After our tour further west and south, we headed back to Chappaqua in New York State, aided by our Garmin, Hilary, as we called her. And what a boom that is when negotiating the traffic going into central New York, so very soon we were heading out through the seemingly perpetual forest past Valhalla, White Plains, Pleasantville and on to Chappaqua in brilliant October sunshine.

To be honest, we felt like chilling and I had promised our host Malcolm, I would give him a few hours loading up the piles of torn and broken felt lying outside after he had redone the entire roof. That was on condition that he ordered a skip and he was not so silly as to look a gift-horse in the mouth.

We tackled the task over three or four days, giving it a couple of hours a day, until the energy levels in our 74-year-old bodies began to flag. “Doesn’t old age suck,” Malcolm stated, with me nodding between shovel-loads.

The job was completed before we left, with the paths and patio round his house seeing the light of day for the first time in months.

We would undertake a trip to the diner in Bedford Hills, which Malcolm referred to as Bedford Falls, tipping his hat to a favourite film of ours: It’s a Wonderful Life. Then perhaps we would undertake a little retail therapy, including our sampling of something we had long-intended to try: frozen yoghurt ice cream. Nice but not wonderful.

We had one regular visit we needed to tick off our list: Dominicks Italian Restaurant on Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx.

We had been there twice before and never found it less than fascinating as it is like experiencing a page out of The Sopranos. They are there: perhaps a group of old men in black hats and suits or young men having a series of conferences with people who call in and do not eat. They talk and leave.

They do not have a menu. We get told what they have available, choose our course, order our drinks, are served and then are given a verbal bill. You don’t feel like quibbling over the price. You pay: there are no receipts.

The first time we went there, we asked for their dessert menu.

“We don’t serve ice cream and next door does but don’t serve no spaghetti,” we were told.

We went next door, where one old man sat wearing a fedora. He nodded: we nodded. We took our seats ordered our ice cream and coffee and after a minute a young dude came in and expressed amazement to the proprietor.

Nodding back towards the old man, he said in a superb Bronx accent : “He don’t recognise me. Look at him. He did ten years at Attica. He used to be the Boss. Now he don’t notice no one.”

Needless to say the experience was one of the highlights of our previous trips to New York and we needed a further fix. Yet this area of the Bronx is not easy to get to by subway and involves some walking. We invited Malcolm to come with us but he declined on two counts. Apparently there are a lot of shootings in the Bronx compared to elsewhere in New York. Also, I was mad: I was planning to drive there.

I had been a little wary driving in the USA. I wondered if, at 74, it was one trip too far for me but I drove happily round Philadelphia, Cleveland etc without a problem, aided by Hilary calling out instructions from the dashboard. So I thought driving into the Bronx would be a challenge but one worth taking, for Ellie cannot walk far without paying for it with aches and pains.

On a blue-sky morning we headed off, feeling as if we were facing a challenge and perhaps an adventure. We travelled along the lorry-free Saw Mill River Parkway, Jerome Avenue and onto the Bronx Parkway: all dual carriageways. We drove through woods, spotting the occasional settlements beyond the trees, as we sped along the carriageway. We saw Yonkers, White Plains and Bronx Zoo signposted, but Hilary instructed us to continue straight on.

Eventually she told us to take the ramp to the right and when we halted at the traffic lights, she informed us we had to go straight over, take the first left and we were in Arthur Avenue. We followed her route and pulled up outside the restaurant.

We had tended over the years, to select a table with a view of the main restaurant yet slightly hidden by the fact it is in a niche. “Useful in the event of there being a drive-by,” I pointed out to Ellie mentioning the possibility of a shooting by way of hors d’oeuvres. Over lunch I suggested if Ellie wanted to pop down to Manhattan, I felt quite confident about negotiating Times Square and driving round Ground Zero. She decided it was best we did not push our luck.

Quite frankly, driving into the Bronx was considerably easier than negotiating Watford’s one-way system. A week later, I was sitting in Hampermill Lane, experiencing that traffic jam I wrote about the other week, reflecting how easy it was popping into The Bronx for lunch.

I must admit, we find it very relaxing amongst the trees and their autumn leaves in New York State and, in a sense, we were sad to leave and say goodbye to our old friend, Malcolm, just as we swallowed hard when saying farewell to Pete and Marilyn. In a sense we feel very much at home in those Ashridge-type surroundings just down the track from New York, far away from the problems and overcrowding. We had a farewell breakfast of hash browns, eggs-over-easy and crispy bacon and endless cups of cawfee and then, later, we headed for the airport.

We had booked on the Virgin/Delta website and to arrive at the right time at both ends, we had found ourselves assigned to Delta when booking. Flying out to the States, our trip out from Heathrow had been postponed until the next morning but they managed to fit us in on a Virgin flight to New York and we made a return trip on the scheduled Delta to Heathrow. From our experience, do not choose Delta: opt for Virgin when presented with the choice. They may be partners but they are very different. Delta’s food and service was way below Virgin’s. Our granddaughter travelled to the USA a few weeks later and thought the food on Delta was rubbish. So it was not just us.

It was a good trip but not one filled with the wow-factors we had experienced on other visits to the USA, such as when we saw Arizona, South Dakota, Charleston, Memphis, Asheville and San Francisco. But we were of a different mind-set when we returned. We had flown out a month earlier, thinking it would be out last trip. We returned, discussing how we could take in New York, South Dakota and possibly Asheville as well, next time round.