By Hamish Russell (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA).

So now that my time at UMass is up, the travelling has got underway. My first stop was staying with my roommate and his family for about a week and a half and seeing the Boston and Cape Cod areas. After making the journey from UMass to his house – during which we had to turn around and drive back to UMass because our room keys were still in our pockets, and we didn’t fancy the $150 fine – we had a couple of days of just chilling out after the exam period.

Once we’d recovered, our first stop was Martha’s Vineyard. The Island has some truly beautiful scenery and weather, but we arrived pretty early into the tourist season so a lot of things were closed or not in full swing. Even so, it was well worth a visit.

 

After Martha’s Vineyard, we headed to Cape Cod to see that area before heading to Boston. The Cape was similar to Martha’s in a lot of ways, probably just because of the coastline and the sun. In order to cram as much of the Cape into the little time we had, we drove up and down it, taking scenic roads and stopping to see the highlights and for the occasional beach break.

When I got to Boston, I did pretty much everything. I did parts of the Freedom Trail, I saw Boston Harbour, I spotted the owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC (but was banned by my Bostonian friends from approaching because they deemed it “disrespectful and inappropriate”), I visited a ‘Cheers’ bar, saw the site of the Boston Marathon bombings and went to a Red Sox game. Of course, the history and culture of the city was very interesting, but as a sports fan, the baseball was the highlight.

 

The next leg of my travels is a road trip from Philadelphia to Savannah (in Georgia), so hopefully I won’t end up driving on the wrong side of the road or opening the door when I try to change gear.