October 6th – Leaf-Peeping in Bar Harbor

Today we visited the charming little resort town of Bar Harbor, on Mount Desert Island in Maine. In the summer, people flock here for its relaxed unspoilt atmosphere and for its beaches, while in autumn, the main attraction is the changing colours of its fall foliage in the stunning Acadia National Park.

It appears that it's been an unusually warm summer up here, so the leaves are changing a little later than usual; but, even though the leaves aren't yet in full colour, there's still a fair amount of flaming reds and bright oranges to be seen amongst the densely forested hills of the island.

The fog that had been following us has lifted a little, but not as far as the top of Cadillac Mountain, which was blanketed in fog, which made our trip up there to enjoy the views a little redundant. However, at sea level, the countryside was typically beautiful – wild coastlines, thick forests reflected in clear lakes, and gentle green hillsides.

This is a stunning part of the world – fingers crossed that the weather will allow it to live up to its potential when we get back here in a few days time.

October 5th – We Are Family in Boston

Today I got the chance to meet up with my cousin Chris in Boston.

Boston's a very walkable city, so we walked from the Shuttle Drop off point at Quincy Market, over to his office in the John Hancock Building in Back Bay. On the way, we walked through the brownstone district of Beacon Hill – an upmarket residential district from the 19th century, that wouldn't have looked out of place in London or York.

Whilst we waited for Chris to get out of his meeting, we wandered around the upmarket boutiques of Newbury Street (Boston's version of Bond Street or 5th Avenue), and we also popped our head into the Boston Public Library to see its impressive Reading Room.

Then, Chris took us up to his office on the 56th storey (of the 60 storey building) to admire the panoramic views over Boston from its tallest building. Unfortunately, the fog that had spoiled the views in New York had followed us up the New England coast, and visibility was not very good. Every now and again, the fog lifted and we could glimpse the golden dome of the State House glinting at us, and then it would descend on us again.

So, we caught the subway across town to have lunch and a couple of drinks at the Boston College Club at the top of another skyscraper, to see if the views were any better – it was like someone had hung a white sheet over the window. This meant that it was time to give up on the views and concentrate on catching up and having a few drinks. Time flew by and before we knew it, we were literally running across town to get the last shuttle. By now, panic was beginning to set in (this ship won't wait for Destination Lecturers who are missing in action), so we hailed a cab and told him to put his foot down.

As it turned out, we got to the ship a good 20 minutes before departure time, to be greeted by an announcement that we'd be sailing an hour late while the refuelling was completed. A whole lot of stress and an overpriced cab fare for nothing – but still a great day of catching up with family.

October 4th – New Jersey’s Edison Museum

As we were re-joining the ship in Bayonne in the early afternoon, it wasn't worth heading into Manhattan, so we stayed close to Lesley's and headed to the Edison Museum in West Orange.

Pretty much all I knew about Edison was that he invented the lightbulb (made me wonder if a lightbulb could have gone off in his head at the point he invented it?); and, to be honest, a trip to his factory sounded like it had the potential to fairly boring. I couldn't have been more wrong – I hadn't realised how many things he invented, or how advanced an industrial operation he set up. The whole tour really got us in touch with the industrial revolution and with the incredible amount of innovation there was back then.

Edison was obviously a genius, but the thing that came through to us was that he was someone who constantly questioned things, and who was incredibly persistent – he wasn't afraid to make hundreds or even thousands of unsuccessful attempts at something, as long as it got him closer to achieving his goal – just about the exact opposite of me!

At the end of our trip, we went to lunch with Lesley, and she kindly took us to the ship to continue with our North America odyssey. As one piece of solace for the embarking passengers who were disappointed not to be sailing out of Manhattan – the fog was so thick that we wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway.

October 3rd – New York’s Lower East Side

Today we headed over to the Lower East Side, the place where most immigrants went to live after passing through Ellis Island. Back in the 19th century, as millions of immigrants passed through, the Lower East Side became the most densely populated place on the planet, and its tenement buildings became home to way more people than they were ever intended to hold.

These days, the area's been gentrified to some extent, so it wasn't difficult to find a nice place for brunch, before we headed over to the Tenement Museum. The museum is housed in a crumbling 5-storey tenement that had been totally sealed up between the 1930s and the 1980s, when it was turned into the fascinating museum it is today. Each floor consisted of 4 "apartments" – 1 tiny bedroom, a small kitchen (with no running water), and a living room – which would have housed families of up to 10 people. This one was considered upmarket, because it had 3 outside toilets (which actually fed into the public sewer) in its tiny yard.

The whole thing was done extremely well – our tour focused on an Irish family who lived there in the late 19th century, and took you through the practicalities of their daily lives. Life must have been fairly hellish for people in the tenements, and I guess that it was as good an incentive as any for people to work hard, and to save enough money to get the hell out of there. Even though "our" particular family only had three children, the youngest child died of malnutrition.

After the museum, we saw the other side of the American Dream, as we travelled uptown to the iconic Chrysler Building, where our friend's company has an office on the 67th floor (the building has 70 floors. It was a real privilege to be inside this art deco masterpiece, in the top section where the building begins to narrow to its point – and it was amazing to see that the windows just open up like regular windows (we all instinctively took a big step back as soon as our friend opened the window!). Sadly, it was a drizzly day, so the views weren't as spectacular as they could have been, nonetheless, the views over New York's muscular set of skyscrapers was fairly unrivalled.

We were now ticking off New York icons like crazy, so our next stop was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to see some of the art that Tracy is studying on her history of art course. On the ground floor, we came across the collection of one of the Lehman Brothers – when you saw the unbelievable array of masterpieces that he'd amassed, it wasn't difficult to see why his bank eventually went bankrupt.

So, we soaked up the culture for as long as possible before we got thrown out at closing time, then it was time for re-fueling in a happy hour at a local pub, and then a delicious hummus and falafel meal. A perfect end to a lovely day.

October 2nd – New York & Ellis Island

On the way to New York, we had a good news/bad news scenario. The bad news was that a rope had somehow got wrapped around the ship's propeller, which meant that the ship needed to go into dry dock to get it fixed. The further bad news was that we'd have to by-pass Newport to get to the dry dock in New Jersey.

However, the good news was that we would now have an extra two days to explore New York, so we got in touch with our lovely friends who live here, and they were very generously happy to put us up at a moment's notice.

Seeing as we were missing out on sailing into the city, we decided to do things the way that people used to arrive in New York, by visiting Ellis Island and sampling a bit of the immigrant experience. Just getting onto the ferry brings you in touch with the feelings of those poor bewildered immigrants as they arrived in the Land of Opportunity. Even though we'd pre-booked our tickets (which by-passed an absolutely huge queue), there was still a long line of jostling people to join and be herded along like cattle before being grunted at by some grumpy security guards.

At last, we finally got on the ferry which took us for those inspirational views of the Statue of Liberty, before taking us to Liberty Island. Somehow, Lady Liberty looks a bit smaller than you'd imagine from a distance across the harbour, but once you get up close, it looks much, much larger than you expect. For those millions of immigrants who'd taken that long, arduous and scary journey across from the Old World, the first glimpse of her must have given them such a spring in their step.

There was an excellent audio guide that took us through the story of the statue, why it was built, how it was built, and what it stands for; and then it was time for the main event, the ferry over to Ellis Island. Here there was another audio guide which did a brilliant job of bringing alive the immigrant experience, particularly when combined with the evocative black and white pictures of the anxious immigrants dressed up in their best clothes trying to convince the border guards to let them in.

We heard the stories of the inspections the immigrants were put through – particularly gruesome was the button hook that was used to flip open their eyelids inside out, to check for eye disease; and we heard the heartbreaking stories of those who were rejected for various reasons (age, illness, or unacceptable political beliefs).

Most evocative of the lot, was to walk into the huge cavernous processing hall, and to imagine the emotions of those immigrants, waiting to see if their American Dream would become a reality. We only had 3 hours before we had to get the ferry back, and we could easily have spent the whole day there – an absolutely fascinating place that really puts you in touch with the spirit of America.

September 30th – Halifax, Nova Scotia

At last the elemental weather that you expect of Canada's Maritime Provinces in the autumn finally hit us. Early morning drizzle turned into heavy rain and umbrella-mashing winds to make us think that we really had arrived in New Scotland.

Halifax is by far the largest of all Canada's Atlantic cities, and that growth has all been founded on its magnificent natural harbour – the second largest in the world, after Sydney (Australia, not Nova Scotia). This has meant that the city became Britain's major naval base in North America and gave Halifax a vital role in both World Wars.

We dodged the rain by going into Halifax's lively Farmer's Market close-by to the pier where we docked, and then we headed down the waterfront boardwalk to appreciate the harbour, and the set of old warehouses and historic buildings that line it. It wasn't really sightseeing weather, so I left Tracy at the Art Gallery while I took a tour to picturesque Peggy's Cove, a tiny little fishing village to the south of Halifax.

In spite of the rain, it was a lovely drive to get there, as the trees are starting to change colour, and the landscape got gradually more bleak and boulder-strewn. Peggy's Cove claims to be Canada's most-visited village, but on a windswept grey day like today, it understandably wasn't too busy. Fortunately, the rain had just about stopped when we got there, and the brooding skies gave the place suitably edge-of-the-world atmosphere.

The village only has a permanent population of 40 (although it's a lot more in the summer), and so the place had a deserted feel, as we explored its waterside of peeling wooden houses and climbed the rocks to get to its old lighthouse. In the summer, you can imagine this would be a lovely place to live; but in the winter, you've got to be a fairly tough person to live somewhere as exposed as this.

We pray for better weather when we come back next week.

September 29th – Sydney, Nova Scotia

The little port of Sydney on Cape Breton Island, in the north of Nova Scotia province, is trying hard to bounce back from economic collapse. For most of the 20th century, this was a heavily industrialised place, shipping out coal from the local mines, and producing steel from the huge steel works that dominated the town. Unfortunately, the vicissitudes of the global economy haven't been kind to Sydney, as the uneconomic coal mines have closed, and the steel works has been dismantled and taken to India, where it produces steel at a much lower cost.

But, what Sydney does have in its favour, is that it's close-by to some spectacular natural scenery, and one hugely impressive historical site – the old fortress at Louisbourg. So, I joined the tour to Louisbourg, to find out more about the titanic struggles between Britain and France for mastery of Canada, and to soak up the historic atmosphere at what's become Canada's largest restoration project.

The French colonial government built this enormous fortress complex in the early 18th century, as they were being slowly squeezed out of North America by the expanding British Empire, and the fortress proved to be the site of one of their last stands before their eventual defeat in the 7 Years War.

When you get there, it's the scale of the place that hits you – enormous 10-metre thick walls, an array of bastions, barracks, storehouses and accommodations that would have cost the equivalent of $1 billion to build. When the British (under General Wolfe) finally captured the fortress in 1758, they decided to raze it to the ground – but it was so big, it ended up taking them a full 18 months to destroy.

In the 1960s, as Cape Breton fell into decline, the Federal Government decided to invest millions into reconstructing the fortress – and what they've created, hasn't only been a great job-creator, but it's also a wonderfully evocative historic site, one that really brings to life what life would have been like in an 18th century colonial fort. Enthusiastic costumed animators give excellent information on the everyday goings-on in the fort – explaining how they dressed, how little they washed, what they ate and how they fought.

On another sunny day, this was a place where history really came alive.