How The East Was Won

Welcome, oriental reader, as today I update you on our progress through the North East of the US.

Just to confuse you, our journey starts in the mid-West, in the great city of Chicago. Now, the mid-West is actually the northern-central part of the US, of course, so I hope that's cleared that up. Anyway, we choose to spend a night in Chicago so we weren't in Amtrak sleepers two nights running, and so that adherence to Amtrak time wouldn't mean a late-night missed connection. This had the added benefit of giving us a day in Chicago too.

Chicago is pretty amazing: full of incredible architecture in a variety of styles, including some very tall buildings, a river which intentionally had its direction of flow reversed, and a whacking great lake. In fact, literally a Great Lake. It's also home to the world's biggest futures and options exchange, which is why I came here 11 years ago. We took on a walking tour, went up the Willis Tower (for 25 years, the tallest building in the world by some definitions), and also took a boat trip which itself included a guided architecture tour. It's all here: 70s supertall skyscrapers, 60s international modern, lots of 30s Art Deco, and even some Brutalism. Perhaps the best of all is the elegantly curved Chase building, or as we called it, the bendy building:

Having finished up in Chicago, we once again joined Amtrak for the trip to Boston, this time keeping reasonably well to time all the way. From Boston, we drove up through various English-sounding places to Vermont, where we're staying for the next week.

Vermont is pretty spectacular: seems like it's mostly trees, and the state gets its name from the Green Mountains which run up its spine. It's in these less-populated states that you really start to get an impression for how big and how sparsely settled the US actually is: Vermont is about a fifth of the size of England, but has a population which is 100x smaller. There's quite a lot of open space here, and the biggest city, Burlington, is about the size of Winchester.

As well as being staggeringly beautiful, Vermont is endearingly eccentric: it's the state which brought us the great Bernie Sanders, and he was in fact mayor of Burlington for many years. Vermont seems pretty left-leaning (everything seems to be a co-op and there aren't a lot of large chain shops or outlets), but at the same time it manages to have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the country. The shirts read "Keep Vermont Weird", and it seems like that's what the residents are determined to do.

Burlington will also go down in history as the place we finished the "50 States of Plates" challenge, finally tracking down that long-awaited Delaware plate on our way into the city. That's saved me a cross-country flight before the end of the year to visit that state simply to get it crossed off. Thanks Vermont, for saving me from Delaware!