I dragged myself out of bed at 7.00 this morning and made my way down to the restaurant for breakfast, discovering to my dismay that the hotel refuses to make eggs "sunny side up" - which is a fried egg to the rest of the world. It seems that they are so paranoid that somebody might get salmonella from an egg which hasn't been cooked properly and then sue the hotel, that they will only serve eggs which have been cooked solid. Here's a novel idea - just give the customer what he bloody well asks for and then employ a chef who knows how to cook an egg without poisoning anyone. Is that really too much to ask? If I can accept the risk of jumping out of a plane with a backpack strapped to my back in the hope that something large and parachute-like will come out of it when I tug the little piece of cord I've been given, then I'm pretty sure I should be allowed to take the risk of eating a fried egg, okay?

The coach turned up at 8.30, and we began our day long tour out to Cape Cod. You can definitely tell that this is where the founding fathers - or the pilgrims, as some like to call them - landed on the 21st December 1620. For a start, everywhere you go in this part of the US seems to be named after somewhere in England - starting with Plymouth, where they landed, the pilgrims appear to have wandered inland renaming everything in their path according to their own tastes: "What, this place is called Great Stamping Bear Lake? We can't have any of that nonsense - we'll call it Chatham instead, okay?". One of my favourite stories about the arrival of the pilgrims in New England was that they were greeted by an Indian who spoke broken English and who went on to introduce them to another who spoke it fluently and became interpreter for the party. The idea that native Americans had previously had no contact with "white man" is greatly exaggerated, to say the least - in fact, people seem to conveniently forget that America had already been well known and visited for 150 years by the time the founding fathers arrived, having been discovered, of course, by Columbus way back in 1492. Squanto, the Indian who assisted the pilgrims as their interpreter, had already spent a considerable amount of time touring the world. In 1614, a mostly forgotten ships captain with the tremendously ordinary name of John Smith passed by what was to become known as Cape Cod and kidnapped Squanto along with several other natives, intending to sell them into slavery when his ship arrived back in Spain. Squanto, being rather more intelligent than the unfortunate Captain Smith had reckoned on, escaped from his captors and made it to England where he spent some time doing odd jobs and learning the English language. Five years after his kidnap, Squanto gained passage back to New England where he was slightly put out to discover that, in his absence, just about everybody had been wiped out by a chicken pox epidemic.

In Plymouth we were shown Plymouth Rock, which is traditionally the place at which the pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower - although, as is often the case with these things, nobody bothered to actually document the event or mention to someone else that it might be a good idea to make a note of it for over 100 years. It is therefore debated in some quarters whether the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock at all, or somewhere altogether different - but whatever you believe, the rock sits proudly on the beach at Plymouth where people can look at it from every angle and say "Wow, it's... a rock." Oh, and it's been inscribed - just in case somebody should forget which rock they're supposed to be looking at. After suddenly thinking to myself "what am I doing? I'm looking at a rock, for gods sake", I went into a local shop and bought some stamps so that I could sit on the picturesque Plymouth sea front and write some postcards before getting back on the coach. Unfortunately, this then meant trying to work out how to use the United States mail boxes, which is probably something people should be taught at school. The first rule is that US mail boxes are blue except when they aren't. The next is that they are square with a round top except when they're small non-descript boxes on a pole. Of all the rules, however, the most important is that you should always be in danger of suffering amputation of the hand when posting a letter. Sometimes, you have to pull down a heavy hinged flap with both hands which springs back and slices your arm in two as soon as you let go to drop your letter inside. At other times, the things are so complicated to work out that there is a little white sign stuck on the front telling you how to post your mail. I really don't know why the United States Postal Service goes to so much effort to make sure your letters are stored in a secure, tamper free environment which will take your arm off if you try to reach inside - after all, when your letter gets to it's destination, they generally leave it in a box at the end of the drive where anybody walking past can help themselves.

Before having to be back on the coach, I ventured into a shop with a window full of donuts and a large swinging sign outside on which was painted a large donut. Disappointed to discover that it wasn't a shoe shop as I had expected, I instead spent some time pondering the quite staggering variety of donuts on offer. Well, I say variety. They've never heard of a jam doughnut in America so every one of them was of the hole-in-the-middle variety, but what was incredible was the sheer number of flavours I could choose from. This was like a Baskin-Robins six million flavour ice-cream shop, only for donuts. The place, despite only selling donuts and coffee, was laid out like a fifties diner - there was a gleaming white counter along one wall, next to which were a line of low bar stools with red tops on which customers could sit and talk to the woman behind the counter while they chomped on their vanilla ice cream and lemon meringue pie flavoured donut. The only thing that was missing was a juke box, but the sales assistant was so incredibly smiley and helpful that I felt sure she would sing for me if I complained about the lack of music. I was wrong.

Around Massachusetts, most of the houses in small villages and towns appear to be built out of either wooden slats or flat grey stones, giving the whole state a mixture of old world charm and the feeling that you've entered one of those small American towns that Stephen King writes about where everybody drives cars from the 50s, strangers should be eyed with suspicion and the local children go around murdering people with scythes. It's probably more of the former and less of the latter, to be honest. It's actually very hard to explain just how beautiful the scenery of New England is, especially now with the multicoloured leaves falling from the trees and the ground starting to crunch underfoot - mainly from the fallen leaves, I hasten to add, and not because the paving slabs are falling apart. I think it's probably good enough to say that this would be my first choice of place to live if I decided to put down roots in the States. The countryside around us as we travelled through the state from Boston this morning was all brightly coloured fields and little towns of wooden homes with tall church spires and people putting down whatever they were doing to wave as we passed. In the shops and streetside cafes we've visited today, the locals have been coming over to say Hello, ask where we come from and make sure that we love their village. The best thing to do in this situation is to say that their village is by far the nicest place you've ever been - as it happened, I did love every single village we stopped at, but that Stephen King idea never quite leaves the back of your mind. The sentence "Well, actually, I was just thinking that someone might like to run a lawnmower over the village green" might well be followed by "Ok, perhaps I might have spoken a little hastily about your beautiful village. Now could you please ask your son to remove that scythe from my neck?"

After leaving Plymouth and crossing back over from the Cape Cod peninsula on the small bridge which is the only way onto the island, we passed through the town of Chatham where our driver clearly forgot just how narrow the roads were and decided on the spur of the moment to take a shortcut down a pretty little village lane. We didn't mind, since the village looked like it might have some interesting old buildings hidden away on the backstreets - and besides, the locals were clearly very welcoming sorts who were delighted to see us driving down their narrow lanes and took great delight in running after the coach, shouting at the driver and waving furiously at him. Half way along the road, we found ourselves stuck behind a convoy of huge yellow trucks which took up the entire width of the road - they were all parked up, and each had a crane extending out of the back of it on which a man was currently trimming the trees for the council. The local residents, who had until this moment been happily pruning their hedges and watching another normal uneventful day go by - except the ones who had been running after the coach and trying to warn us that we were going the wrong way - suddenly stopped what they were doing and started laughing and pointing and going inside to call up their friends and tell them about this stupid coach driver who had tried to drive down their street on the day when the tree cutting service was in town.

The trucks had to lower their cranes, to the sound of much cursing from the guys on the platforms, and drive further up the road to somewhere where there was just enough room for them to mount the pavement so we could squeeze past. Then, a couple of hundred yards further on, we suddenly arrived at a sharp bend that it was obvious we wouldn't be able to get around in our bulky coach, so we had to reverse all the way back down the road and past the trucks which had so kindly moved out of our way. The locals had all given up on whatever they'd had planned for their day by now, and had set up garden chairs on their little wooden porches so that they could watch the action as though we were a Hollywood movie. Our driver got a standing ovation from the entire coach when he succeeded in getting us back to the main road without scraping anything, which I took to be sarcastic applause as he had, after all, got us all into the mess in first place. I'm sure that, as we finally drove away along the route we should've taken in the first place, the locals in Chatham were standing by their front gates shouting "Encore!"

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.