For me, the best part of any trip is seeing Hawkes Bay unfold as the plane descends towards Hawkes Bay Airport.
The worst part is the two boxes of mail and over three hundred emails that require attention on our return. Mind you the junk mail and the correspondence from nutters is easily identified and able to be deleted or sent for recycling without the hassle of having to open it or read it.
It’s interesting traveling now that I am a City Councillor. I find myself taking great interest in refuse transfer stations and landfills. I find myself quizzing people about what rates (the yanks call it land tax) they pay and what they get for their money. I find myself looking at parks and sporting facilities in a completely new light.
The east coast of the United States is certainly a vastly different place than the west. We loved Washington DC with its memorials and monuments – its huge sturdy buildings that don’t block out the sky and the very real impression we got that we were visiting the centre of power.
Historic Boston was a great place to visit and the state of Maine was simply beautiful. We enjoyed being big kids in Orlando although I have to admit the new space ride in the Epcot Centre made me a little green around the gills.
Miami was just as expected. Warm, racy, brash and a great place to visit. In fact we could easily live in Miami if we won lotto – perhaps a couple of times!
There were two overriding impressions we gained from this trip to the eastern seaboard of the USA.
The first is that Americans are still the most hospitable people in the world. We had people we had never met inviting us into their homes for meals, taking us on outings and showing us around. One lovely fellow took a day off work to show us around Boston and then took us home to have dinner with his wife. Such was the generosity we were shown.
The second impression was that the Americans will never learn. They still serve everything in polystyrene and plastic despite the oil crisis – no thought of using crockery that can be washed and reused. And despite the fact that excess borrowing has precipitated their current economic crisis, they have airline stewards and stewardesses, up and down the aisles trying to convince passengers to sign up for yet another credit card.
Clearly the message about borrowing has yet to get through.
Anyway it is good to be home.
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