BACK FROM THE US OF A

It's a full week now - and I still feel times when I'm tired, sleeping till noon without a moment of wakefulness but full of delight at the wonderful time we had in New England.

We visited four states - Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York State. Society of American Magicians' Pres. Elect Bruce drove us hundreds of miles and we met some splendid people such as Vinny Grosso whose garden is a go-kart track and whose house is actually on a creek; Eddie Gardner of Diamond Magic (now we know whose emails we delete with increasing regularity) and Peter Lantros who gave us a tour of his Patriot Missile factory (I kid you not!) and also housed us for two nights at his wonderful museum, the Magic Barn,where I surprised everyone by spending all of one night playing poker on one of Peter's marvellous arcade machines.
We ate masses of food, Bruce stopping over-regularly for meals to supplement the Dunkin' Donuts and coffee he seems to live on. And, in spite of the rain, we managed two history visits:

To Salem and the Witch Museum with its fascinating waxwork presentation (no animatronics here) and also to the preserved home of Louisa May Alcott who wrote Little Women and its sequels. Both of these were fantastic opportunities to learn about things we'd only vaguely acknowledged before.

Then there was the shopping! I felt like a millionaire as everything is so cheap whilst the pound is strong against the dollar. they decided I went to every Macys in every mall - but Bruce and I also descended on a couple of Disney stores which had great sales - Rob is now the proud owner of a shirt and a hoodie which sport Grumpy from the seven Dwarfs!

Thanks to all who were so very kind and helpful to us on our amazing trip... and it doesn't end there as I'm out to Kentucky in July. Now there's jetsetting for you!

Meanwhile - I'll be posting some more of the amazing things I photographed, particularly from Peter's collections.