We finally got out of New York and got to see stars – and some Trump supporters

A few days ago, I left New York City for the first time since January. At the beginning of 2020, my fiance and I got the first packed flight back on New Year’s Day and landed, bleary-eyed, in the middle of the afternoon. We were expecting to return in April and June for friends’ weddings, and then in August for our own. We even spoke about how exhausting 2020 would be, with all the travel it had in store for us. Little did we know.

New York is a wonderful place to live, and we feel lucky to be in a part of Brooklyn where it’s a 10-minute walk to the park and a 15-minute walk the other way to the waterfront. Nevertheless, too much time in the city can drive you a little insane. You begin to wonder what stars look like (in the sky, that is — celebrities are 10 a penny) or if you’ll ever hear silence again when you get into your seventh or eighth month of nonstop sirens. So we jumped at the chance to share a friend’s holiday home in a sleepy beach town in Connecticut — and, in true British fashion, we decided to trust the creaky US railway infrastructure to get us there.

This involved getting on the Amtrak, which is an experience so unusual to most Americans that it’s like being transported back in time. We turned up at Penn Station with our masks and our miniature suitcases and boarded the (huge, and adequately socially distanced) train at a convenient carriage. Numerous conductors were at the platform, loudly explaining to people how to board. After we set off, one of those same conductors came round to check our digital tickets (“You’ve been flagged for a random ID check, ma’am, but I won’t ask you to do it because I’m a libertarian and who is the system to tell us what to do?”) and to explain – in detail – what it would look like when we pulled into each station.

And then, two-and-a-half hours later, when we were on the approach to Old Saybrook town in Connecticut, the same conductor came back to collect us from our seats and guide us to the nearest opening doorway, reminding us as we walked down the carriage again what the platform would look like and how we would be able to step through the door onto it. For a $30 (£23) ticket, it was extremely personalised. And we were the only people who seemed to find the explanations unnecessary; ordinary Americans experience trains so little that they really did appreciate the constant reassurance.

Needless to say, we stepped onto that quaint wooden platform and into another world. Brooklyn is a sea of masks and “Bernie 2020”/“Obama ’08” bumper stickers. Old Saybrook boasted huge holiday homes with Trump flags and beachgoers wearing red Maga hats. Nobody wore masks on the (admittedly deserted) streets. Teenagers powered up and down in golf carts, bringing towels and snacks to the sandy inlets at the end of every road. The beaches outside New York City are so packed as to be their own deterrents, but here we were able to kick off and actually swim in the hermit crab-filled sea.

And for the first time in months, we saw stars. At the end of the first day, we found a blender in the Airbnb and knocked up some spicy watermelon margaritas to go with our backyard barbecue. (I’d almost forgotten what a grassy garden looked like.) We pulled out some picnic blankets and lay on our backs, discussing the constellations we could see. At one point we even put on sweaters, because at 1am outside the concrete jungle that swallows then belches out 33-degree heat all summer long, you get a bit of a chill in the air.

Despite the Trump supporters sitting in houses half a mile away, it was pretty much perfect. Of course, the eight months preceding it made the payoff even sweeter.