TRAVEL - BALTIMORE & THE US EAST COAST

The whole 'Road America' thing sounds great until you're the one that has to be on the road. Seeing even a small part of the USA requires a great many miles at the wheel and an awful lot of stamina. Or does it?

Introduce yourself to Baltimore in Maryland, on America's East Coast. Philadelphia and New York are a half a morning's drive North, with Washington and beautiful nearby Alexandria and Annapolis much the same distance South. Get yourself a rental car and in just a couple of weeks with the minimum of mileage, you can properly experience them all from a Baltimore base - or at least that's what the guy at the tourist board told me.

We decided to put that claim to the test at the wheel of a Lincoln LS, a car Ford nearly sold in the UK, developed as it was alongside Jaguar's S-TYPE. Ours was the 4.0-litre V8 version which provided glorious performance, excellent refinement and an average of around 17mpg throughout our trip: but then who cares about that in a land where petrol is a pound a gallon?



Arguably the best summation of Baltimore comes from US film Director John Waters who claims “I would never want to live anywhere else. You can look far and wide but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the US South decided to move North, ran out of gas in Baltimore and decided to stay.” Certainly, this is a pretty cosmopolitan city. So much so that it's hard to believe that there's room for somewhere of this size to co-exist, sandwiched between Philadelphia to the North and Washington to the South - and more importantly in doing so, preserving such a distinct identity.



This is one of those places where ideally, you need to stay in the heart of the metropolis - in this case, within walking distance of the hub around which t...