If you’re going to go somewhere different after south America, you might as well make it somewhere very, very, different.

An orgy of light. Adverts cartwheeling over each other to grab our attention. All shouting so incredibly loud.

A little to one side one said ‘this advert is powered by green electricity.’ That’s the one I remembered. Even if, rather boringly, it was for Coca Cola.

There’s something strange and moving about coming face to face with a painting quite this famous. A painting you’ve read about an unbelievable number of times. A painting that changed the course of art history completely.

I couldn’t help being surprised by how big it was. My usual experience of it is that it fits in textbooks and in small illustrations alongside other paintings explaining where they came from of course… The real thing takes up a wall.

Which is a good thing if you’re trying to get a look at it through the throng of people trying to take a photo of themselves with it in the background.

The High Line is absolutely brilliant.

An old elevated railway, it has been transformed into a park. Some tracks have been left in situ, tasteful walkways installed over the rest, and trees, shrubs and flowers have been planted along the length. Walking it you gain magical glimpses that would never normally be possible, across the water, over the streets, into buildings.

I found the viewing gallery, with tiered seating suspended almost weightlessly over the road below, particularly magical. I loved the art installations - recordings of bells from all over Manhattan, the colours of the river Hudson transformed into stained glass. I couldn’t help but smile at the wonderful wooden sun loungers arranged along a graceful curve of route.

I’m never normally one to advocate digging up railway lines, I usually prefer them with trains on. But in this case I’m prepared to make an exception.

Meet Molls. Molly is my north American bike. She is heavier and clunkier than I thought she would be. She has silly leather bar tape that isn’t very comfortable. Her wheels aren’t as circular as they should be. Her gears didn’t work initially. I’ve had to bend the rear rack to get it to fit on, and it wobbles. But she looks gorgeous don’t you think? Only 1,500 miles to Florida…

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…

From my research in the USA, and in south America before it, I have established that dogs don’t like bicycles.

There must be something about the size, shape, or speed of a bike that really sets a perro’s hunt, run, attack, kill, reflex off. Even the most docile dog can suddenly transform into a hurtling, barking, in the road ahead of you, running at you from the side, trying to bite into your leg, baring teeth you didn’t realise even fit into that sized head, menace.

What sixth sense allows them to identify a bike coming towards them over hundreds of metres distance when they can quite happily leave pedestrians and motorists alone? How do they know to target your leg and not the front wheel? What has the bicycle ever done to them that they are so upset about?

I am now beginning to understand the likelihood of attack and relate it to the scenery I’m cycling through. In general

If you are in a central urban area, you can relax
If you are in a very rural area with no buildings, or a national park - low incidence
If you are in the sort of very smart village that wins prizes for flowers, no problem
Oddly enough, if you can see a danger - beware of the dog sign, usually you’ll be fine

But if you are on the urban fringe or in a small village - look out
If you are coming up to a tatty house or trailer, doubly look out
If there’s no evidence people are at home, or if there are just small children playing with a dog outside…

I think we’ll be cycling through quite a lot of that…

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.

Check out my cyclists’ tan. My arm is a completely different colour from where I’ve been wearing my cycling gloves…

Lovely…

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.