Chatham was a curious place, very much like an American version of some of the little villages we have back home where time seems to have stood still for centuries. We found somewhere out of town to park the coach and walked back, finding ourselves arriving at the single main street on which the now familiar wooden slat houses and shops were all painted in bright colours or adorned with colourful signs. In fact, many shops seemed to have those western style saloon doors and signs which hung from poles jutting out over the door which were gently swinging in the wind. By the side of the pavement, trees in resident's gardens stretched their branches out to hang over the road and drop leaves on passing cars. It was all very pleasant, and a far cry from the hustle and bustle of big cities not a million miles away such as Boston and New York. Our coach crew located what looked like a country style tea shop - a place which might well have won the prize for cutest place on Earth judging from the "oohs" and "aahs" it got from some of the older people in the party - and I settled down for a delicious lunch of sausages and eggs. I ordered my eggs "sunny side up" and actually got them exactly as I expected them to be, so an element of common sense obviously still exists away from the multinational hotel chains of Boston where every dish is scrutinised by a lawyer and medical advisor before being offered for sale. There was also an incredible confectionary shop just down the street where they actually made all the sweets on the premises - I've never tasted so many delicious flavours in my life, and I have the dental work to prove it. People from England who go to the US and then whinge constantly that they can't get any of the chocolate bars and sweets they love back home, clearly haven't been to small town America and tried anything the small mom and pop operations can offer them. I even had time to try one of the shop's delicious and ridiculously over the top ice-creams, which were offered on a menu by themselves and looked as though they would each take a week to make - in fact, we were so delighted with the quality of deserts on offer that a number of us suggested the owner should export the recipes and sell them around the world as a franchise operation. If only someone would take notice of this advice once in a while - it's incredible just how many delicious cakes, deserts and biscuits a visitor to the US will come across which he knows he will never see again. Come to think of it, do we even have shops back home that just sell sweets and ice-cream and nothing else, providing visitors with tables to sit down and pig themselves until their teeth fall out? If we do, I want to know where they are.

Back on board the coach, we stopped off briefly by the sea to tramp about on the sand dunes for no other reason than they looked as though nobody had tramped about on them recently - the lack of footprints in the sand seemed quite strange, actually. It always amazes me that I keep coming across wonderful places on my travels which I just wouldn't have expected to find - this place was like the desert, and considering it was right next to the sea I couldn't really understand why the sea breeze hadn't blown all the dunes away. For a good half hour, we all walked among the dunes, sat and looked out to sea, kicked sand at each other and generally acted like school children on a day trip to the beach. After we'd all made idiots of ourselves for some time - wondering briefly why passers by on the beach were looking at us with disgust, and thinking that they should perhaps let their hair down and chill out a bit - we made our way back to the coach, where the driver explained that he had forgotten to mention that the dunes are all protected and that it is illegal to walk on them. Apparently, they have helicopter patrols over the area, and anyone found enjoying themselves in any way is carted off to jail. To be honest, though, I don't think any of us would've been able to take the police seriously if they had turned up to arrest us - around here, they all seem to look like the park ranger out of the Yogi Bear cartoons, with big floppy hats and ridiculously over the top uniforms. All the same, we sat in silence like naughty school children all the way back to the hotel, perking up for a moment when we stopped for tea in the town of Sandwich but slipping quickly back into a stupor upon discovering that the only thing there was a mill with a small waterwheel and a glass museum which wanted three dollars for the privilege of looking at, well, lots of things made out of glass. I've seen things that are made out of glass before, believe it or not, and even though I have no doubt that the place is excellent for fans of things made of glass, and there was apparently a man inside who would've given us a demonstration of glass blowing, it didn't really float our boat.

Since my time in Boston is limited, I decided tonight to head downtown and get a proper feel for the city - last night, my priority had been to find Cheers, and although I did get to wander through some quaint cobbled backstreets and across some inner city parkland, I felt that there was clearly much more to see. I was advised by the hotel that the best place to start a walking tour of downtown Boston would be at Government Centre, the main subway station at the very heart of the city. I must have caught all of the students from Harvard Medical School having a night out on the town, as the subway - or the "Transit" as they prefer to call it here - soon filled up with more young people than you would probably be allowed to have in one place back home. After a couple of stops, it was like being on the Hong Kong MTR during the rush hour but with the carriages full to capacity with students instead of businessmen. I must've been the oldest person there - and it was quite depressing to feel old at 23. One of the things which just hammered home how amazing this city and its people really are was that people actually started talking to me during the journey. Now, if I had spoken first then I could sort of get my head around this because Americans do seem to have something of a soft spot for British accents - but when you're sitting on a train, minding your own business, and a young woman sitting opposite you suddenly smiles and asks how your day has been, you do tend to look around to see who they're talking to. Especially when they're wearing as little as possible and have hair which moves in slow motion when they turn their head - which a lot of the women here do. I don't know how men in Boston manage to concentrate, to be honest.

Getting off the subway at Government Centre and starting to explore the downtown area, I immediately wondered if there had been some sort of earthquake warning and everybody was trying to flee the city at once - the roads were gridlocked, and I could actually walk across the street by simply weaving in and out of the cars which were stacked virtually bumper to bumper. Of course, this is one of those things you really shouldn't do in the US as they tend to get rather upset about it. Just about anywhere else in the world, people just cross the road whenever there is a gap in the traffic, especially in places like the UK and Australia where you are usually kept standing at a pedestrian crossing for several hours before the lights change in your favour. In the US, on the other hand, they actually have a law called "Jaywalking" which makes it illegal to cross the road anywhere except at a pedestrian crossing, or to do so when the "Walk" signal isn't displayed - which, naturally, slows any foot journey down horrendously. My grandmother went on holiday to America once and reported that one of her coach party crossed a busy road to ask the policeman who was directing traffic in the middle how to get somewhere - apparently, he watched her with disbelief as she crossed over to where he was standing, looked her up and down after she had asked her question, and said "Ma'am, if you weren't British I'd be hauling you downtown right now". Anyway, I digress. It turns out that the roads were gridlocked across the greater Boston area tonight because the Boston Red Sox have chosen tonight to play an important national baseball match at home, and so everybody and their dog was going to the stadium. On top of this, as if things weren't already hectic enough, the president of the United States has decided to fly into Boston today and so you can't move for police. Between the two, I'm pretty sure the people of Boston are more interested in the baseball game. In fact, the most fun you can possibly have with an American man is to point out to him that we do actually have baseball in the UK, except that we call it rounders and it is mainly played by girls of ten. Of course, you'll wake up in hospital after saying this, but it's fun all the same.

My favourite area of Boston is a large open plaza and market called Faneuil Hall marketplace - although it really is one of those places which people tend to call by different names just to confuse visitors. Everyone I spoke to was calling it Quincy Market, and so that's what I called it right through until 2008 when I started doing research for this book and realised that Quincy Market is actually the large building in the middle. Faneuil Hall marketplace is very much like Covent Garden in London, only on a predictably larger scale. The old historic buildings of Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall together create the centrepiece of Faneuil Hall marketplace in much the same way as the central buildings do at Covent Garden, and these are surrounded with large plazas on which elaborate patterns have been created in the flagstones and cobbles so that you're always looking to see what you're walking on. The passages between the buildings and the open plazas are surrounded by a mix of trendy cafes, boutique shops and market stalls. When I stumbled across the place, it was absolutely filled to capacity with crowds of people watching street performers juggling torches from the seat of a unicycle, or magicians stopping people in the street to ask if they were missing their watch. The strange thing was that I stood and watched a few of the performers, and the acts seemed to be exactly the same as the acts I see in Covent Garden, even down to the same scripts - in fact, I'm more than a little convinced that I saw a couple of street singers who I have actually seen in Covent Garden. The whole area was very attractive by night, the flagstoned passageways being lit by hanging lanterns and low-key lighting spaced out along the sides of the buildings. Even this late at night, the plazas were full of people pushing vending carts around with little umbrellas sticking out of the top of them, selling ice cream or pretzels or donuts. Between the buildings, vendors were selling clothes and souvenirs and gadgets from those portable stalls that people set up in shopping centres, except that these seemed to be permanently moored to the street and the vendors were sitting alongside their stalls on stools watching the multitude of shows going on around them. Clearly, this was the hub of activity in Boston, and the crowd was made up of people from every walk of life - young couples walking hand in hand, people wearing next to nothing who were clearly thinking about moving on to a club somewhere, locals doing their late night shopping, businessmen in suits who had clearly not bothered to go home after work, pensioners sitting on benches and sipping coffee. In the middle of the road, there were even areas where people were sitting around makeshift cafes eating Chinese food and Fish N' Chips. And, of course, a decent proportion of the crowd was keeping a careful eye on the baseball game which was being shown on a big screen at one end of the central plaza. I have no idea how late Faneuil Hall stays open at weekends, but I can really imagine people coming out of nightclubs at three in the morning and just moving over to the plaza to watch street performers until dawn.

Inside Quincy Market, things weren't quite as I had been expecting - everything was certainly a lot more carefully laid out than they would've been at an indoor market back home. In the UK, visiting an indoor market will often mean finding one of two things - a hap-hazard collection of stalls scattered seemingly randomly around a big room and covered in fruit and vegetables, or a lot of people standing behind display cabinets and worktops displaying piles of trinkets, new age odds and ends , cheap gadgets, jewellery and assorted stuff that the stall holder found behind the sofa before leaving home that morning. UK markets, charming places though they may be, are often thrown together affairs with barely enough room to get past other people in the aisles between stalls. Looking at anything on offer can sometimes mean fighting your way through a crowd of people rummaging around on the stall as though searching for something in a garage sale. Things are certainly not like this in Quincy Market. Instead of traditional market stalls, each vendor had an old fashioned cart - the sort of thing you would expect to see someone selling Ice cream from - with oversized wheels and a colourful canvas awning on top. The carts were lined up in neat rows, with wide spaces between, so that I was able to wander through the market and stop to look at everything on offer without feeling cramped and without having to barge through crowds to get anywhere. The vendors were sitting on stools next to their carts, reading the local paper or smiling at passers by while waiting for a sale, and I found the place altogether more relaxed than any other market I've ever been to. You know sometimes you go to a big out of town shopping mall and see those carts set up in the middle of the corridors between the shops, selling bean-filled cushions or framed cells from movies? Well, imagine a whole marketplace full of them, only selling more everyday items as well as the more expensive goodies - that's what Quincy Market was like. The sun shone in through the open sides of the market and glass windows in the roof, and the atmosphere was more that of a friendly meeting place than a working market. I felt as though, at any point, any of the vendors could have simply released the brakes on his cart and wheeled it off around the plaza - and perhaps that's what they do. In fact, when I think about it, the layout of the market could be compared to a bus station, with all the carts neatly lined up waiting for their turn to be pushed out into the sunshine and around the plaza a couple of times before returning to their spots inside. Inside the adjacent Faneuil Hall building, there was a Cheers shop at which I bought myself a mug with the TV logo on it which I was assured was painted in 22 carat gold - which seems highly unlikely to me, but there you go. Apparently, since my visit, the shop has expanded into a whole new Cheers pub complete with a replica of the island bar used in the TV show, so now visitors have the slightly surreal ability to look at the front of the pub in one place and then hop on a bus across town to sit inside. To be honest, though, apart from the actual bar the new location bears no real resemblance to Cheers at all - the room is flooded with light from an entire wall of shutter windows onto the marketplace, and various parts of the bar are built in different rooms almost as though they are trying to show off different parts of the set in a museum. I actually got quite excited when I heard that they had built the inside of Cheers at Faneuil Hall. I imagined that, when I returned to Boston some day, I would be able to walk into a building and find myself inside the set and able to sit where Norm used to at the bar and imagine I was in the TV show - but then I saw the photos. Seriously, why is it so hard to put the authentic set in a building and make it feel real? If they did that, they'd really be on to something. Whatever they do, though, I can't imagine it will ever have quite the same atmosphere without Sam, Norm, Cliff and all the other regulars. I would want to walk through the door and have everyone look up and shout "Simon!" at me.

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.