We wanted to see some of the "out of the way" parts of North Eastern USA so we turned to the trusty mode of transport known as the automobile and took a week to drive ourselves around the region, focussing on the state of Maine. It started out on a high note when collecting our vehicle in Boston we were offered a free upgrade from our small, cheap car to a Mustang, so we set out north, in style, towards the coastal city of Portland, Maine. The state of Maine is...

Boston was the first of the universally known, large cities that we visited in the US. We kept up our recent trend of couch surfing, staying with a guy about our age, Aaron, originally from Alabama. This definitely made a huge difference to our stay as we all hung out together for most of the weekend and got along really well. Aaron showed us some of the local sights including a tour of the Samuel Adams brewery which was great, probably due to the free beer. ...

After escaping Syracuse, we arrived in Albany late at night and had a 3km walk in the pouring rain to get to a share house of seven people happy to take in weary travellers while they visited the state capital. Although we were a day early, we were warmly welcomed into the home by Dave (our "host" found on a website, couchsurfing.com, set up to facilitate these meetups) and were very relieved to be comfortable, warm, safe and dry. Albany was a pleasant city with...

Our second stop in the United Sates was Syracuse which was an interesting experience to say the least. We first walked to our hotel and were given our room with the caveat that it might be a little dirty, house cleaning would get to it very soon. We would be very interested to see what a very dirty room looked like to them since the room was an absolute mess. Not only was there rubbish all over the place, dirty towels in puddles on the floor and the fridge had le...

The town of Buffalo was our first stop in the USA which belongs to a region in the United States known as the "Rust Belt" due to the fact that it was once a manufacturing hub but has been in decline for a number of years. We were surprised by the size of the town but more surprised by how quickly areas went from nice, safe streets to dangerous back alleys full of "interesting" characters. We were approached a few times by people trying to sell us drugs which made...