USA - Ann Arbor, Michigan
“Take your shoes off.” The Southern drawl was unmistakable, even though this was rural Michigan in November. Handlebar-moustached and with a concealed gun holster, he looked like the type of man who did not take no for an answer. All around were cowboy hats, riding spurs, and boots of every variety, skinned from crocodiles, sharks, ostriches. On the wall were photos of hunting trips and the spoils of the chase: mounted moose skulls with bullet holes. Real, genuine bullet holes. This was a bonafide American moment, where cultures clash and a British boy’s ‘fight or flight’ instinct is set firmly to ‘flight’.
The man in question was actually rather small, with a smiling wife and a decent turn in sarcasm, and he owned a cowboy store in the middle of a tiny little town a few miles outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. In a bid to find the real ‘Hillbilly’ America, myself, Dean and Adam Jacobs drove between the towns that are strewn around the larger (but not really that big) metropolis of Ann Arbor. We found Dexter and Chelsea, two townships where most of the population had not ventured further than the state line. The cowboy shop was in the middle of Chelsea, Michigan, a pretty enough town with a Main Street that looked like something out of Disneyland, complete with typical barber shops, confectionary stores and, yes, somewhere you can buy a holster for your gun. When we entered the cowboy shop, the patron must have felt he was in for a killing. In terms of money, that is. Although he spoke affectionately of his concealed gun and holster, and despite our own trepidation at his rather earnest attempts to sell us something ($450 for a boot? No thank you), actually it was rather unlikely he would have resorted to using live ammunition. This was more Glengarry Glen Ross than Platoon.
The shop itself was fascinating, illustrating what can only be described as the most complete clash of cultures since Prince Phillip condescended some tribal aborigines in Australia. The cowboy was all “y’all”, dominating the room despite being softly spoken, eyeballing each of us, perhaps dubious of our accents, or surprised to find non-locals in his store. We, on the other hand, had entered in order to look at the boots and mooch around as tourists are want to do. His determination, echoed in the statement “take your shoes off”, rather than politely enquiring whether we would like to try on some boots, was unnerving. Ultimately, he was amiable enough, but I could not help but think just how out of place this person would be in the middle of London. Like so many Americans, he clearly had not ventured too far beyond his own country’s borders. He was also a fairly obvious Republican. That, of course, is fine. Who am I, as a foreigner in this land, to judge somebody else’s political convictions (beyond the downright scandalous ideologies of some Republican politicians)? However, the cowboy’s description of Ann Arbor as “five miles of insanity surrounded by the reality of everywhere else” and as “Moscow on the Huron”, failed to ring true with me. If anything, I found Ann Arbor to be the very definition of normalcy, with normal restaurants, cafés and bars, bringing in normal people who had been to a normal job or studied at a normal university and shopped in a normal mall. The surrounded area, including towns like Dexter and Chelsea, were the opposite, emerging slowly out of fields and run-down railroad factories, like little ghost towns on the horizon, occupied by folk content to never leave. It is not necessarily a bad or wrong way of life. It is just not what any of us are used to. Certainly, however, it was a fascinating experience walking around.
Similarly enjoyable was Ann Arbor itself, and arriving from New York for a few days of calm with our good friend Adam Jacobs. It is worth noting at this juncture that Adam is not really in Ann Arbor out of choice. While fond of the town, and building up an impressive photography business with close links to the huge University of Michigan (check out www.adamjacobsphotography.com), Adam ended up in Ann Arbor in a bid to find a recovery from a number of physically and emotionally draining medical issues. It was, therefore, fantastic to see Adam doing so well, for him to be able to join Dean and I every day, and to hear of his plans to spend some time back in England in January. Everybody hopes one day he will make it back to London permanently, but in the meantime he has created a flourishing business and social life in a lovely town. Ann Arbor is part-University town, part-Hi Tech industry, with 40,000 students at the University of Michigan, and that number again working at companies like Google and Borders (both founded in Michigan). The town has a suitably modern feel, and a young edge that draws in thousands, particular to the college football games. Michigan’s football team (and yes, I am aware how wrong it is to call it ‘football’) is one of America’s most heralded, playing in a 100,000 seat stadium (that Adam has pitchside access to for his photography) and attracting millions to TV audiences. Imagine Nottingham University playing home games at Old Trafford and having their matches against Loughborough broadcast on BBC1. That is how big college sport is in America, and how significant Michigan is within that.
Dean and I enjoyed driving around in Adam’s car (getting some good practice in for later in our trip), visiting Ann Arbor’s art museum and library (the largest in the world), as well as enjoying the beauty of the university’s law department, which is modelled on Christ College, Oxford, and creates a Hogwarts-esque façade over the main street. There is also a sports bar, The Blue Leprechaun, which shows soccer matches from Europe. This was a good thing. We enjoyed a number of Ann Abor haunts, popular with the locals and students like, including a delicatessen called Zingerman’s. Here you can buy the ‘greatest sandwich in America’, according to Oprah Winfrey no less. It is a truly remarkable place, where you can try anything in the room as a sample, free of charge, including a 100-year-old $750 bottle of balsamic vinegar, not to mention chocolates made of 100% cocoa, and breads beyond the dreams of Carmelli’s. Ostensibly a ‘Jewish style’ deli, with latke and corned beef, Zingerman’s attracts customers from all over the world. They take their job so seriously that they send their staff to locations across the globe to learn about what they sell in the store. We spoke with one young lady who was sent to Italy for four months to learn about balsamic vinegar. Can you imagine that happening at Yummies in Radlett?
Also in Ann Abor is Scorekeepers, a well-known nightspot at the University. We were told to expect plenty of attention from attractive sorority girls interested in our British accents. Dean and I arrived in the bar early, started quickly on the vodkas, and waited for the fun to start. In they poured, in their hoodies and ugg boots, ready to dance and drink with two boys from London. We were in prime position by the side of the bar, talking loudly so that they might hear a touch of Robert Pattison in our voices. Alas, despite a good night out in a classic American university environment, our expectations were perhaps a little out of kilter.
Ann Arbor is full of these ‘classic American university’ moments. Everybody knows that American football teams take to the field with real pomp and ceremony, full of colour and noise. Obviously, putting on such a show takes a lot of practice, and Dean, Adam and I were lucky enough to spend one evening watching the University of Michigan Marching Band practice for the forthcoming match-up against Perdue University on Saturday. It was bitterly cold, on a slab of concrete marked out as an American Football pitch, but there they were, blowing their tubas and trumpets, twirling their batons and streamers, criss-crossing in perfect unison. It was amazing fun to watch and a shame we will already be in Chicago when they perform for real on the weekend. Michigan is a patriotic University. Everybody wears the football team’s colours (maize yellow and blue). People exclaim “Go blue!” in the street to each other, and the Michigan ‘M’ is everywhere to be seen. It is a world away from the reserved antics of our own academic institutions.
Although our time in Ann Arbor seems busy, it was good to calm down a little after the madness of Boston and New York. The few days we spent their acted well as a segway between the America of big cities, and smalltown USA, which we will encounter throughout the driving part of our adventure from this Sunday onwards. Taking an afternoon to walk around the railway between Dexter and Chelsea reinforced in my mind the fact that this country is absolutely gigantic. Here we were, just a few miles outside of Ann Arbor, walking over railway lines that stretched almost impossibly in a straight line towards a horizon that in turn disappeared into the vastness beyond. We clambered aboard abandoned carriages and walked through depots and sidings that seemed like ghost towns. Go into a Whole Foods store in America and you will find a lot of everything. But step just a little bit out of town, and there is a lot of nothing as far as the eye can see.
It is a staggering thought that Dean and I will only really scratch the surface of this country’s vastness on our trip. I type this on an Amtrak train heading for one of the greatest cities in the world: Chicago. There we will reconvene with Dylan Viner, and another Habs Boy in America in the form of Robert Gilbert. Chicago has enjoyed a spectacular rise to prominence, particularly because of President Obama, and now dominates the Midwest. Detroit, once the New York of this region, languishes in its shadow, with run-down businesses, discarded buildings and warehouses, and a bleak sense of hopelessness pervades. Ann Arbor sits between the two, a welcoming haven of entertainment and old friends.
So it is time to wrap up warm and head for Illinois and The Windy City. We’ve got our winter coats ready, but sadly no cowboy boots.
Monday, 9 November 2009
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
New York: Buzzing Around The Big Apple
USA - New York, New York
“For a transitory, enchanted moment, man must have held his breath at the sight of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
If Boston came across positively European, with its winding streets and inclines, New York is the ultimate American city. Living up to its name as the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple was our home for three nights, and over the course of a heady weekend in one of the world’s great metropolises, Dean and I came to realise that most of what you hear colloquially about New York is true. Everybody has a story in New York City. Everybody comes here for a reason, a goal, a purpose. This aspirational element, combining with a cityscape that takes your breath away, is what preserves this city’s place in so many people’s hearts, from London to Los Angeles, Radlett to Rio.
We arrived on the Friday before Halloween, taking the Amtrak from Boston, and enjoying the many bays, harbours and canals of New England’s waterways along the route, stopping off at some Ivy League destinations like New Haven, Connecticut (Yale), and Providence, Rhode Island (Brown). As we approached New York, and the Manhattan skyline slowly meandered its way towards us, the pangs of excitement were clear and constant. Arriving in New York is amongst the most pleasurable and exhilarating experiences for a young adult. A world of possibility lies in wait, just beyond the Hudson, stretching up almost indefinitely to the sky, as if trying to grasp it before anybody else can. It is why multitudes of writers have come to New York and tried, if it is even possible, to put into words just what this city can bring out in a person. From Walt Whitman to Robert Frost, Emma Lazarus to F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, the giants of modern American literature, New York has compelled them into the same ‘aesthetic wonder’ that grabbed characters like Gatsby, and socialites Evelyn Waugh.
Dean and I, upon arriving at Penn Station, navigated our way to East 14th Street, on the corner of 3rd Avenue, to the apartment of Robert Gilbert. Surreally, Rob was back in London (though he will join up with us in Chicago this weekend), so the keys to his place were ours for the duration of our stay. It was a quick turnaround in the flat, before heading back out again to meet Dylan Viner in the West Village, close to Tribeca. Dylan pulled out all the stops for us throughout our time in Manhattan, and kicked off our Friday evening with a trip to Shiller’s Liquor Store, bar-cum-restaurant that served up a dab hand in burgers and beers, and where wealthy Upper West Side patrons rubbed shoulders with blue-collar Tribecans under a warehouse roof with loud music and laughter.
After dinner we popped into an old-fashioned ‘Speak Easy’. For those who do not know, ‘Speak Easies’ grew up in the time of Prohibition during the late 1920’s, where the sale and consumption of liquor was prohibited. These clandestine alcohol venues sprung up all over New York (and beyond) and acquired their name because of the need for secrecy, and thus a requirement that those frequenting the venue spoke ‘easy’ about is existence. Beer served inside brown paper bags, and vodka appearing in English tea cups were the norm, and the modern version that the three of us sampled after dinner maintained those traditions. It seems astonishing to think that Prohibition even existed. New Yorkers can certainly drink, so even the slightest attempt to moderate their liquor consumption was bound to have caused some entrepreneurial enterprise on the part of those looking to bend the rules. This, of course, worked well for Dean, Dylan and I, because Speak Easies now exist as throw-backs to a bygone Jazz Age era and can thus be enjoyed by wide-eyed tourists looking to try something a little different.
If Friday seemed a little circumspect, a tad slow or lacking excitement to you, I feel confident you’ll enjoy Saturday’s offering in the Big Apple. I had an early start at 8am, taking a cab into the Village to Dylan’s apartment to watch Arsenal v Spurs in the North London Derby. Together we sat in Dylan’s comfortable lodgings, watching Arsenal defeat my beloved Tottenham, as I questioned my mental sanity, desperately trying to find a reason why I had voluntarily decided to wake up early and watch my team lose against our most hated rivals, in the company of a boy who supports the very team I despise. Still, being in America, it was easy enough psychologically to distance myself from the haphazard nature of Tottenham’s defence and concentrate on getting to know New York a little more.
Dean met us for brunch (French toast, poached eggs, proper coffee, chocolate chip cookies – basically the full works) and then the three of us enjoyed a stroll westwards towards the Hudson, eventually walking along its banks and taking in the views across to New Jersey, and the Statue of Liberty further out into the bay. Then came the great Halloween costume race across town, as Dean sought to find numerous garments with which to turn himself into a ghost/ghoul/monster (delete where appropriate) and I attempted to find knee-high soccer socks to go with my England kit, and paints to draw a massive Union Jack flag on to my face. In between, we managed to have a coffee in Dylan’s rather plush Soho House club, wander around Wholefoods, and find graffiti to take stylish photographs of. Most tourists would have spent their first New York hours around 5th Avenue or Times Square, so it was interesting to look at the city through a resident’s eyes, taking in the sights and sounds in Dylan’s New York life, noting the independent-run cafes and bookstores, the small side-turnings and open thoroughfares, the tenement apartments and early twentieth-century townhouses. This was a different New York to what I had previously experienced, but it only enhanced my opinion of Manhattan. In New York, everybody talks, everybody is out and about: the streets are alive with human chatter, teeming with people of seemingly every class and creed.
Halloween in America is a big deal. Much more so than in England, where our natural cynicism makes it impossible to find the treat in a trick, the amusement in fancy dress, or the interest in what other people in our communities are doing. Sure, there are other major holidays in the UK that get people talking, but Halloween in America is beyond anything I have experienced. This was a pageant of people, cramming the streets in costumes and face paints and props of every variety under the sun. Bumble-bees (Dean’s particular favourite) mixed with Cowgirls (my particular favourite), numerous versions of Alice in Wonderland rubbed shoulders with Russian Generals and, well, you name it and it was walking around somewhere in New York on Saturday night, ever so slightly inebriated and more than ever so slightly having a lot of fun. The Subway, already a little confusing for me to work out, became a cacophony of colour and noise and revelry as partygoers made their way across Manhattan in search of their own quintessential Halloween moments.
Ours began on Lexington Avenue, at a rather lovely midtown apartment belonging to friends of Dylan and his good mate Dan. With our English accents working nicely, the alcohol flowing gently (and when I say gently, I mean rigorously), and the music playing loudly, Dean and I found our form. What followed was a merry march through Manhattan, from Subway stations to bars, sidewalks to clubs. Needless to say, we were really drunk. I mean ‘absolutely, completely, totally and utterly off our faces, not sure where we were going and how we were going there but more than happy for some Americans to show us’ drunk. Dean woke up with a bumblebee’s antennae on his face (and he was rather pleased, to be honest). I woke up with half my face-paint mysteriously missing (also pleased). Dylan woke up and realised his Russian General’s uniform was several sizes too big (not pleased).
Bleary eyed, with pounding heads and aching limbs, we awoke into the cold light of a Sunday morning, safe in the knowledge that while the hangover would only be transitory, the memories of what all of us now consider to be one of best nights out of our lives will remain steadfast in their permanence. The hangover was worth it.
That might make Sunday sound like a right-off, but we still managed another long walk around town, a little spot of shopping, and another rendezvous with Bumblebee and Cowgirl in Brother Jimmy’s Sports Bar in Midtown, near to the Empire State Building. This was World Series night, where the Yankees were (and still are, as it is a best of seven contest) taking on the Phillies. It took a little while for me to understand the finer points of Baseball (thanks to Cowgirl, however, for setting me straight), but I am happy to tell you all that I am now a New York Yankees fan, and just to prove that I am fully on board Team Yankees, they promptly went and got hammered tonight (Sunday), in a manner similar to how Spurs can often take a goal lead against teams like Manchester United, but still inevitably lose. I am told the Yankees are actually pretty good, and they play in white and blue, so I am stuck with them now. “Let’s go Yankees!”
REM once said that leaving New York is ‘never easy’. I agree. While excited to head on to Michigan, and another close friend of ours in Adam Jacobs in the town of Ann Arbor, Dean and I were both a little down to be departing such a wonderful town having had such a busy and exciting few days. Thanks go to Dylan for that, and to the myriad of fantastic people we met along the way, from our Halloween buddies, to Robert’s other East 14th Street flatmates, all the way to ordinary New Yorkers who help contribute to the magic of this place. It was fitting, then, that we ended our stay with a walk through all the New York hotspots, from the Rockefeller Centre to a beautiful, autumnal Central Park, before finishing up at Ground Zero, where the World Trade Centre regeneration project has recently worked its way up above street level, rising out of the ashes of an unspeakable tragedy and once more preparing to soar above New York and the fields of the Republic beyond. What an inspirational way to leave the city.
Another skyline is on its way: Chicago, Illinois. Before that, however, we are off to Michigan to see Adam. Put your hands up for Detroit. The English are coming!
If Boston came across positively European, with its winding streets and inclines, New York is the ultimate American city. Living up to its name as the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple was our home for three nights, and over the course of a heady weekend in one of the world’s great metropolises, Dean and I came to realise that most of what you hear colloquially about New York is true. Everybody has a story in New York City. Everybody comes here for a reason, a goal, a purpose. This aspirational element, combining with a cityscape that takes your breath away, is what preserves this city’s place in so many people’s hearts, from London to Los Angeles, Radlett to Rio.
We arrived on the Friday before Halloween, taking the Amtrak from Boston, and enjoying the many bays, harbours and canals of New England’s waterways along the route, stopping off at some Ivy League destinations like New Haven, Connecticut (Yale), and Providence, Rhode Island (Brown). As we approached New York, and the Manhattan skyline slowly meandered its way towards us, the pangs of excitement were clear and constant. Arriving in New York is amongst the most pleasurable and exhilarating experiences for a young adult. A world of possibility lies in wait, just beyond the Hudson, stretching up almost indefinitely to the sky, as if trying to grasp it before anybody else can. It is why multitudes of writers have come to New York and tried, if it is even possible, to put into words just what this city can bring out in a person. From Walt Whitman to Robert Frost, Emma Lazarus to F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, the giants of modern American literature, New York has compelled them into the same ‘aesthetic wonder’ that grabbed characters like Gatsby, and socialites Evelyn Waugh.
Dean and I, upon arriving at Penn Station, navigated our way to East 14th Street, on the corner of 3rd Avenue, to the apartment of Robert Gilbert. Surreally, Rob was back in London (though he will join up with us in Chicago this weekend), so the keys to his place were ours for the duration of our stay. It was a quick turnaround in the flat, before heading back out again to meet Dylan Viner in the West Village, close to Tribeca. Dylan pulled out all the stops for us throughout our time in Manhattan, and kicked off our Friday evening with a trip to Shiller’s Liquor Store, bar-cum-restaurant that served up a dab hand in burgers and beers, and where wealthy Upper West Side patrons rubbed shoulders with blue-collar Tribecans under a warehouse roof with loud music and laughter.
After dinner we popped into an old-fashioned ‘Speak Easy’. For those who do not know, ‘Speak Easies’ grew up in the time of Prohibition during the late 1920’s, where the sale and consumption of liquor was prohibited. These clandestine alcohol venues sprung up all over New York (and beyond) and acquired their name because of the need for secrecy, and thus a requirement that those frequenting the venue spoke ‘easy’ about is existence. Beer served inside brown paper bags, and vodka appearing in English tea cups were the norm, and the modern version that the three of us sampled after dinner maintained those traditions. It seems astonishing to think that Prohibition even existed. New Yorkers can certainly drink, so even the slightest attempt to moderate their liquor consumption was bound to have caused some entrepreneurial enterprise on the part of those looking to bend the rules. This, of course, worked well for Dean, Dylan and I, because Speak Easies now exist as throw-backs to a bygone Jazz Age era and can thus be enjoyed by wide-eyed tourists looking to try something a little different.
If Friday seemed a little circumspect, a tad slow or lacking excitement to you, I feel confident you’ll enjoy Saturday’s offering in the Big Apple. I had an early start at 8am, taking a cab into the Village to Dylan’s apartment to watch Arsenal v Spurs in the North London Derby. Together we sat in Dylan’s comfortable lodgings, watching Arsenal defeat my beloved Tottenham, as I questioned my mental sanity, desperately trying to find a reason why I had voluntarily decided to wake up early and watch my team lose against our most hated rivals, in the company of a boy who supports the very team I despise. Still, being in America, it was easy enough psychologically to distance myself from the haphazard nature of Tottenham’s defence and concentrate on getting to know New York a little more.
Dean met us for brunch (French toast, poached eggs, proper coffee, chocolate chip cookies – basically the full works) and then the three of us enjoyed a stroll westwards towards the Hudson, eventually walking along its banks and taking in the views across to New Jersey, and the Statue of Liberty further out into the bay. Then came the great Halloween costume race across town, as Dean sought to find numerous garments with which to turn himself into a ghost/ghoul/monster (delete where appropriate) and I attempted to find knee-high soccer socks to go with my England kit, and paints to draw a massive Union Jack flag on to my face. In between, we managed to have a coffee in Dylan’s rather plush Soho House club, wander around Wholefoods, and find graffiti to take stylish photographs of. Most tourists would have spent their first New York hours around 5th Avenue or Times Square, so it was interesting to look at the city through a resident’s eyes, taking in the sights and sounds in Dylan’s New York life, noting the independent-run cafes and bookstores, the small side-turnings and open thoroughfares, the tenement apartments and early twentieth-century townhouses. This was a different New York to what I had previously experienced, but it only enhanced my opinion of Manhattan. In New York, everybody talks, everybody is out and about: the streets are alive with human chatter, teeming with people of seemingly every class and creed.
Halloween in America is a big deal. Much more so than in England, where our natural cynicism makes it impossible to find the treat in a trick, the amusement in fancy dress, or the interest in what other people in our communities are doing. Sure, there are other major holidays in the UK that get people talking, but Halloween in America is beyond anything I have experienced. This was a pageant of people, cramming the streets in costumes and face paints and props of every variety under the sun. Bumble-bees (Dean’s particular favourite) mixed with Cowgirls (my particular favourite), numerous versions of Alice in Wonderland rubbed shoulders with Russian Generals and, well, you name it and it was walking around somewhere in New York on Saturday night, ever so slightly inebriated and more than ever so slightly having a lot of fun. The Subway, already a little confusing for me to work out, became a cacophony of colour and noise and revelry as partygoers made their way across Manhattan in search of their own quintessential Halloween moments.
Ours began on Lexington Avenue, at a rather lovely midtown apartment belonging to friends of Dylan and his good mate Dan. With our English accents working nicely, the alcohol flowing gently (and when I say gently, I mean rigorously), and the music playing loudly, Dean and I found our form. What followed was a merry march through Manhattan, from Subway stations to bars, sidewalks to clubs. Needless to say, we were really drunk. I mean ‘absolutely, completely, totally and utterly off our faces, not sure where we were going and how we were going there but more than happy for some Americans to show us’ drunk. Dean woke up with a bumblebee’s antennae on his face (and he was rather pleased, to be honest). I woke up with half my face-paint mysteriously missing (also pleased). Dylan woke up and realised his Russian General’s uniform was several sizes too big (not pleased).
Bleary eyed, with pounding heads and aching limbs, we awoke into the cold light of a Sunday morning, safe in the knowledge that while the hangover would only be transitory, the memories of what all of us now consider to be one of best nights out of our lives will remain steadfast in their permanence. The hangover was worth it.
That might make Sunday sound like a right-off, but we still managed another long walk around town, a little spot of shopping, and another rendezvous with Bumblebee and Cowgirl in Brother Jimmy’s Sports Bar in Midtown, near to the Empire State Building. This was World Series night, where the Yankees were (and still are, as it is a best of seven contest) taking on the Phillies. It took a little while for me to understand the finer points of Baseball (thanks to Cowgirl, however, for setting me straight), but I am happy to tell you all that I am now a New York Yankees fan, and just to prove that I am fully on board Team Yankees, they promptly went and got hammered tonight (Sunday), in a manner similar to how Spurs can often take a goal lead against teams like Manchester United, but still inevitably lose. I am told the Yankees are actually pretty good, and they play in white and blue, so I am stuck with them now. “Let’s go Yankees!”
REM once said that leaving New York is ‘never easy’. I agree. While excited to head on to Michigan, and another close friend of ours in Adam Jacobs in the town of Ann Arbor, Dean and I were both a little down to be departing such a wonderful town having had such a busy and exciting few days. Thanks go to Dylan for that, and to the myriad of fantastic people we met along the way, from our Halloween buddies, to Robert’s other East 14th Street flatmates, all the way to ordinary New Yorkers who help contribute to the magic of this place. It was fitting, then, that we ended our stay with a walk through all the New York hotspots, from the Rockefeller Centre to a beautiful, autumnal Central Park, before finishing up at Ground Zero, where the World Trade Centre regeneration project has recently worked its way up above street level, rising out of the ashes of an unspeakable tragedy and once more preparing to soar above New York and the fields of the Republic beyond. What an inspirational way to leave the city.
Another skyline is on its way: Chicago, Illinois. Before that, however, we are off to Michigan to see Adam. Put your hands up for Detroit. The English are coming!
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