USA

Getting a bit behind here: after all, I have now been home for close to a month. In my defence, I have been caught up in a swirl of work, film festival, house buying and getting reacquainted with friends and family.

Heading out of Memphis, I had a small detour to make, to Oxford, Mississippi a small city of a mere 19,000 people but the birthplace of one William Faulkner, and is the model for Jefferson in his fiction. The surrounding county, Lafayette, is replicated by Yoknapatawpha County. Most of his books are set here, and the town has honoured him by having a statue outside (I think) the Town Hall - certainly some official looking building in the Square. The Square Bookshop also had an entire floor to ceiling shelf devoted to his work and commentary on him. It is one of the top ten independent bookstores in the land and did have some John Barth books, but not the one I sought. Another prominent writer from these parts is John Grisham, but I saw no mention of the fact as I wandered. It is an older town, has the oldest department store in the South, and many of the buildings have big balconies on which it is pleasant to sit out the heat.

The plan was to follow the river for a couple of days, but it was thwarted by the fact that in the fight between river and road-builders, the river won so no-one dares put a road anywhere near it. I did go up a road which I thought might take me to at least see the river, but after passing a few miles of cotton fields, it petered out in the middle of a farmers collection of agricultural machinery.

As the day was coming to an end, I was willing to stop at anywhere that seemed OK. I thought Clarksdale would work, but the town was just very sad, with the only accommodations on offer a very tired looking motel. I passed. Towns got smaller and sadder as I headed south, so it wasn't until I hit Greenville that I felt encouraged to stay. This was a town right on the river, with a floating casino in an old riverboat replica, and a mile or so of motels and fast food joints, one of which had an all you can eat fried chicken buffet. I think for the state of my health, it is probably good that the buffet was closed by the time I got there: I do like fried chicken.

I went in to the information centre in the morning, trying to find out whether there was any road that would be good to see the river from. The answer was not positive, but I have to say, the folks running that place were among the friendliest I've encountered. They made me sign their guest book, and sent my off with a couple of mementoes, one of which is a wee guitar, with tiny little flashing lights. I decided that since driving down the Mississippi side had been a bust in terms of seeing the river, I'd pop across to the Louisiana side for the day. It was no better, but I did get to spend a very pleasant time in Lake Providence, LA. The lake is very pretty, and up a side road, I found a fairly unusual place that was a combined delicatessen, coffee joint and gospel TV station called Jehovah Java.

For my last night on the river, I went posh. I'd decided that I was going to stay at Natchez, a town largely comprising old plantation-style mansions (I went mad taking photos here but, alas, no longer have them). My researches indicated that the Natchez Grand Hotel would be a nice place to stay, and it was: right on the river, four star, a river view from a very large room. As I noted in a review i posted, my only complaint was that the TV didn't quite swivel far enough to let me watch it from the very nice desk they provided. I went for a two hour wander out among the grand houses, and along the main street before popping in to the Pig Out Inn for some more pulled pork, green beans and corn on the cob. In the morning, I had even more houses to wander, and then made an important discovery: the Natchez Coffee Company. Two very high-ceilinged old shops joined together, cool art on the walls, good coffee, interesting food: I was set!

It took a couple of days to make the journey from Knoxville to Memphis, mainly uneventful ones. Knoxville is a funny wee place, once famous as the underwear capital of the world and before that as a way station for those heading west, which was pretty much the only function it served for me. After the horrible drive through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Ford, I was keen to just find somewhere to stay and then eat. That proved a little problematic: heading back into town, I somehow overshot and found myself on the wrong side of the river and half way to the south coast. I finally found a street with a couple of bars and a coffee shop and had to ask "where's town"? Turns out most of the action is centred on Market Square, which turns its back on the rest of the world so unless you know what you're doing, you don't know its there. Makes for quite a pleasant space once you find it - there were several musicians of various types busking, and a number of restaurants. There is a highly rated pizza place called Tomatohead, which I wanted to visit in honour of someone who comments here, but the line snaked all the way out of the building. I had to be content with a pineapple and prawn curry.

I've only just learned that Knoxville is where Cormac McCarthy spent a lot of time when he was young: walking around, there was no sign at all. Funnily enough, given my fruitless quest for John Barth's Cambridge book, I actually had McCarthy's Knoxville book, Suttree, in my bag.

I dithered in the morning, eating a very fine chocolate mousse thing pushed on me by a coffee man who might pass as a drug dealer, so seductively did he point out the charms of his mousse, and then it was off to Nashville. Only I didn't quite make it - evidently I missed a sign somewhere, because I was quite confident I was on the right road. Eventually I thought to check, and found I was just outside Chattanooga - which is south of Knoxville, right on the border with Georgia, not west at all. D'oh! A quick change of plans was called for. Dinner at the Blue Plate restaurant that night was curious: possibly the best fried chicken I have ever had and definitely the worst beans ever (green beans cooked in a gluggy white supposed sauce).

Of course, I checked out both the bookshops I found, looking for John Barth to no avail. One was a complete shambles, run by this funny old lady. The radio was evidently playing some Christian station, as a fellow was preaching. The funny old lady took one look at me and up went the volume on the radio! I'd also read of a fantastic homely place that did great pork dishes for lunch, but it wasn't open so I had to hit the road in anticipation of finding more chain food outlets.

Its a long drive from Chattanooga to Memphis - 6.5 hours according to Google maps on the route I took, which took me into Georgia briefly and then snuck along the top of the State of Mississippi - so I was on the road quite early for once. Luckily, in some random town in Mississippi I found, in amongst the chain food, a very busy looking Mexican restaurant, so went in and had an enormous, impossible to complete, meal of fajitas.

I'd actually booked a motel in Memphis, a classic looking Super 8, but it proved the most elusive to find of all the places I have got lost looking for. I even had a wee map with the motel marked on it. Ultimately, I followed their directions to the letter - found the right Interstate, the right exit, and there it was, pretty much the only thing at that particular exit. Leaving to go into town, I took the wrong turn and was suddenly in a different State, Louisiana.

I did drive out to Graceland but, no, I didn't go in. I was far more interested in Beale Street and the Stax Museum of Soul Music. I spent my first night at the former, which had a nice buzz although the action is confined to just a couple of blocks, starting with the BB King Blues Club, where he appears regularly (but not the night I was there). There were several bars with live music, but only one seemed to be offering proper blues, so I went in and had a couple of Yuenglings. Back in Cambridge, Katie had worked on me to try pulled pork, and I finally found the exactly right place to have it: a place called Pig on Beale Street. This was absolutely delicious - slow cooked pork pulled apart, incredibly tender, with a wonderful smoky flavour. Nice with corn on the cob, green beans and Yuengling.

The Stax museum was a good way to spend a couple of hours. I hadn't actually heard of many of the artists on the Stax Records roster - just Otis Redding, Booker T and Isaac Hayes - but it didn't stop me having a good time, as there was lots of music playing and exhibits devoted to each artist, such as Isaac Hayes' gold Cadillac (and a video of him performing Shaft at the Stax Records gig in LA in 1972, when Hayes seemed to be wearing just a few gold chains and nothing else). The story of Stax Records is an interesting one: it formed because lots of locals were congregating at the record store, Satellite Records, and they wanted to make some music of their own, to respond to the Motown sound. They became vastly popular, which attracted the interest of the big record companies: three times Stax did deals with one, and three times they were done over (they even signed over all their original music to one). But they attribute their failure to the shooting of Martin Luther King at the Lorrain Hotel, a hangout for all the Stax people. Until then, race hadn't been an issue but suddenly it created divisions, and Stax couldn't function.

So, after deciding to avoid the Interstates and head southwest, you can imagine what I did next. Yep, I hopped on the Interstate and went vaguely north, with a fair bit of west in it. I wanted to see the Appalachians, but wanted to do a little more than just drive across them - they run north to south. My scouting about revealed something called the Blue Ridge Parkway - it runs for 469 miles, starting with the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and heading down through to southern North Carolina. For its entire length it is in National Parks, the southernmost one being the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was started in the depression, as a way of making work, but took fifty years to complete.

Looking at the map, the way to get a decent run down the Blue Ridge Parkway was to go to a town called Boone - quite a short drive of 160 miles. I didn't find much to distract me on the road, so was there fairly early: dead on 5:00. It is a pleasant town, fairly modern, dominated by the bush clad mountains and by the Appalachian State University. It has a very nice radio station, WASU, which plays contemporary country: so contemporary that the DJ played a quite wonderful song by a girl who is going to school with her brother. Its that kind of station. Boone takes its name on the basis that Daniel Boone camped there a few times! Driving in, I didn't see any of the chains of budget hotels, but there were a few old style motels - I picked one that gave me a good view of the hills.

The drive down the Parkway didn't get off to a good start: after about 8 miles, it was closed and, after numerous detours, I found myself back where I started, at the entrance to my motel. I had to go down to a slightly more posh looking place called Blowing Rock to get back in. As far as I could tell, there is nothing built on the Parkway at all, it doesn't have any major roads intersect with it - instead, it has little side roads head off to the nearby townships or to connect with the main road. It leaves you with a feeling of remoteness, even though I suspect it is a fairly narrow strip of forest at times, just looking at the map, and there was hardly any other traffic. At one point, I pulled off one of these side roads and found myself in a place calling itself Little Switzerland - just a cafe and a bookshop.

After lunch, and back on the road, there was a storm warning on the radio - it gave pretty precise instructions as to where it was aimed at, but because I didn't recognise any of the names, could only hope it was not aimed at me. One particular aspect of the warning that made me hope that was that it said to stay away from trees. The rain and mist and vestigial sunlight did make for some fantastic sights. I'd show you some photos but, since leaving there, I had an incident in which my camera was taken from me, including the last couple of weeks worth of photos.

My stop for the night was in Asheville, North Carolina. I actually had a hostel to stay in here and, thanks to a friendly policeman on a Segway, was finally able to find it, only to discover that the electricity in that part of town had been knocked out by the storms and the fellow running the hostel had gone AWOL. So it was back over the other side of town where I'd seen some cheap, old skool motels: the one I picked just happened to have an owner who liked to make people feel unwelcome: I was interrogated about the number of guests I was proposing to have, the location of my vehicle etc and then subjected to a long and quite freaky silence (Rolling Stone does say that Asheville is the #1 city for freaks). I was about to walk out, when he smiled and told me about his family in Wellington, and everything was sweet after that.

I liked Asheville - it provided me with a wonderful jumbalaya (that is a southern rice dish, not a song) for dinner and it was very pleasant to walk around. I found three good bookshops - no John Barth, but - and was intrigued to find one that had eschewed the fairly common combination of books and coffee: this one had a champagne bar. It has had some famous residents: to me, the most important would be F Scott Fitzgerald, O Henry and Thomas Wolfe but others might be more interested in Charlton Heston, or Robert Moog (he invented the Moog synthesizer).

A very famous family from these parts is the Vanderbilts: in the morning, I tried to see their home, Biltmore House, which is the biggest private house in the USA. There was no actual obstacle to seeing it, save for my repugnance at being charged $US50 for the privilege: nice to see the spirit of greed that made them one of the richest families is still alive and well, but there was no way I was going to contribute to it.

Instead, I rejoined the Parkway for a bit, and then cut through the Smoky Mountains - busiest road I've seen in a while, with older gentlemen on Harley Davidsons travelling in groups of 20-30 being a common sight. There was so much traffic, I basically had to just go with the flow. I was out the other side before I knew it, and if I had read my guidebook before setting out, would have taken the bypass up to Knoxville, Tenessee. But, well, I wanted to see Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge - they turned out to be two very tacky, endless strips of cheap food joints and motels, that went on for miles, with an enormous number of traffic lights. It was just awful.

I left Williamsburg with no real plan but a fairly serious dilemma. Although the general trend of the travel is inevitably west, to get me home, a variety of paths are possible. I had a serious wish to see Charleston and Savannah, which meant heading south and along the coast, but an equally serious wish to see mountains and rivers, which meant heading south west. I spoke to people and they only made the dilemma worse. This was my last day I could keep travelling without commiting to one or the other: standing on a cross roads in the rain, my mind was made up. I'm going south west, but coming back next year, with more time and less heat.

I think most people going to North Carolina would check out its capital, Richmond, and as I drove out the old US5 from Williamsburg,

that was my plan as well. Whimsy took over: it amused me last year to visit Moscow, Idaho and now I had Petersburg, North Carolina just a few miles away.

In around 1650, this marked the western and southern boundary of English exploration. Its definitely a town that has seen better days, half of its main street was closed down, but I found it to be magical, far more engaging than Colonial Wiliamsburg. I spent a couple of hours wandering its streets,





admiring people who were starting new and fairly obscure businesses, such as the shop selling Crabtree & Evelyne stuff in this building,

or having wonderful displays in their windows

(these are dolls, not real women)
snapping pics of the courthouse, which loomed above erything

On 3 April 1865 at 4:00 in the morning, the flag was taken down from the courthouse, to mark the end of the seige of Petersburg and thus the end of the Civil War - making Petersburg a neglected big deal of a city.

I was even able to find a good coffee in a cool cafe, Maria's,

much better than that produced by the "leftie wierdoes" in Norfolk. I was stalled by these suits - they were equally charming

If it hadn't been so early in the day, I might have stayed. In fact, to hell with the earliness, if I'd seen a functioning hotel as I wandered, I'd have stayed.

Across the main road, things took a turn for the posh: all of these appeared to be private homes

I know I could make things happen faster if I was to take the Interstate, but I don't like them very much - six lane monsters that are disconnected from their surroundings - for example, you have to exit to get into a town rather than have the road take you right through - and heavily populated by chain food and lodgings outfits.

So, instead of I-75, I took the old US-1 south from Petersburg. It is quite an experience on this stretch of the road, as it has been superseded by the nearby Interstate: most of the service stations

and shops sit derelict and unused.

I noticed a couple of old style motels that were pretty sad but possibly still in use, there was grass growing on the roadway and there was no traffic. This is a road which should be honoured: it is one of the first created for the automobile, running from Florida to New York. Originally, it was apparently just some ribbins or the like attached to telegraph poles to show motorists they were on the right track! I liked the Roanoke River as I passed by

Favourite song on the radio today, in amongs all the R'n'B and R'n'R? A Country & Western number Here's a Dime, Go Call Someone Who Cares, by someone called Dewayne Bowman.

Chapel Hill is a University Town, part of the Reasearch Triangle (Durham and Raleigh are the other two points). The trusty NY Times sent out a brilliant list of things to do there, two days after I left. I was a bit tired and it was raining, so I found a Red Roof Inn, tangled with the Interstate a few times (I overshot the hotel twice), and went for the first decent looking place to eat, some sort of noodle fusion hell.

Distance travelled: 737 miles. To go: 1600.

The NY Times sent me an email a while ago touting the virtues of Williamsburg. When I found I could get a room in a new Motel6 right in the centre of town for $30, the deal was done: my first destination would be Williamsburg.

I didn't get very far after dropping Katie at work, no further than the Wal-Mart at the end of town. I've only ever been in one, and I wanted to go and explore the joys of $7 jeans, see if they had any books at all (they do, but John Barth is a long way from what they sell) and generally check the place out. Somehow I emerged with a gallon of kettle fries (Really, a whole gallon. Of chips.), a doo-hickey to let me play my MP3 player through the car stereo and a $1.68 chilli bin.

The drive down the Delmarva Peninsula to its point was fairly unspectacular, but I did have to pull in and wander about Pocomoke - it was – it was hot and still

At the point, there is one of the seven engineering wonders of the world, at least it had that status when it was built in 1964, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. First there is a bridge

and then there's, well, nothing

To allow shipping to get in


the bridge is transformed into a tunnel, twice. The whole thing is 17 miles long, the longest in the world. This had me back on the mainland, near the big naval base at Norfolk Virginia. My guidebook mentioned a coffee shop there run by leftie wierdoes, so I popped in to check it out. There was a bit of a boat tied up on the way

This is the battleship Wisconsin.


After that, it was a clear run up to Williamsburg but even so it was late in the day before I got there. Williamsburg is one of the oldest settlements in the USA, and when Jamestown was burnt down, it became the colonial capital. Early in the 20th century, after having his church restored a local priest decided it would be a good idea to restore colonial Williamsburg to its 17th century glory. It has operating taverns and shops as well as various historical buildings with a replica of their original contents. Several blocks in all. Almost everything was closed by the time I got there, but wandering around made for a pleasant couple of hours.

This is the Governor's Palace, occupied at one stage by Thomas Jefferson


and the Court House

Next door is William & Mary College, second oldest University in the USA, and a collection of very handsome buildings indeed, although not the originals


They had a good bookshop, it even had several John Barth books, but not the one I want. I'll get one if it kills me!

I was quite keen to try out one of the dining establishments in Colonial Williamsburg, as they serve 17th century food, but they were mostly closed, and the offerings from the one I did find open didn't realy appeal (partly because they were $US30 for a main). So, recourse was had to one of the endless fast food places America offers.

Distance travelled: 510 miles. To go: 1800.