At the baggage retrieval carousel we said our farewells to our wonderful guide, Roger Marsden, and the other members of our thirty strong group (most of whom, realistically considering, we probably will never see again) and then set off to the long-stay car park. Traffic on the M25 and the M420 was fluid and we caught our Channel Tunnel shuttle on time. By seven-thirty in the evening we were back in Brussels and unpacking our cases and suddenly America seemed very far away again. Time for consolation with a few facts and statistics about our ‘Grand Coast-to-Coast Tour’. Altogether we visited or passed through sixteen (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California) of the USA’s fifty states , including stays in six great cities (New York, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco) together with another seven lesser towns and, of course, the R.M.S. Queen Mary on Long Beach. We got to know several of America’s great rivers, from the Hudson and Potomac in the east, through to the fantastic Colorado. We crossed the Delaware and the mighty Mississippi and we stayed on the shores of Lake Michigan. We visited the Rocky Mountains National Park, Goosenecks Canyon, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon and we saw a lot of great animal, plant and bird life. We saw some of America’s mightiest constructions, from the Empire State Building and New World Trade Center in New York through to the Willis and the Hancock Towers in Chicago and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. We visited some wonderful art collections, from the MoMA in New York to Chicago’s Art Institute to Denver’s Modern Art Museum to the San Francisco MoMA and we visited the Smithsonian. We saw America’s capital city and its civic architecture, from the Capitol to the White House, from the Supreme Court to the Fed. Including the Channel Tunnel Shuttle, altogether we took ten train journeys, from the mere 80 kilometres from Silverton to Durango (but along some of the most spectacular scenery we saw) to the massive 1,670 kilometres between Chicago and Denver. In total, we travelled 5,708 kilometres by rail, 1,634 kilometres by road and 14,188 kilometres by air, making a grand total of 21,530 kilometres for the whole journey. We travelled across six different time zones (Central European Time, British Summer Time, Eastern Standard Time, Central Standard Time, Mountain Standard Time and Pacific Standard Time). And, of course, we gazed on the Atlantic and on the Pacific Oceans.