Boone NC to Lynchburg VA

Monday May 30th

 View from Blue Ridge Parkway
We thought we’d try the scenic route today so found the Blue Ridge Parkway which extends 479 miles along the ridge of the Appalachians. It was worth the effort as the views were great (awesome as they say here) and the area around the road was full of flowering shrubs – azaleas and rhododendrons. It was a single carriageway and had a 45 mph limit so we stayed on it for about 30 miles before crossing to the Interstate 81.

We hadn’t travelled more than a few miles when we came across bad congestion – stop start traffic moving very slowly. We saw several vehicles making their escape by reversing up the on-ramp and considered joining them but decided to be law-abiding instead – a big mistake.

There were notices saying that the I85 was closed further down and that the traffic was being guided along a detour. As soon as we could, we escaped down a side road and, using Google maps on my iPod, I found an alternative route along state highway 675. On reflection, I think lower numbers are better for State highways. All went well for the first few miles and it was good to get moving again. But then the road became very narrow and unpaved.

 State highway 645
It was still very scenic but we were a little unnerved when we found we would have to ford a stream that looked quite deep. I paddled across first and found the shallowest route and David followed with the car. On the other side we met a couple in a 4x4 coming the opposite way, so thought we’d better find out what the road was like. They told us it got a lot worse; there were 7 fords altogether and the first was the shallowest. Also, that the pot-holes got so large, a car like ours could disappear. This was not good news so they persuaded us to turn around and invited us to their place for a glass of iced tea before we continued our journey.

 Ford in a Ford
Tony and Jennifer have a lovely home, set in 3 acres of grassland and on a housing estate where all the homes have 3 acres of grassland. We had a good chat before we returned to join the traffic detour. It was a very long trip and we eventually arrived at our destination in Lynchburg, VA, at around 9 pm.
Someone told us that the reason the I81 was closed was that one of the local Sheriffs had shot and killed his wife on that road, earlier in the day.

Into the Appalachians

Sunday May 29th

 Some of the previous winners from Nascar races with all the dents knocked out.
Investigated the Nascar meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina where they had a speedway race.It was the Coca cola 600 which I think means that they whizz round the track 600 times.  Luckily we didn't have time for this. so we went to the Nascar Hall of fame which David found very interesting. There was a video about the history of Nascar which appears to be highly regulated stock-car racing. We learnt that impoverished people in the Appalachians took to selling moonshine to make money during the depression. They tended to deliver it at night and the cops would chase them. If they had a fast car, they could get away so they modified their cars to get more power out of them. After a while, they would compare cars by racing them as there wasn’t a lot of entertainment in the mountains and so Nascar was born.

David and some car enthusiast friends at Nascar.  They didn't talk much.
In the late afternoon we headed for the mountains and stayed overnight at Boone, named for Daniel Boone. It was a lot cooler and quite different from the lowlands. There seemed to be a lot of folk from the big cities here – mostly genteel wealthy people and a lot of twee countrified stuff but very picturesque. Hope to take the scenic route to Virginia tomorrow.

We passed through a town called Blowing Rock. Not far from the town is a cliff where you can throw things over and the updraft brings them back. The posters feature a parent throwing a child over but I think the phenomenon is restricted to lighter objects. Tissue handkerchiefs and so on. Unfortunately, the area was closed when we passed through.

 Landscaped gardens at Blowing Rock
Just heard on the news that there was a shooting in uptown Charlotte last night. One guy killed and another wounded. Just near where we were this morning.

The Carolinas

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Saturday May 28^th

Slow to get moving this morning.  We eventually got away about 11 at chucking out time and set off on the road north to Charlotte, North Carolina.  We stopped at Greenville and explored quite a lot of the town while looking for the downtown part.  A problem was that we had keyed in “Main St” to the GPS and as it turned out there were several main streets.  The one we arrived at first was in the country to our surprise.

Park in Greenville Main st.

When we did find the correct Main Street, it turned out to be pedestrianized with a lovely park and waterfall at one end of it.  There were also lots of trees giving shade from the hot sun. (still around 28oC but less humid than the gulf coast).  Being Saturday, there were hordes of people about.  We discovered also that it’s a holiday weekend with Memorial day on Monday which is the equivalent of Remembrance day in the UK, so there is a bit of pressure on the motel rooms.

 Waterfall in Greenville Main St.

Our evening was marred a little by David losing his credit card in a shop.  He was making lots of phone calls about lawn-mower parts and he thinks (but isn't sure) he left it on a counter while he went to get something.  Anyway it has disappeared.  There were other people in the shop so someone could have picked it up.  After spending about an hour retracing steps. we cancelled it  from the shop with the help of the phone and my iPad to get on the internet and get the visa card number.  Luckily we have other credit cards!

Off to the Appalachians tomorrow where the hill-billies live. 

Montgomery, Alabama to Commerce, Georgia

Friday May 27th

 The road to Columbus.  The road is edged with forest just like the day before.

Storms holding off so headed north for Columbus which was a little off our track. We passed through the State line into Georgia on the way, so we are now, finally on East coast time. Columbus had a Space centre financed by Coca Cola Inc. which was very entertaining as it was really set up for kids. There was hardly anyone else there and when it was time for the movies, we were the only people in a huge movie theatre. It seems it is the quiet period in between the school trips and the summer camps.

 Space Centre in sunny Columbus
Unfortunately we spent too much time there so there wasn’t much time to look around Atlanta, home of Martin Luther King and the place that was burnt to the ground by General Sherman in the American Civil war. Margaret Mitchell who wrote “Gone with the Wind” lived in Atlanta and they have made her house into a museum. Unfortunately it was a quarter to five when we arrived in Atlanta so we were a bit too late for most of the museums.

 Unidentified blossom that we see a lot of.
We decided we would visit Railway City, which is a novel redevelopment of the Inner city of Atlanta where a town has been built for railway commuters so that they can live close to the station and not have to travel there. A city within a city they say. It sounded interesting and appealed in that it was unlikely to shut at 5. We programmed the address into the GPS but every time we got close, a street was blocked off or we weren’t allowed to do a right or left turn. We circled round several times getting more and more frustrated, until David saw a solution, and we dived across the road. Unfortunately the solution involved driving on the left side of the road for a bit– not the side that they’re used to here. In his excitement, he’d forgotten that we’re not in the UK. Luckily the road had been momentarily clear, but there were many cars pawing the road at a nearby set of lights. You could almost hear the revs dropping and see the drivers heads raised in astonishment. But we reached our destination, so it was a good thing really.

After that, railway city was an anti-climax and didn’t look too different from the rest of the city. We could have been in the wrong part of course, but we spotted Ikea and being hot and thirsty, called in for a cool glass of Lingon juice and some Swedish meatballs. Just like home really.

North through Alabama

Thursday May 26^th

Got up bright and early to make the last rental car change.  This was a brilliant one - $39 for a week, thanks to Elise finding us the 1$ a day deal with Dollar rental car.  By the time they added on tax etc. it came to a little more but still – A Bargain!  We can only take it for a week though, so we have to be in NY by the 2nd June.

Road between Mobile and Alabama. Forested 4-lane highway all the way.

We were also pleased to find that both the drop-off and the pick-up were from the airport, so, extra convenient.  Our latest acquisition is a Ford Fusion which gives us a greater presence on the road than our previous micro cars.

Dire weather warnings all day so we raced to Montgomery ahead of the thunderstorms but they caught up with us in the end.  However, none of the fabled golf-ball hailstones although I overheard someone saying she’d caught some. 

The weather cleared up in the evening so we had a look around Montgomery which seems a very affluent place with nice parks.   Montgomery is the capital city of Alabama.

 1000 miles to go! 

The Ku Klux Klan is strong in Alabama which was of the last states to enfranchise the African American population.  To be fair, you needed to be able to pay the poll tax and pass a literacy test to vote so that eliminated many white folk also. But he African Americans were hardest hit as there were a lot of exemptions for white people.  This injustice was only rectified in 1965 with the voting rights act.  Some say there is still evidence of racial discrimination in the South in that approximately one third of all young African American men are in jail, on parole or probation.  The number of prison inmates has been increasing in the USA whereas in other western countries, it has changed little.  However, there are many African American high achievers also so maybe things are changing slowly.

The road to Mobile

May 25^th

 Tourist in Old pharmacy in New Orleans
Spent some time in New Orleans browsing around the French quarter and enjoying the sunshine and atmosphere.  We visited a pharmacy museum; the French are proud of the fact that Pharmacy was widely practiced in New Orleans before other States.  Part of the reason is that in the early days, there was a lot of disease in Louisiana because of the mosquitoes, swamps and humidity.  Yellow fever outbreaks were particularly bad.  Some references to voodoo here because of the early association with Haiti - another French colony.

Paddle  steamer awaiting passengers in New Orleans
The road from New Orleans took us over Lake Pontrachain , which is really a large bay, and then we drove around the coast to Mobile.  The beaches are beautiful with very light coloured sand and almost no people about.  We noticed some evidence of hurricane damage as some houses have not been repaired yet but the majority are looking good. People told us that most of the coastal houses between New Orleans and Bilroxi have had to be rebuilt.  We noticed that they were all on very high stilts, presumably because of the likelihood of flooding. Or alligators.

 David on the beach near Biloxi, Gulf of Mexico.
There is a little bit of black sand polluting the light sand and it is claimed that this is a result of the BP spill.  We did hear that the people have done very well out of the compensation paid by BP and there were lots of shrimp boats out in the bay.  It would be nice to come back here and stay for longer.  It’s still hot and humid but we head north tomorrow after our final car exchange, so we should be cooling down soon.  Lots of tornado warnings.  And the giant hailstones are after us again.......

New Orleans!

Drowning trees on the edge of the Mississippi

Tuesday May 24^th

Set out on the road to New Orleans with a little trepidation as we’d been hearing lots of scare stories about the floods from the Mississippi. However the weather service at http://water.weather.gov/ahps/ reported that while there was some flooding at Baton Rouge, there was very little at New Orleans.

The road ran across swamps for a lot of miles and was built up on concrete posts like a low bridge.  The carriageways were separated and for a lot of the time you could see water between them.

Floods seen from the road
Stopped off in Baton Rouge for a coffee in a dilapidated but very popular French café and had a good look at the Mississippi over the levees.  It certainly moved fast and was very wide and made me think of Tom Sawyer and his adventures on the raft.  It was pretty warm at 32oC so we didn’t stay out in the heat for long, got back in the car and travelled to Sorrento to have a look at a Cajun village, which again was dilapidated. 

We stopped for coffee and lunch in the village and got chatting to a local called Michael Johnson who was very interesting.  One of four brothers, his family were very poor as they’d spent all their money on healthcare for another son who had eventually died.  As a result they lived in a trailer with all the poor folk who were all black and when they started de-segregation in the late 60’s he was one of the few white folk who felt perfectly at ease with blacks which was a big asset.  Also, the black folk were at ease with him. So he ended up running things at school that involved both groups of kids. Without any qualifications, he started work as a policeman and then joined Total petroleum and spent a lot of his life in Africa, South America, China and even Aberdeen at one point.  Then he got fed up with travelling and now works for Verizon maintaining their networks.  Like a lot of folk he’s fed up with Obama who has just poured billions of investment into the oil industry in South America while letting the oil Industry in Louisiana run down.  He says it’s because Louisiana didn’t support Obama in the last election.  American politics seem in as bad a state as UK politics. 

The reason for staying away from the drains!
We went to a very interesting cafe in the evening called Mantino's in Canal Street for authentic local food.  We had to wait ages for a table as there were no reservations and it was very popular but the food was great.  Hope to see more of New Orleans tomorrow before we head for Mobile, Alabama.