Sunday 8th September

Following on from a very comfortable room at Monmouth Historic Inn last night, we had the most indulgent breakfast this morning at the Garden Room, French Toast with bacon and/or sausage. The setting was just wonderful as well !

Following breakfast, guests were given a tour and history of Monmouth, it started out as a 30 acre estate, now 26 acres. The present owners started renovating the property in 1978, bringing it back from a derelict property.

We reluctantly hit the road after the tour at around 11.00 am, and drove for 4 hours 40 mins to arrive in Memphis around 3.40 pm. We have booked an AirBnB apartment here for 4 nights, we have a full kitchen so we can do some cooking for ourselves.

Some of our observations along the way ..... there are so many towns in US ending with "ville" or "burg" or "boro". We were keen to know how many places in the US end in "ville", but Mr Google wasn't able to answer that for us. We did find out that "burg" tended to be used after a person's name, "ville" was used with any word and both of them mean village or town. We did find out there are 34 states with a "Greenville" in them, we have stayed in 1 and visited another on our travels ! Only in America, some states have more than one 'Greenville' in the state. Today we passed by a "Coffeeville". We also noticed a lot of "boro" towns, particularly in North Carolina. We figured the Americans just got lazy and shortened the "borough" which was common for a lot of English towns and locations. Our recent research found this quote..

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".. you wil find the ending "boro", which is short of "borough", in states which made up the original 13 colonies. This is because back in England since the middle ages the word "borough" was used to describe townships or areas granted self government. This English concept and word were brought over here as the English formed settlements in "New" England. We Americans adopted this traditional word and used it places like Pittsburgh - also another way of saying "boro". (Source : city-data.com)

We hadn't even thought about the "burghs" !!!

We have also purchased petrol now for $1.95 and $1.99 per gallon, that being roughly 50 cents per litre. Our road trip now totals 2,627 miles (4,228 kilometres) over 17 days . Today was our third longest drive so far.