Gettysburg, PA / Cooperstown, NY

Any day that starts with a banana and Nutella crêpe and ends with a Peroni is a Good Day. Today even had additional great stuff in between.

After breakfast we spent the morning in Gettysburg, then there was another loooong and almost mind-numbingly beautiful drive up through Pennsylvania and into New York before we finally arrived at Cooperstown.

How exciting to be in towns with such visible age; in Houston an 'old' building might possibly date from the 1980s. The venerable nature of today's settlements beamed from their bricks and timbers; they crackled, radioactive with History. Both these towns share something else too - they each have one unique theme that dominates their tourist shops, streets and economies.

For Gettysburg, of course, it is the Civil War battle of July 1863 that looms over everything. The fronts of houses, shops and museums are frilled with ubiquitous flags and banners; there are 'ghost walks', Victorian photography studios; adverts for dioramas and memorabilia, plaques to commemorate this or that cover almost every wall. Obviously, this is a great source of income for a small town, but it's hard not to see it as echoes of a terrible trauma that has not yet loosed its grip on a community: for three days thousands of men fought here, in and around the town - fields and streets and houses were packed with dead and wounded men for weeks afterwards. Once hasty burials had commenced, hard rain re-opened the shallow graves and it wasn't until November that a service could be held to dedicate land for a national war cemetery. Even if the memory of the battle could ever fade, the address given by Abraham Lincoln that day would ensure that Gettysburg would never be allowed to forget its pivotal moment in American history.

Perhaps the reverse is true of Cooperstown, which has been bestowed a reputation that it almost certainly does not deserve. In 1906 an elderly resident was interviewed and announced that baseball had been invented there by his friend in a cow pasture in 1839. Although extremely unlikely, this was seized upon by a local hotelier who built the National Baseball Hall of Fame museum there in 1939 as a way of drumming up business. If baseball is nothing else, it is a very effective way of manufacturing and selling stories; no one wanted to disbelieve the myth. Today it is the 'Home' of baseball and in the centre of the town of 2000 people sits a 9000-seat stadium. Like Gettysburg, the beautiful main drag is littered with shops that are devoted to its USP - a display of waxworks of legendary players is a mundane example of the sort of thing available. Never mind, it is an utterly charming place and we'll explore more tomorrow.

One last thought about Gettysburg - it is a stunning place, well looked after and with a fantastic visitors centre. But, being English, I find sometimes there is an absence of judgement in coverage of the Civil War, by which I mean sometimes it feels like representations of the Confederacy are kept neutral, as if to avoid causing offence. The movie in the museum pulled no punches thankfully. Morgan Freeman's narration made clear not only the battle's significance to the war, but also the importance of the end of slavery for the United States, connecting forward to the Civil Rights movement and Dr Martin Luther King Jr as well as to the Suffragettes. The moral case of the North, the Union and of Lincoln was made unequivocally. But five minutes later in the gift shop it was possible to buy Confederate uniforms for children. It felt utterly inappropriate, like finding children's SS uniforms for sale, well, anywhere. No matter how complicated or nuanced the relationships between North and South and between races have been in Antebellum America, I cannot believe that anyone would unthinkingly choose to dress their kid up as someone fighting to defend slavery. Can anyone explain this to me?

I can't help thinking that, if history is written by the winners, then victory, ultimately, is ensuring the losers believe your version of events.