My husband has long wanted to visit the West Point Military Academy in the USA. I’ve finally agreed we can go and visit, as part of a New England shopping trip of course. How do we get to the academy and what is the best way of seeing it? - Margery Critchlow, Kinston Upon Hull

Sunday Times travel expert Richard Green writes: West Point is the US equivalent of Britain’s Sandhurst, and is the oldest military training academy in the US, founded in 1802. Its impressive clump of neoclassical buildings lie on an attractive bend on the Hudson River, about 40 miles north of New York.

The journey takes about 90 minutes by car, bus or train. Taking a Short Line (www.coachusa.com/shortline ; £23 return) bus is the easiest option, as they run right to the academy’s visitor centre: they leave from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan (42nd Street and Eighth Ave). Alternatively Metro North trains (www.mta.info; days returns from £13) run along the east bank of the Hudson from Grand Central Station to Peekskill, where a cab to the campus takes about 20 minutes. For more detail, see www.westpoint.edu

It’s no longer possible to mosey the grounds on your own. These days you have to book a visit through West Point Tours (www.westpointtours.com), which includes an informative and patriotic commentary. Be sure to take the two hour tour (£9pp), which is only a couple of bucks more than the one hour tour, and importantly gives you some time at the cemetery, where you can hunt for the grave of General George Armstrong Custer.

Tours also covers the academy museum and some of the neoclassical campus buildings, the extraordinary gothic inspired chapel, and monuments galore, including to such illustrious alumni as General’s Patton and Eisenhower. At Trophy Point there is a particularly sweeping view of the Hudson, and a few leftover links from a chain the Americans slung across the river to stop British men-o-war from getting any further upriver during the war of independence.

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