Chapter 29

In the end, after weeks of advice from his staff and then his customers when they'd cottoned on to the idea, he'd given in.

Taking a day off, he'd gone to the nearest Department of Transport office and completed the written test. After travelling so much over the past five years, it hadn't been hard. Really, the hardest part had been remembering those rules that pertained to driving in America, like the fact that they drove on the wrong side of the road compared to people back home in jolly old England.

A couple of lessons later and he was pronounced a natural, thus, he'd gone and taken the driving test. The tester, an older man with a very large combover that Harry did his very best to ignore, assured him that if he could drive in New York, then he could drive anywhere in the world. Harry believed it, too.

The streets around the city were pure chaos. Drivers pushed their cars into the tiniest of spaces in an attempt to get them where they wanted to be in the shortest amount of time possible. And the horns! Harry'd once heard that the shortest measurement of time in the universe was the 'New York second' – the time it took for the light to turn red and the first horn to sound. And after driving in the city and experiencing it himself, he wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment.

And so, with fresh licence in hand, Harry decided to treat himself with a small road trip around the State, hired a car … and had promptly gotten lost.

He knew that he was somewhere in the county of Westchester, possibly in its northwest corner, although that wasn't a given. Really, with the way he'd been navigating, he could be anywhere. A sign that he passed not that long ago said 'Salem Centre', so that was something.

After flipping backwards and forwards through the map book for nearly a minute, he finally found 'Salem Centre' and surprisingly, it was indeed in the northwest corner of Westchester County. Now all he had to do was to find the name of the road that he was on and he was sure that he'd be able to navigate his way back the nearest highway to get himself home. Hopefully before nightfall.

Dropping the open map book on the passenger seat, Harry put the car in gear and rolled slowly along the road, looking for something to give him more information.

And then he saw it.

A large oval metal sign was attached to a high brick fence, just beside a double metal gate. 1407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Centre. That was the address of the school that he was outside of.

Throwing the car into park, he searched the map, his finger moving rapidly about. A sigh of relief escaped him.

"Okay," he said to himself. "I follow this Lane to here; hang a right and keep going 'til I reach this town and go left and that should lead me straight back to the highway."

Getting home before nightfall would be iffy, but at least he wasn't lost anymore.

ooo00ooo

After getting lost in Salem Centre in the upper part of the state of New York, Harry found that he had an urge to visit the real Salem, or at least, the one that he'd heard about and read about back home – the one where there was a magic school and the site of one of the most famous historical events of the magical world in America that there was.

Salem, Massachusetts was only about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from New York, so Harry decided to make a weekend of it and drive up there and stay overnight. Thankfully, it being a weekend, it hadn't taken much to convince Gwen to take over running the Den for him.

Finding a map of the area wasn't hard – a simple stop at a travel agent was all that was needed for that. Using it, Harry drove into the city with one eye out and very quickly found a place to stay. It was a quaint, little bed and breakfast. But what made it particularly attractive to Harry was the fact that it was located in a two-storied house that could have been dropped out of seventeenth or eighteenth century merry old England.

The couple that ran the place were extremely friendly, especially when he mentioned that he'd come up simply to see the sights – apparently, it was rare for a young man to do so on his own. Before he was able to excuse himself to go see the sights, he'd been gifted with nearly a dozen recommendations of 'must see' places.

Knowing that he was likely to be quizzed later, Harry decided to stick to the muggle parts of the town for the rest of the day.

The tour of The Witch House that he took was a bit of a let-down, really. It was an authentic seventeenth century house, decorated with period furniture and with mannequins strategically placed to simulate what life would have been like back then. But for Harry, after living in a castle for seven years, staying in the Leaky Cauldron for a summer, owning and living in Grimmauld Place, not to mention the countless trips to Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, it felt incredibly mundane.

The Salem Witch Museum was much more interesting. It was filled with realistic sets and exhibits that detailed the Salem Witch Trials of sixteen ninety-two as accurately as possible. He'd startled slightly when the first of the signs that he was reading blurred slightly and a second sign appeared directly beside it. This one gave a magical accounting of the scene in question – the death by crushing of a man accused of witchcraft.

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