"What surprised you most?" a friend asked when I returned to Boston, Massachusetts, after my first summer vacation in England. It's a sharp, defining question, inviting focus, unlike the amorphous cliché, "How was your trip?"

My answer begins with its two-part comic preamble: before overactive flight attendants explain the British sequence of day, month and year, I'm startled by the 12/7 sell-by date on the dinner packaging. To us, that means December 7. But it's July. This airline serves food that's seven months old?

Having thrown away five hours of sleep over the Atlantic while Boston's midnight morphs into London's dawn, I am too soon staggering through Heathrow's checkpoints and stepping on to a waiting bus, red as the A2. I never expected a solicitous driver to take my bag, ignore my £10 note, and wave me toward the back where smiling fellow passengers with American accents are chatting as if they know each other. The bus is snaking into central London when I ask the group, "Doesn't anyone want our money?"

"Oh, no, my dear," one woman explains. "We all paid in Philly."

The driver, still surprisingly kind, lets me out at a stop light with directions to King's Cross; he continues toward Victoria Station with members of the Philadelphia Art Museum tour. My destination is Scarborough, a place I know only from Simon and Garfunkel, who made the medieval English folk song internationally famous in 1966. And my concept of the North York Moors is myopically framed by television views: a section of bumpy dirt road, a farmhouse, and James Herriot treating sick cows and other creatures, great, small, bright and beautiful. I come to visit a friend from the many years when she lived in the States and we taught in the same school.

She's returned to her birthplace – one part rugged coastline with a North Sea wind bracing enough to stiffen jet lag – and one part green landscape with sheep and heathered moorlands.

Conditioned to assaults by American advertisers from huge billboards and psychedelic neon signs, I'm stunned by Scarborough's unblighted 50-mile views of visual serenity, by light that can flow like water over grassy dales and Burniston cliffs, and by 360-degree samplings
of weather.

I marvel not only at the meticulous geometry of Vale of Pickering farms – hedgerows dividing yellow fields of rape from subdued blue flax, framing tanned wheat, barley and oats – but also at ubiquitous cottage gardens. They give the impression that, just as almost everyone walks a dog, nearly everyone in Scarborough digs clumps of soil and snails in cultivated enclosures. Are they motivated by a long growing season? Roses across the Atlantic shrivel in September; yours survive even in snow.

We can match the amusement arcades and Ferris wheel along the Scarborough foreshore with Coney Island, yet the skeletal fortress of a 12th-century castle on a triangular headland above the sea is real. It bears no resemblance to Cinderella's fantasy castle in the magic kingdom of Disney World, Florida – a fibreglass shell over a steel frame, with glass-tiled mosaics.

Nestling under Scarborough castle's ramparts, the historic part of medieval Old Town has been witness to smugglers, fishing boats, and Viking raids. It is one of many reminders that America, despite sophisticated heating systems, forceful bathroom showers, and advanced technologies, is still a very young country.

Long before America established 13 colonies, Dr William Harvey, in London, had described the systemic circulation of blood. During years when the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth to the New World and survivors struggled to build a Massachusetts town, Mrs Farrow, a Scarborough visitor, was tasting the effervescent spring waters near South Bay cliffs, spreading news of their medicinal benefits and inventing a seaside holiday that led to development of the country's first beach resort.

In present times, from North Bay cliffs, the shorefront on Guy Fawkes Night is startlingly beautiful. Last November, the chilly darkness was brightened by a full moon over a midtide sea, seven bonfires on the beach, and fireworks as spectacular as the Catherine Wheels, Chrysanthemums, and Roman Candles we reserve for July 4.

But only the atmosphere reminded me of Hallowe'en in the States. Scarborough has revised or reassigned other elements of All Souls' Night traditions: in Scalby, for example, fear has been taken out of Fright Night. For four years, St Laurence Church has run an alternative event to trick-and-treating. Games and activities celebrate Brightness and Light.

Stuffed scarecrows with pumpkin heads, which typically sit on our Hallowe'en porches, appear in more creative forms. At one August festival, in Muston, the fanciful population comprised Tolkien figures, TV personalities, green aliens hanging in space with wooden kitchen spoons for ears, and Little Bo Peep's lost sheep, whose towelled rumps disappeared into a privet hedge.

Other surprises have astonished me. I am gobsmacked that police don't tow Scarborough cars parked in roadways used by oncoming traffic; that unknown shopkeepers and checkout people at Tesco's call me "Luv;" that teatime scones are topped with double cream, (condemned in our cholesterol-conscious country as "arterial velvet"); that schoolchildren in the Scarborough Art Museum and unchaperoned teenagers riding trains without even chewing gum, are so well-behaved; that a Yorkshire menu features "spotted dick with creamy custard" (a dessert with X-rated American connotations). And I can't believe that a society which built an empire on the spice trade seems to avoid its every contact with their food.

There's a different and cherished collection in my museum of memory of Yorkshire. There's the staggering sight of daffodils against stone walls as the train pulls into York, for example. Then there are amazing Scarborough images – panoramic woods of bluebells, pantiles and chimney-pots, mail slots in stonewalls, sleeping under blankets in the summer, opening screenless windows in a place without mosquitoes, collecting the DVDs that fall out of Sunday newspapers, savouring white Stilton cheese with ginger and mango bits, following the rise of a skylark as beautiful as our cardinals in snow, laughing at Brits who put on wellies to walk out in toy rain, barely more than American mist, delighting in the marvellous chemistry between Geoffrey Palmer and Dame Judi Dench in As Time Goes By, and movies screened on the BBC uninterrupted by 52 ads.

The Yorkshire Post photographer who meets me has visited all 50 states and cites America's vast size (about 70 times larger than England) and "transience" as most surprising to him.

There is no Native American except for the Indian. The forbears of our multi-ethnic society all came from someplace else, and Americans today who relocate because of jobs, may move several times during a working life. Children adjust to new schools and make new friends. Every post office stocks change-of-address cards. In Massachusetts, changes of season are equally dramatic. We put up with winter's 16-inch snowfalls and high summer humidity because the yellow, orange and red fall foliage is as nourishing as the first spring crocus announcing, "I'm back". I begin to understand why, despite her 30 years in America, England has always been "home" to my friend. Her sense of it goes as deep as Britain's heritage. In Scarborough, I'm struck and comforted by its aura of permanence and by the stability of homes with walls of 14-inch-thick stone, rather than wood houses with thin sheetrock walls.

Yes, the Scalby library has been "purple-ised", a sea wall has been built on Marine Drive, the beach huts on North Bay have been painted bright colours.

But the National Trust still holds and protects more than 300 historic houses and 700 miles of unspoilt, geologically amazing coastline. Like the Spa, Westborough is essentially unchanged.
St Mary's Church has endured for nearly nine centuries. The several faces on the railway station tower clock continue to argue the correct time. After 20 years of visiting, my favourite Queen Street restaurant, like its menu, is the same as it was in 1988.

Americans wade where you paddle and express admiration with "cool" rather than "brill". Yet babysitters, yard sales, cookies, RVs, fanny packs, jellies, pancakes and cell phones easily translate into child-minders, tombolas, biscuits, caravans, bum bags, jams, dropped scones and mobiles.

Unlike Wales, where every road sign looks like a bad Scrabble hand, Scarborough reassures me that, basically, we speak a common language.

On hundreds of bus rides, I've studied the shoes, sweaters, hairstyles and expressions of fellow passengers. Yet I still can't factor out the quintessential features that make a British person so distinctly recognisable to me.

Perhaps differences are too insignificant to matter; perhaps any attempt at stereotyping is foolish.

As a visitor, I try to impose some British restraint on my unbridled enthusiasms. Not always successful, I appreciate those who graciously tolerate a noisy American from a country which doesn't know what a "proper" robin and "proper" teaspoon look like, a New Englander who'll never drive on the left without brushing roadside hedgerows, never master the choreography of roundabouts.

And never get a grip on the complexities of cricket.