It was time to leave New York. I gladly packed my bags to leave the hostel and stepped outside to wait for my taxi at 7am, the earliest I had been awake for many days! My flight was at 9.45 from La Guardia, which was pretty cool as I got to explore a second New York airport. I arrived at the internal flights section of the airport and quickly got my boarding pass, left my bag at the drop off area and went through security. I was surprised to see that the section of the airport that I was departing from was quite small and in need of refurbishment. I was also fairly surprised to see that my flight was delayed for an hour and a half!

Luckily I had bought some chic lit to read, so happily tuned everything out and read my book. My flight was finally called and we boarded pretty quickly, and as I was looking out of the window as we were taking off I was surprised to see that we were leaving New York. One airport is much like the next, and I had quite forgotten that I was in NEW YORK!!

The flight was quite quick, and after about 20 minutes of snoozing and the head bobbing that went with it, and more chapters of my book, I landed at Indianapolis Airport. On disembarking from the aircraft, we had to walk through the departures hall to get to baggage reclaim. I had seen landing passengers walk right past me in the departures hall in New York and was surprised that arriving and departing passengers would be mixed up like this. But of course, this was an internal flight I was taking, not international, so the protocol is different. I walked out of the departures/arrivals hall and into the main terminal, where I then had to take an escalator to the floor below to collect my luggage, another change from what I am used to.

Shortly after that I saw my friend Heather. I haven't seen her for ten years, but there was no mistaking her clear blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair. We got into her car and quickly drove the 30 minutes to her house in Franklin, and I was excited to see another side to America from what I had seen in New York, and the kind of houses that you see in films like Erin Brokovich, brick built houses with wooden slatted fronts. Beautiful big front yards and picket fences out back. We soon arrived at Heathers house, and had time to drop off my bags before heading back to Indianapolis - or 'Indy' in search of a couple of the museums. We were using the sat nav, but unfortunately as we had ten years of talking to catch up on we didnt really pay much attention to what it was telling us. We took one wrong turn after another, chatting all the while, but not really minding that we were getting lost as we were seeing different parts of Indianapolis along the way. We finally reached the museum we were looking for, but as it was shut by that time we took a walk around the beautiful gardens attached. The route we chose had quite a few stairs which were difficult to negotiate with the stroller and in the heavy heat of the afternoon. Up and down stairs we went until we finally found a huge fountain where we greatfully stuck our feet into the waterfall to cool them off and sat in the shade and the breeze. Heather and I were both getting grumpy from the heat, so we decided to call it a day, and drove home via a nearby liquor store where I picked up some Coors beer (I had had a couple of Budwisers in New York so thought it would only be right to try Coors this time.) I was looking for an American wine, but they were all Reislings or Zinfandels which I am not a huge fan of, so I chose a New Zealand Sauv Blanc.

Heather's partner had fired up the BBQ to cook us some chicken, I opened up the wine and we settled in for a pleasant evening of good home cooked food, nice wine and UNO with the next door neighbours.