Back in 1992, I flew out to Boston in Massachusetts for a two week tour of New England during the Autumn - or "the fall" as they insist on calling it in the US. Seems a bit unoriginal really to call it that just because the leaves are falling - they don't call the summer "the shine" or the winter "the freezing my nuts off" do they?

Anyway, what follows are my journals from the time, suitably researched and updated for this volume...

A cab collected me from home at seven this morning and drove me to Heathrow, where the smiley check-in assistant told me that there were so many people taking flights today that I would have to wait until nine o'clock before they could sort themselves out and work out when they might be able to check me in. Being one of the busiest airports in the world - perhaps even the busiest if you ignore all the official rules for what "busy" actually means and just listen to what Heathrow likes to tell anyone - I would've thought that they might be used to having a lot of traffic passing through by now, but apparently not.

I had a cup of tea to pass the time, mainly because I'm unlikely to see another one for two weeks, carted my bags around until my arms began to fall off, and was eventually allowed to hand my luggage over to somebody who tossed it casually onto a conveyor belt while I fought my way through the crowds to get to the departure lounge. This is where I was informed that American Airlines had overbooked the flight and that they didn't actually have enough seats on the aircraft for everybody to get on - airlines have never been very keen on people standing up on international flights, so they were offering a thousand dollars to anyone who was willing to take a later flight. This always seems to happen to me . I'm not one of those people who releases steam from their ears when there is a delay at an airport - I'll just go and get a book and find something to pass the time - so the concept of having to stay at the airport for an extra couple of hours reading a book and people watching in return for a thousand bucks sounds like a really good deal to me. Unfortunately, of course, I always seem to be flying out to somewhere where I'm expected to join an organised tour at the other end - so I am never able to take them up on the offer in case I miss the coach.

The flight took a little over six hours, not actually as long as I had expected, and there were more complications to deal with when I got to Boston International Airport. The tour rep had booked me onto coach number three for the journey to the hotel, but only coach numbers one and two bothered to show up. Bewildered, we all sat around for ages while the rep scratched his head and made frantic phone calls, and in the end the news came through that our coach had left the coach station with the other two and had apparently just vanished into thin air. We never did find out what had happened to it - in the end, the tour company made arrangements for us to be picked up in an old American yellow school bus and we got to be shuttled to the hotel like a bunch of mature students on our way to an excursion. I was almost waiting for someone to moon out of the back window at passing motorists, or flip somebody the finger as they like to say over here. My hotel in downtown Boston is right in the middle of the historic college district, which must have made it seem even more strange to the locals when we all turned up in a school bus. In fact, I'm staying right next to the Medical college of Harvard University - which means that I have to share the food court of the shopping centre downstairs with large collections of students drinking and flirting and doing all the other things they didn't come to one of the world's most famous universities to do. Mind you, they're all incredibly polite - and once you've been brushed past in the line for coffee by fifty or sixty beautiful American college students wearing as little as they think they can reasonably get away with, fluttering their eyelashes and telling you they just lurrrve British accents, you start to warm to a place. This is the girls we're talking about here, just to be clear.

This evening, I managed to get hold of a map of the downtown area from reception and looked up the location of the bar used in the TV series "Cheers", somewhere which has become one of the must-see locations in the city. To get there, I had to experience not only the delights of downtown Boston but also the full glory of the metropolitan subway system. The subway, which is what they call our underground trains, is actually very impressive - not at all like the dark, dank, dangerous looking place depicted on television when they show the New York version - the tunnels and stations were spotlessly clean, and there was no sign of graffiti anywhere. This, alone, warmed me to Boston straight away - I don't think I've been anywhere before where I've seen no graffiti at all while wandering around. The subway trains, quite bizarrely, run over ground for quite some distance, trundling down the middle of the road on tracks as though they are trams - the power comes from overhead cables, which means that people just walk back and forth across the tracks without worrying that they might be electrocuted, but I did find myself wondering exactly how they enforce the fare system. People in Boston must be incredibly honest, because there is absolutely nothing stopping anyone just walking into the middle of the road to one of the numerous open air subway stations and getting on the train without purchasing a ticket first. Eventually, the trains do go into a tunnel and descend into the bowels of the earth as they reach the heart of the downtown area, but this is where the resemblance to the London Underground ends. Even on the stations below ground, there is no "pit" through which the train runs - when you've paid your fare at street level and descended on the escalators to the subway station, you come out into a large tunnel through which the trains run along a track down the middle. The platform and the track are on the same level, so you can literally walk onto the track and look down the darkened tunnel to see if there is a train coming, before having to quickly jump out of the way to avoid being flattened. Power, of course, continues to come from overhead cables in the roof of the tunnel. The fare, when I rode the subway, was a mere eighty-five cents from anywhere to anywhere else - none of that nonsense about asking you where you're going and telling you how much it will cost, you just drop your coins into an unmanned slot when you get on board the train at a over ground station, exactly as though it's a bus. Theoretically, there is nothing at all stopping you from paying less than you're supposed to, or nothing at all, although there is sometimes a guard standing by the door to wave his finger at you sternly. The underground stations are slightly different - you buy a token on your way into the station and then drop it into the turnstile to gain access to the platform - so you have to be slightly more honest if you choose to board the train underground, but I can't help but think that, if they trust people enough to just let over ground passengers drop coins in a slot without any sort of check or issuing of tickets to say that they've paid, then why bother with the tokens when the train descends below the surface at all.

It's not just the subway which seems clean compared to the graffiti covered mess we call a city back home. The streets and buildings of Boston also seem to be spotless, and this seems even more surreal when you consider that many of the skyscrapers and office blocks towering over me as I walk along the street here are clearly based on the same architectural styles used in the UK and sometimes it seems as though I've gone home to a London which has been scrubbed clean and then washed down with a high powered water cannon. Walking the streets of Boston is a little confusing at times - they don't quite seem to be able to make up their minds whether the buildings should be gleaming modern monstrosities covered in glass and reflective chrome, or discrete brick buildings which look as though they are centuries old - pretty much the same problem which some areas of London have. To their credit, I must say that Boston comes across as a thousand times better than London, all the same - whereas London seems to be heading more in the direction of building as far into the sky as possible and pushing all the old buildings aside, Boston seems to limit its skyscrapers to particular areas and great chunks of the city retain the charm of times past. In fact, if you leave your manners at home for a moment and just wander along the side streets peering through the great bay windows of some of the marvellously over the top old houses here, you can actually see that many of them have high domed ceilings with patterns or elaborate paintings on them. There must be people living in Boston who wake up every morning and think nothing of staring up at something approaching the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Away from the business centre, where all taste has vanished from the minds of every architect, the back streets of Boston are usually cobbled or covered in classical flagstones which make a satisfying clunk as you walk over them in hard shoes... and just when I thought I'd seen everything a city could possibly do to make itself look like something from days gone by, I had to do a double-take as I was passed on the street by a horse, pulling a glass carriage like something out of Cinderella, complete with driver in top hat and tails holding onto the reins and bouncing up and down in an altogether overly exaggerated way to the sound of the horses hooves clip-clopping along the flagstones. If the driver had raised his hat as he passed and thrown me a cheery "Afternoon, Guv'nor", I would not have been the least bit surprised.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.