To the west of Rhode Island, Connecticut realises all those images you have in your head of New England as a leafy, green and pleasant land knee deep in chocolate box villages, swathes of forests, farms, cornfields and historic whaling towns especially around the south east coast. All of this within easy reach of New York City, which means it's a commuters dream. It's worth spending a few days just touring around the state and admiring the scenery. Route 169 comes highly recommended but the Connecticut Tourism Board can recommend specific routes.

It's not all pretty though. Some of the larger towns and areas of the coastline have been unsympathetically modernised. Never-the-less a state that includes an entire town devoted to antique dealers and antiquarian bookshops can't be all bad. Head up north to Putnam and you can spend an entirety browsing through the 450 shops. Sheer Heaven. Probably not one for the kids though so luckily Bridgeport has a museum dedicated to the entrepreneur, politician, journalist, impresario, museum owner, founder of 'The Greatest Show on Earth' and local boy P.T. Barnum. Bigger kids will probably enjoy an unsupervised self-guided tour of the innards of the submarine USS Nautilus that is moored at the Submarine Force Museum on the Thames River in Groton. When it was launched in 1954 the Nautilus was America's first ever nuclear powered sub.