, and laying low for a while. It seemed that pirating ways were just too appealing - and in the end he went back to them.

After a particularly notrious several day pirate party hosted by Teach in the Outer Banks, the colonial authorities decided that enough was enough, and arranged for the navy to seek him out and kill him.

He died, after a spirited resistance, on Ocracoke island. But his memory is kept alive in this tasteful museum… Where his final stand has been modeled in - Playmobil…?

The first shots of the Civil War were fired in Charleston, when the Confederates, incensed at a Federal fort sitting as an ‘alien presence’ in their harbour, shot at the Union ship, Star of the West, trying to resupply the fort. Little did they suspect that they had fired the starting guns of one of the bloodiest conflicts of the nineteenth century.

While the Confederates won an early victory here, ultimately they and the evil institution of slavery they supported were doomed. The North had too many men, too big an economy, and following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, right on their side.

Now, the guns are silenced and the only people in Confederate uniforms are the horse and cart drivers. Charleston has become a beautiful, relaxed, little tourist trap. We wandered around the antebellum mansions with their double height porches, enjoyed the shade of magnolia trees, and ate ice cream in the sunshine while we watched a broken fire hydrant set off a spectacular impromptu fountain in the streets.