First off - An Apology - Last weekend we were without internet on passage down the east coast of the USA, so sadly an upload wasn't possible. Fare not ye of little faith because below and somewhere in the paragraphs below is this week's word search. Yes! Yet again I have hidden two words from my desk calendar (Curglaff and Nincompoop) for you to discover whilst contemplating your own life choices leaving you simply the smug glow of a job well done (and a disaster like our life seems to be at times missed).

There is a particular sort of limbo that settles over a boat once the big decision has been made. The plan is set. Sawasdeekat will go back to the Mediterranean. We will return to North America and point an RV at whatever horizon takes our fancy. The paperwork is signed, the route is sketched, the arguing is done... And then nothing happens for a while whilst we wait for the trade winds back.

So we did what people do when the weather is warm and the diary is empty. We went looking for company.

Our first stop was Richmond, to see our Thai friends from the last edition. The Zimmerman yard car came with a strict four-hour leash, so we hired something with a proper boot and drove north with the windows down and the radio doing that American thing where every third song is about a road.

They met us at what they call the Beach House, a place on the water on Gwynn's Island. The name promises more than the building delivers. There is no beach to speak of, just a stretch of shoreline, a dock and a house that sits low and easy against the river. They are thinking of using it as an out of town base. By our count they now have four possible living locations. We have concluded they simply enjoy collecting properties the way other people, like us, collect fridge magnets.

Gwynn's Island has a stubborn history. English settlers arrived in the 1640s, the place spent a century quietly growing, and then the American Revolution rolled through and burnt most of it down. The island rebuilt itself with the patience of a community that had already survived worse and understood that land on the water is worth the risk. It still feels like that. Quiet, unhurried, populated by people who know the tide better than they know the news.

Sonny hauled up the crab pots while the rest of us stood around offering advice, which is the traditional role of guests everywhere. The pots came up heavy and wet and full of blue crabs, all claws and indignation. Sonny handled them with the casual efficiency of a man who has done this ten thousand times. We did not. We held them at arm's length and made noises of surprise, which I suspect is how most of the world experiences live crab.

Then we drove into Richmond and ate them for lunch with the sort of noisy, generous enthusiasm that makes you forget you are a stranger. We then went with Sonny to his restaurant, Mum's Siam. The place hums. There is something wonderful about walking into a restaurant where the owner is also your friend and the food arrives with the confidence of a kitchen that has nothing to prove. We ate that evening until conversation became optional.

Richmond is a city that rewards wandering, and Pookie didn’t make it ten paces down the street before a pair of American MasterChef fans recognised her. There followed the usual delighted exchange about dishes and stages and the pressure of the competition. I stood to one side, took the photograph, and watched two strangers leave happier than they arrived.

This happens in every country we visit. My wife is a walking, talking episode of a show people love, and I am her official fan photographer. Her posts from that week (@Pookiestylecook) were a small festival of Richmond. A plate of oysters. A doorway. A street corner with the light falling just so. She posts every single day, a habit that has turned her feed into an unofficial guidebook for wherever we happen to be. I have started reading it in the morning to find out what we did the day before.

While we were in Richmond, Sue showed us the next project. It is called YaYa's Cookbook, a perfectly pink building on a prominent downtown corner. The place is already on Google Maps and it is not even finished. Sue has that rare talent for making a city feel like it is waiting for her. It runs over two floors, and the family are constantly reviewing what menu to serve there when it opens. I have sat through three of these discussions and the only conclusion I can offer is that whoever gets to eat there will be lucky.

Having a car meant we could eat our way around this corner of Virginia. Around Cardinal, out in the countryside, the pickings are slim. Fast food dominates, and fast food is not our thing. Every so often a decent sushi bar or a teppanyaki place appears out of nowhere like a mirage, and we fall on it with gratitude.

The best find was The Hatchery, where a casual basket of oysters arrived with the sort of understated confidence that makes you sit up. Pookie posted a photograph of them. She almost captioned it "Virginia, you surprise me." Then she chose against it. I think she was worried the surprise would sound like an insult. It was not. It was admiration from someone who had spent three weeks dodging gas station sandwiches and burgers.

The state surprised us in other ways too. Virginia was, at the time of our visit, a Republican state, and someone with strong feelings about Donald Trump had planted a statue of him on the lawn outside Mathews among the other presidents. It stood there with the confidence of a man who had not been invited.

Pookie also insisted on a photograph with a big yellow American school bus. I understand the appeal. In this part of Virginia, houses sit miles apart, and a school bus is a secure, supervised way of moving children across those distances.

What caught my attention was the white strobe light on the roof. It flashes while the bus carries children, and it exists because the bus roof sits higher than a car roof, which means ordinary halogen lights can vanish in early morning fog. The swing out stop sign is just as clever. A car that passes a stopped school bus on either side of the road commits an offence. Virginia authorises flashing white or amber warning lights for exactly this purpose, and the law requires them to operate whenever children are aboard and visibility drops. It is a small piece of engineering that makes a large promise. In America the most precious cargo on the road WILL be seen.

Admittedly there was a second reason for the drive to Richmond, and it was less romantic than crabs. We had fallen into conversation with other sailors at the yard, the sort of conversation that begins with dreamy locations and ends with engines, paperwork, and one of them asked whether we carried a cruising licence. We dug through our folder and discovered that Miami had never given us one. Nobody had mentioned it. Nobody had asked for it. We had sailed up the coast in happy ignorance, technically a little less legal than we assumed. So we rang the CBP, who could not have been more helpful, and they suggested the airport in Richmond. We turned up with a folder thick enough to stun a small animal and the officers there simply took the lot from us and reappeared some 20 minutes later with a cruising licence. It cost us an afternoon and nothing else. It felt like a small administrative errand, the sort of thing you forget by the following Tuesday, but one that in our case comes back to haunt us later.

The Fourth of July

Then July arrived, and with it the main event. This year the Fourth of July carried extra weight. 2026 marks the semiquincentennial (no not one of the words you are looking for), the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the whole country was in a mood to celebrate. Flags on every porch. Fireworks stocked in supermarkets. A general willingness to overlook the traffic.

Lee and Stephanie, whom we had met on Meanwhile… in Zimmerman's yard, invited us onto their speedboat for a water bound party. We’d never been on a boat like it. I had seen videos of Americans lashing their speedboats together into a floating gaggle, a temporary island of coolers and laughter and sunscreen, and I had assumed it was a teenage summer break tradition. It is not. It is a national art form. Somebody should teach it in schools.

We arrived and their family and friends climbed aboard and we set off. One of their daughters is married to Poon, a Thai man who towers over everyone around him with the gentle confidence of a redwood. They met at university in the UK and have been together ever since. An Englishman, hearing Thai spoken on a speedboat in Virginia, while the American flag flapped its independence above us, felt like a small summary of our lives.

Pookie made hot dogs and arranged them in the stripes of the American flag. We brought enough refreshments to float the boat if the hull had failed. I wore my Havana hat I had bought in Miami, a decision that felt stylish on land and increasingly foolish on water. Water and Havanas do not mix. The hat survived the day but lost its shape, and I lost a small piece of my dignity to the curglaff of the first cold wave that hit the brim.

The day was magnificent. Hot weather, good company, a boat full of people who had known each other for decades and welcomed two sailors from England as if we had always been there. Children jumped off the back and climbed back on and jumped off again. Somebody's uncle produced a cooler of something homemade. The sun went down slowly, the way it does when it has been a good day and wants to stay. This is the part of travel that no guidebook can sell you. The kindness of strangers who become friends before the sun goes down.

I thought about Elsie on that boat. She would have been the first one in the water and the last one out. She would have talked to every person aboard and come home with four stories and a new recipe. Her friend Ethel would have stayed on the dock, happy enough, and missed it. I have spent my whole adult life trying to be Elsie, and days like that one feel like the plan working.

Back on dry land, the conversation turned to guns. Lee joked that in Virginia people either have none or they have ten, and then he proudly showed me his ten. Some had laser sights. Some were neat and small. Some were frankly enormous. I had arrived in Virginia as something of a nincompoop about firearms, and I left slightly less of one.

We talked for a while. I explained that in the UK a licence is possible but not easy, and it only ever permits a rifle. Handguns are a firm no, a line drawn after a school shooting in Scotland in 1996 that changed the law for good. Lee knew the facts. He told me there are more guns than people in America and he said it plainly, without pride or apology, the way you might mention the weather. He listened with the patience of a man who has had this conversation before. I listened with the patience of a man who understands that a country with 345 million people spread across a vast map arrives at different answers to the same questions.

And that map is vast. Cardinal has a population of 84. Richmond, the state capital, holds around 230,000 people, which makes it roughly the size of Peterborough. But the numbers that really tell the story are the densities. The United Kingdom packs in about 740 people per square mile. Thailand, which (Bangkok aside) never feels crowded when we visit, carries roughly half that. The United States spreads its 345 million across 97 people per square mile.

No wonder the houses sit miles apart. No wonder the school bus needs a strobe light. No wonder a drive to Richmond feels like crossing a small country. In England you can drive for two hours and pass through four counties and three arguments about a bypass. In Virginia you can drive for two hours and see one barn. It changes how people behave. It changes how they shop, how they build, how far a child travels to school and how far a neighbour travels to help. It makes a car essential and a boat optional, which is the opposite of our life aboard Sawasdeekat.Flying Home

Work was calling me back to the UK to sort out some issues. Not long after the speedboat party, I left Pookie to manage the boat repairs and flew home taking our newly aquired fridge magnets with me. She didn’t complain.

Join us next week, when I take you back to the UK and show you what happens when a man who has been at sea too long tries to remember how a supermarket works. Take care, my friends. We will see you next week