Our Itinerary!

Welcome to our blog! We hope you'll come back regularly to see our daily posts as we travel across the US. We'll keep 'em short, we promise. But to get you started, we wanted to share with you our itinerary; the map above shows you where to find all the fancy places we mention.

0. Starting out from Boston, we'll be catching an early morning flight on August 2nd to our first destination...

1. Washington D.C.: We'll be staying in DC for two nights, and will aim to pack in visits to as many of the sights as we can. Top of our list are The Whitehouse, Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln/Jefferson/FDR Memorials, the National Art Gallery, the Pentagon, and (if Vikki can persuade Malcolm into it) the FBI's headquarters (well, they've listened in on so many of our phone calls it'd be rude of us not to drop in while we're in town).

2. Baltimore, Maryland, is our second stop. Actually we’re not going right into Baltimore, because we’ve watched season one of The Wire and Baltimore is scary! We're actually going to a place called Ellicott City, a little outside of Baltimore, where we'll be meeting up with the sister and mother of the husband of the professor Vikki's been working with at Harvard (confusing, isn't it?). You'll remember we met these people at Christmas time when we went to Vikki's professor's house for dinner. At the time they very kindly made an open invitation for us to visit them; no doubt they are regretting it now, as they've got to entertain us for the evening and put us up for the night on August 4th.

3. Richmond, Virgina, is stop three. We'll set off bright and early for Richmond on August 5th, arriving in time for lunch before taking a look at some of the sites of the early colonies (Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown), and possibly also George Washington's old stomping ground, 'Mount Vernon'.

4. Wilmington, N. Carolina, is next up, on August 6th. We selected this more or less entirely on the grounds that Dawson's Creek was filmed there. Mind you, so was the movie Cape Fear, but we're pretending that we don't know that. Not entirely sure yet what we'll be seeing or doing there; maybe we'll just find a bar on the coast with a little wooden jetty that we can dangle our legs over while we sing the Dawson's Creek theme song (All together now: "Doo Doo, Doo Doo Doo, I don't wanna wait...".) One intriguing potential stop along the way is Roanoke Island, where in 1585 the first English settlement in the US was established, and where very soon after it disappeared without a trace. Hmmmm.

5. Charleston, S. Carolina is our destination on August 7th; and, yes, we will be attempting to do the Charleston while we're there. In between dances, we'll also be visiting some of the old plantations, and the Fort Sumter National Monument, site of the first shots fired in the Civil War. We'll probably spend two nights in Charleston before heading on to...

6. Savannah, Georgia on August 9th for a two-night stay. Savannah is apparently one of the most beautiful places you could imagine, so our main aim while we’re there will be to kick back and relax, drink plenty of sugary iced tea, eat chicken-fried steak and hominy grits, and wander round the town looking at the old mansion houses.

7. Atlanta, Georgia will be our next destination on August 11th. Well, actually our destination will be Memphis, but it’s a bit of a long drive from Savannah, and Atlanta is about halfway between. We don’t know too much about Atlanta, except that Dr King was born and is buried there, but this we think is a good reason to visit, albeit on the way to somewhere else. Having said that, we may get tempted to go to Birmingham, Alabama instead, for the equally good reason that it’s Birmingham innit? It would also mean that we could notch up two more states if we were sneaky and cut through the top corner of Mississippi on the way to…

8. Memphis, Tennessee, birthplace of Elvis and of Justin Timberlake. On the menu: Graceland, Sun Studio, the Rock’n’Soul Museum, and deep-fried Mars bars. Also the National Civil Rights Museum, housed literally in the motel where Dr King was assassinated.

9. St Louis, Missouri, is where we’ll be by about lunchtime on August 13th. Well, we should actually be there by about an hour before lunchtime, since we’ll have crossed our first US time zone the previous day (spooky, eh?!). Might drive on to Hamilton in the afternoon to see Mark Twain’s boyhood home, and to try out a few fence-painting scams before bedtime.

10. Denver, Colorado, will be our destination on August 14th. It’s rather a long way from St Louis – you’d have to drive about three million miles through Kansas and into the next time zone for starters – so we’re going to go by ‘plane. Things to do in Denver when you’re still living include, erm, well there’s the ‘unsinkable Molly Brown’ house and the Six Flags water park. Maybe we’ll have to take a trip out of town to Boulder, or to Fairplay (aka South Park), or to the Buffalo Bill Memorial Museum on the wonderfully named Lookout Mountain (conveniently situated next to the Coors brewing plant).

11. Salt Lake City, Utah, will be our next stop; we’ll be taking the Amtrak train right through the Rocky Mountains to get there (choo! choo!). It’ll take us the best part of a day, but it’ll be well worth it. Once we get there, we’ll make our way over to Donny and Marie’s place for a welcome dinner. Not really; we vowed we’d never visit them again after the way they behaved the last time. What we will definitely do, though, is visit the Mormon Tabernacle; then we’ll try to find somewhere that will serve us a stiff drink.

12. Reno, Nevada, the poor (but much more fun) relation of Las Vegas, is where we’ll stop next on August 16th. After turning our watches back yet another hour, and calling Vikki’s mom to wish her a Happy Birthday, we’ll hit the casinos. Well, it’s either that or get divorced. Or get married. These are the three things to do in Reno. Perhaps we’ll get a divorce in the morning, go put $5 worth of pennies in the slot machines at lunchtime, and marry each other again around teatime (you can view our Wedding Gift list at: http://www.letsgetdivorcedandremarrythesamedaysopeoplewillhavetobuyuspresents.com.

13. San Francisco, California, here we come on August 17th. We will, of course, be sure to wear some flowers in our hair. While we’re there we’ll take a look at the Golden Gate bridge, and nip across to Oakland (in daylight – it’s a bit like Baltimore we reckon) to have a snoop around Berkeley. From there we’ll take a very leisurely drive south along coastal road, Route 1, stopping overnight at places that take our fancy, and generally dawdling over to…

14. Los Angeles, California, some time around the 19th/20th of August. We plan to spend just an afternoon in LA; all we really want to do there is go round on one of those open-top buses where they point out the celebs houses to you, and have a quick gawp at the Hollywood sign. Once these musts are ticked off the list, we’ll be heading off again, either by car or train, to…

15. The Grand Canyon, Nevada. ‘Nuff said.

16. San Diego, California, is next on the 22nd August or thereabouts. We hope to have a day or two on the beach there, and we’ll by flying back from there to Boston on the 26th August. But not before the daytrip to…

17. Tijuana, Mexico. Margaritas triple para todos! (Loose translation: Triple Margaritas all round!)

Exhausted already? Us too. So go and have a lie down, and come back to our blog tomorrow for the first exciting instalment of Malcolm and Vikki: On the Road!

V&M :-)