It's been about a week since we last updated y'all (see we're already talkin American) on our tour and since then we've ended our first stint in New York - we'll be back at the end of June - and spent 3 nights in Boston. New York was mainly occupied by us getting our trip and our selves in order after the chaotic organization getting out of SA. After many Starbucks and McDonalds coffees and with the use of their free wifi, we managed to put a skeleton in place for our US trip. Our next few stops will be around the central East and take us to Boston, Atlantic City and Washington making our way up to Chicago to catch a Contiki across the North of the US. We were deciding how to fit Philadelphia in but in the end we chose Atlantic City as neither of us had been there and we couldn't say no to the cheap rates for staying at the Trump Plaza. We've also decided to keep two additional running blogs, separate to our updates, that we'll use to firstly track how we're getting around and where we've been staying and secondly to let everyone know what plans we have going forward…so take note of this if you're planning any travels!

Back to story time now, Boston is a great city with a fantastic energy and fascinating history - especially for Americans. The thing that I found most interesting is how many times the city has been floored, rebuilt, remodeled and revived. From wars for democracy to immigrant slums to housing the most important people and best minds in the country. Another interesting point is that many buildings have restrictions on changing the outer face of the building so they get completely rebuilt from the inside and often get floors added below the building as extensions. With all this history also comes about 300'000 students, and with this many students comes the energy, the interest and, of course, the party.

The city is full of little pubs, most of which, have great live music. We stayed in a great location, right between the North Station and the Gardens (main sports stadium) which absolutely packed the area around our hostel when the Bruins played the first of their NHL playoff games while we were there…unfortunately they lost, but it didn't stop the streets from being filled with black and yellow jerseys nor the beer from flowing very freely - a really great atmosphere. It was a good idea to be in Boston for the weekend and the city helped us find our party shoes. We finally managed to get to some cool little parties at the many Irish bars in the area and also managed to make a dent in the bottle of Jameson (just a coincidence that its Irish) that we'd been schlepping since OR Tambo. Each night ended off at our "local", the Grand Canal, which is a lekker dive bar and was only a street away from our hostel - so a perfect stop for that final night cap. Two things that we weren't expecting though were: (1) the city shuts down quite early at 2am; (2) you need your passport for proof of age - SA drivers was not acceptable.

During the day we filled up on touring and sightseeing using the hop on/hop off tour guide busses. These were a great way to get around the city and to cover all the main attractions: heritage buildings, parks, burial grounds, homes, universities etc etc. In the centre of the city is a large Holocaust memorial where they have put up 6 tall glass pillars with a million numbers written on each pillar - we will post photos of this soon. It's quite easy to walk around most of the city but if you want to get up to Harvard and MIT in Cambridge (which we would recommend), it's much easier to use these busses or to take a subway or a cab.

Just before arriving in Boston, we saw that there was an Adele concert on our last night there. We planned our accommodation and late night bus around the show and mercilessly tried to get tickets to get us into House of Blues - even offered to work there for the night and tried our "but we came all the way from South Africa" sob story - but to no avail. At least we got some education from the local scalpers on how the system works…don't worry, we weren't taken for a ride, just had a good lag with/at them in the ticket queue. We ended the night with a substitute movie ticket to see Thor, a final beer to some live classic covers and a 2am overnight bus to Atlantic City...at least we saved on a nights bed rent!

Trek on…Brett and Darren