Greensboro, VT

The Hill Farmstead Brewery is located near the remote village of Greensboro, Vermont. It's at least two hours' drive from any major city (and the nearest city is Montreal). Their beers, which are widely reputed among the very best that exist, are only available to buy at the brewery itself: you can't buy them at any bars or shops anywhere in the world. As I happened to be in the area, kind of, I felt I had to drop in and pick up a couple of bottles. Many thanks to my mate Mark for the tip-off.

It took a while to get up here. After picking up my rental car at Pittsburgh, I headed out on a long drive north-east and had a night in Albany, NY, before continuing on for another long drive to Portland, Maine. And that's where I'm staying, in another splendid little AirBnB room. Portland itself is nothing to write home about, if I'm being honest. Perhaps it's nicer when the sun shines? It has at least yielded some good breweries for me to visit, notably Shipyard (who export to the UK) and Allagash (who don't, but definitely should).

Sadly the weather up here in the north has been very cloudy and rainy. As such, I don't have any pretty pictures for you to look at. Rather than go on about beer any longer (and God knows I certainly don't want to talk about football right now), I'll just leave it there for today!

The Hill Farmstead Brewery

Weirdly coloured mountains in Vermont

More scenery of the kind that's probably spectacular in better weather. Bah, etc.
Also my rental vehicle. It's not very good, but at least it's easy to find in car parks.

You are what you drink. Or at least I am, anyway.

Err...authentic popular English beers, apparently!
I recognise the one in the middle...

Edd vs Fast Food #12
Chipotle
A bit upmarket from Taco Bell. The burritos are bigger and fresher but much more expensive.
Also they make them right in front of you, like in Subway.
This removes the eternal worry that somebody has sneezed on your food while preparing it.

Pittsburgh, PA

Prior to Pittsburgh, I'd spent fifteen consecutive nights surrounded by fat snorers in stuffy sweaty overcrowded city-centre hostel dorms. When I arrived here, to an nice big airy AirBnB room all of my own, frankly I felt like King Louis the F***ing Fourteenth. I slept like a drugged lamb.

My train rides so far on this trip have been pretty short: NY to Philly was 90 minutes, Philly to Baltimore was just over an hour, and Baltimore to DC was barely 45 minutes. So I was pleased to restore my traveller credentials with a 7-hour Greyhound ride to get to Pittsburgh from DC. Thanks to a combination of luck (double seat to myself) and preparation (noise-cancelling headphones), the ride was really quite tolerable.

So far on this trip I've visited prosperous East Coast city centres, where people wear suits and hail Ubers and buy macchiatos using contactless payment apps. Now I'm in a Mid-West suburb, where people wear checkered shirts and drive old pick-up trucks and buy peanut butter using food stamps. It's a generalisation, but hardly a false one. And I think on the whole I prefer the people out here.

But of course the looming election highlights these divides. In the East Coast cities you meet diverse college-grad metropolitan types, almost none of whom will vote Trump; in the Mid-West sports bars you meet white male non-college-grad suburban types, almost all of whom will vote Trump. They'll vote for him because he speaks to them. Everything he says is of course nonsense on stilts, at best, but he speaks to these people. It's analogous to the Brexit vote, really. A country divided in two and the cracks beginning to show. One keeps hearing anguished cries of 'I don't understand how people can vote for that.' Correct. You don't understand. Give it a try and you might get somewhere.

More constructively, it must be observed that if the Democrats could have just found a candidate who wasn't the most widely loathed person in America, the election would be no contest at all. I also suspect that no senior Republican politican seriously believes in Trump - they have to pretend to support him, because if they all abandon him then their party base splits, and in a first-past-the-post electoral system that means they're all toast. It's pragmatism, not principle. (This is also the reason why most Labour MPs still take the party whip.)

Sorry for going off-topic. See below for Pittsburgh pictures. Tomorrow I'm picking up a rental car, which I've got for 10 days. I don't have anything else booked, I'm just going take off in a vaguely north-easterly direction, and see where I get to. In the meantime I'll leave you with a joke I overheard in a bar....

What's got nine arms, and sucks?

Def Leppard.

Pittsburgh by night, from the southern bank of the Monongahela River.

Pittsburgh by day, from Mount Washington to the south-west

Statue outside Carnegie Mellon university.
Symbolising a long hard slog, at the end of which...nothing.
Welcome to your student years, kids!

Downtown Pittsburgh, from the fountain in Point State Park

Edd vs Food #41
Pierogies, stuffed with pepperoni and cheese. At Hough's, directly opposite my AirBnB room.
Pierogies are dumplings, by the way. I'd never heard of them before but apparently they're a big thing in Pittsburgh.

Soccer memorabilia in a South Pittsburgh bar.
W T actual F?

Washington, DC

In 2014 I visited Yellowstone National Park. I couldn't help feeling that it would be kind of cool if the supervolcano went off when I was there. It's not that I positively wanted to see Armageddon envelop the earth; but I reasoned that if it was going to happen, I might as well be there watching when it did. A similar feeling arises now, arriving in the nation's capital for my second visit (see here for my first), at the prospect of Donald Trump getting his unnaturally small hands on the nuclear button. There's something strangely thrilling about it all.

I've had quite a bit of sporting action here in DC. First I saw local Major League Soccer team DC United dish out a 3-1 whipping to the big-money glamour boys of New York City FC. NYC have three World Cup winners - players David Villa and Andrea Pirlo, and manager Patrick Vieira - but they were comprehensively outclassed on this particular occasion. DC United replica shirts are $120, by the way.

Second, I got my first-ever taste of ice hockey: Washington Capitals 3 Colorado Avalanche 0. It wasn't bad actually: the action is fairly constant, and it's reasonably simple to figure out what's going on, which is more than can be said for either baseball or American football. There were of course the obligatory unconvincing 'fights', too. And replica hockey shirts start at $135.

At the hockey it was $11 a beer, so I was surprised to hear whiny trashy American girls in front of me talk excitedly about getting 'free shots' in the concourse. However, on listening further, I realised they were in fact whiny posh English girls who'd been given free shirts, not shots. It's funny how accents fly right past you when you're not expecting them. Three years ago I met a Scouse lass in St Louis and for the first couple of minutes I assumed she was Dutch or something.

On Monday lunchtime, heading back to my digs on foot after a morning spent taking photographs on the National Mall, I was very disgruntled to find that 9th Street was temporarily closed off to both traffic and pedestrians. The police weren't even letting people cross the road. Bah, I thought, probably we're all being held up for some jumped-up newly-elected tin-pot Congress-dork...yes, here comes the motorcade...for God's sake, how much security do they need, is it somebody I've heard of? Oh blimey hi Barack hi Michelle. See photo below.

By the way, do you know what the first vehicle in the presidential motorcade is? It's not the Secret Service, or even the police. It's a tow truck. If you're in the way, then they're going to move you out of the way, one way or another. When Trump gets in, no doubt he'll use a tank instead. And then the rest of us will just have to relocate to Yellowstone, and put our faith in volcanoes.

United States Capitol, seen from the southwest

Looking east across the National Mall to the Washington Monument, from the Lincoln Memorial

Korean War Memorial

Arlington Cemetery

POTUS

Bad day at the office for Andrea Pirlo (beard) and Patrick Vieira (suit)

Ice hockey, seen from the (relatively) cheap seats at the Verizon Arena

Edd vs Fast Food #11
A 'Big Italian' at Potbelly
Sandwich chain, a bit like Quiznos: upmarket from Subway and definitely worth a visit.

Baltimore, MD

No, I don't watch 'The Wire'. I have never watched 'The Wire'. I'm sure 'The Wire' is wonderful, by the standards of those huge DVD box sets which people sit and watch for hours and hours at a time, as if there was nothing better to do with our lives; as if we weren't all just fragile agglomerations of soggy molecules hurtling headlong into eternal oblivion. Insert disc 9 and press play. Exit through the gift shop.

But I digress. The point is that if you're a fan of 'The Wire' and you're hoping for photos of the real actual authentic street corner where DeWayne P. Tyrone busted a cap in the ass of Tyrone C. DeWayne, in revenge for being framed by DeAndre G. Jackson for a crime actually commited by Jackson B. DeAndre, then I'm afraid I shall have to disappoint you. Actually, for all I know, my photos below may include some 'Wire' locations. Have a look if you want.

Anyway. Baltimore. The Inner Harbour is very pretty and most of the downtown area is perfectly nice too, albeit quite sleepy by the standards of big American cities. But I've had a few trips further afield and you don't have to walk many blocks before you start seeing boarded-up houses and metal shutters. One trip to Mondawmin Mall took me through the Penn North neighbourhood, where there were gaggles of people on street corners clamouring into their cellphones for 'brown'.

On the whole Baltimore has been fairly pleasant, and hopefully the photos below reflect that. But I suppose I associate most American cities with a particular dominant theme (eg music, movies, politics, history), and Baltimore to me was a blank slate. I have no particular reason to come back, just as I had no particular reason to come here in the first place. That's what I said to the guy at the hostel reception desk as I left. "Well, you would," he retorted, "if you'd watched 'The Wire'". True dat.

Baltimore Inner Harbor

City Hall

Overlooking the Harbor from Federal Hill Park

Memorial for the 1940 Katyn massacre.

Not sure about those chimneys. Are they burning the books?

Philadelphia, PA

It's that time of year again. Leaves fall, nights draw in, Xmas advertising begins in earnest, and I get itchy feet. After a seven-stage journey - two planes and five trains - I'm now here in Philadelphia and my sixth big adventure has begun.

First things first: food, of course. An authentic Philly cheesesteak sandwich, in Philly. See photo below. For some reason I had expected these cheesesteaks to be huge and elaborate concoctions, dripping with dressings and stuffed to the brim with mixed vegetables. In fact, meat and cheese and bread is all you get, with optional onions. And they're not really all that big. But hot diggity damn, they're good.

Of course, there's more to Philadelphia than just those grease-laden slabs of artery-clogging lard, splendid as they are. Philly is also an important part of my ongoing musical odyssey through the USA. Places like Memphis, Nashville, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle need no introduction: Philly is more like St Louis or Muscle Shoals, in that you have to be a bit of a music geek (like me) to understand its musical legacy. There isn't any one artist or studio that really stands out, like Elvis in Memphis or Motown in Detroit. It's probably easiest just to quote the song titles: 'Could It Be I'm Falling In Love', 'Love Train', 'If You Don't Know Me By Now', 'Don't Leave Me This Way', 'La La Means I Love You', 'You Make Me Feel Brand New', 'Now That We've Found Love What Are We Gonna Do With It'. All that kind of thing. That's Philly soul.

There's also a long tradition of movies being filmed here, like 'Trading Places' and 'The Sixth Sense', and most notably 'Rocky'. There's a Rocky statue near the bottom of those famous steps, and of course at the top of the steps there are always tourists photographing each other jumping up in the air. I saw one guy make his wife stand at the bottom filming while he ran up the whole 72 steps, shadow-boxing all the way. Idiot.

On the whole, Philadelphia is a strong contender for a place in my top five American cities. It's big & thriving, but not too crowded, and it has plenty of interesting shabby-genteel neighbourhoods perched just on the right side of that precarious divide between bohemianism and pretentiousness. Only 90 minutes by train from New York, too. Y'all should give it a try, next time you're passing.

George Washington in the foreground, 'Rocky steps' in the background

The view from the top of the steps

Further back from the top of the steps, nearer the museum entrance

 

Downtown Philly seen from the east, halfway across the Benjamin Franklin bridge

Neoclassical / Art Deco splendour at 30th Street Station (completed 1933)

Edd vs Food #40
A Philly cheesesteak (obvs) from Pat's King Of Steaks, 1237 East Passyunk Avenue, South Philadelphia.
See above.