There are obvious differences. You drive on the right (note: not the correct) side of the road. Your cars are huge (you wouldn't be able to park them in England). Your roads are wide, long and straight (ours follow the landscape). Even your lanes and pavements (sidewalks) are wide. Your shops are huge and spaced out with large car parks in front and around.

Driving in 3-D along the broken remnants of Telegraph Road in Detroit (long conflict between people in power), I commented on the amount of free space that was everywhere. Tracy, of course, was quite surprised at this. She pointed out that Telegraph Road is actually pretty crammed for a main road, at least on that stretch...

Maybe this will explain it: put England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland together into the United Kingdom and you have a country about the same size as Michigan. And we have sixty million people living here, twice as many as Canada, the second largest country in the world. Another reason I want to get out - breathing space...

We only stayed in Michigan briefly, but we'd head back later. First it was off on a long trek down through southern Michigan, across Ohio, down through Virginia and West Virginia to Boone, North Carolina and the big Cosmo meetup of the summer.

We stopped overnight in Charleston, West Virginia without noticing much of the scenery. It was nice, to be sure, but nothing spectacular. Next morning we noticed it though, driving out of Charleston, a small town nestled in vibrant green hills. The highway followed the contours of the hills and valleys and took our breath away. Tracy compared it favourably to a similar stretch of highway in Tennessee which I hope I'll get to see next year. It resembled parts of England's Lake District, but where our unblemished scenery lasts for a few miles, this lasted for two and a half states...

Of course with true American irony, one town situated right in the middle of this luscious countryside suffered under the name of Bland...