'Things founded clean on their own shapes / water and ground in their extremity'

Yesterday we peeled ourselves away from Cooperstown, slunk into the car and tried to make our way through the world, leaving that lovely, peaceful and friendly place behind. We didn't get very far. At the far end of Lake Otsego is a State Park and we were compelled to stop and park and try and capture it once more. You can't, but at least, in the age of digital photography, you can happily take forty or fifty pictures in an attempt to lend as much weight as possible to the experience - mighty now - that will soon be a merely a flimsy memory.

I'm convinced that there is something profound and cathartic in such places, these boundaries between land and water. There's more to it, surely, than just sea breezes; shorelines, like mountaintops, induce clarity. They are opportunities to stand at the margins of one's own life and gaze out over another world of sky or water.

It's something that seemed somehow to be entirely missing from the Berkshires, and specifically Lenox, Massachussetts where we stopped last night. It's a feeling we have recaptured in spades today as we eventually hit the Atlantic coast.

Maybe Lenox would have benefited from a good lake or mountain. It struck me to be a superficial kind of a place: very nice to look at but hardly very practicable. It was all a little rarefied. Our hotel seemed typical. It was beautiful, a real English manor house with dark wood panellings and staircases, echoing halls and twisting corridors. Miss Marple would have felt right at home, as indeed did we until we realised that all the electrical sockets were hidden away under the bed and that the Internet was marginally more inaccessible. Our room was beautiful, but somewhat lacking utility. Walking around the town I wondered if this was part of a greater and deliberate disengagement with a wider reality.

This morning we had no qualms about leaving and managed to get on the road so early that we were able to improvise an unscheduled stop. Heading for the Nantucket ferry, we diverted to Plymouth, MA where the Pilgrim Fathers (TM) arrived in the Mayflower in 1620. They were by no means the first Europeans to settle over here but their eventual encampment is still the oldest continually inhabited English community in North America.

A lot of what we have driven through so far as looked like England but suddenly we are somewhere that feels like the old country. For a century and a half this was part of Great Britain and the street that runs along the harbour would not be out of place in Plymouth, Devon. Here the overlap between the United States and the United Kingdom is tangible.

The physical manifestation of this connection is the Mayflower II, an exact, life-size and working replica of the original ship that brought those proverbial ex-pats to the New World. This ship was built in the 1950s and sits moored at a jetty in the middle of the sea-front. It is small, but extremely satisfying. One hundred and two settlers lived here for many months before, during and after the sixty-six day Atlantic crossing, and some of them are still aboard. Okay, they're actors, but they are very good, delightfully unflappable in their parts and very informative. Their accents too are mesmerising, recognisably English but with pungent whiffs of Ireland and America to make them seem exotically olde worlde.

We spoke at length with an ol' sea dog, be-whiskered and leather-skinned who had worked the crossing as a Second Mate. Compared with the stifling reverence that we had encountered at other historical landmarks (the Alamo, anyone?), he was beautifully sardonic, pouring scorn on the religious fervour of the settlers and convinced that within a few months they would all be dead. As we left him, he hailed a newcomer and asked him where he was from. 'Boston', came the American's reply.

"Ahh," he purred. "Out of Lincolnshire, are ye?"

It would seem that the ol' dog was on to something - the flight of the Pilgrim Fathers (TM) was not so much about religious freedom as it was about economics and enterprise. When they hatched their plan to quit Europe, the pilgrims were not being oppressed in England, but living in the laid-back non-judgemental town of Leider in the Netherlands where they had been for more than a decade. Unfortunately, they could no longer afford the high cost of living there and, furthermore, weren't comfortable with the idea of their children growing up Dutch. They entered in to a deal with the Corporation of Virginia: their passage would be paid and they would spend seven years working off their debt, at the end of which they would be given 100 acres per adult - well worth the trouble. Half the 'pilgrims' were ordinary Londoners on the make and most of the money for the expedition was put up by the Church of England. Bad weather meant that the Mayflower never reached Virginia and they disembarked at Plymouth. Aboard ship the settlers had suffered one death and one birth, but the physical exertions of the crossing (mainly puking their guts up for two months straight) had taken a toll on the 102 - within four months, 55 were dead.

We'll be back to see how they got on when we return next weekend, but we had to leave Plymouth and drive to Hyannis, on the tricep of Cape Cod, to catch the ferry to Nantucket.

It's a very impressive service - a sleek white catamaran that blasts its way across Nantucket Sound in an hour - and it was wonderful to be out on the water and to be buffeted by the salt air. An hour was just long enough for the boys to become bored with having to behave but we were all excited to clamber off at the other end where we were met by Laura's aunt, Jane, and driven off across the island to their utterly beautiful house. The ride through the town hinted at narrow, cobbled streets and ancient houses which we'll explore properly tomorrow, but for now we are delighted to be here, both at the very end of America and its beginning: water and ground in extremity.

The wind that savaged us on the ferry is now a fresh sea breeze that pours in through the dark window, whispering of the ocean and sleep.