The Great Tennessee Road Trip

Follow this link for photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=99157&id=510568119&l=2ecae21185

I’ve always wanted to do a road trip across America, and what better way to do it than in a 1979 VW campervan called Scooby? So Regan and I set off from New York en route to Memphis, Tennessee and wherever we liked the look of along the way. The best part for me wasn’t necessarily the places we stopped at, but the drive itself and the feeling of total freedom that came with it. Kinda like Thelma and Louise but without the violence, crime and death. We covered around 300 miles on the days we were travelling, staying wherever we could find a cheap campsite or motel (or on one occasion a Marriott as it was 2am and neither of those options were presenting themselves). We saw a good bit of small town America and it turns out they really do fly American flags outside their houses and sit on rocking chairs on the front porch (well, a lot of them do anway). We met some friendly helpful people who helped us out when we got a flat tyre on the first morning, directed us to the vendor of a replacement petrol cap after we left ours at a gas station and recommended that we didn’t try the Virginia peanut soup. (We tried it anyway, it was warmed up peanut butter). We also spent some time familiarising ourselves with the names of US department stores and supermarkets, as a key feature of US culture seems to be making all of their shops look the same. Imagine a retail park with superstore-sized identical shop fronts for shops called Kohls, Target, Lowes, Harris Teeter and CVS without any pictures or window displays to suggest what they might sell. Now try and guess which one sells pasta sauce. It took us a while, but we did get to entertain several different shop assistants with our “pretty accents” in the process.

Weather wise we weren’t very lucky for the first few days – torrential rain made driving fun, particularly when Scooby’s windscreen wipers gave up the ghost on day 2 (although it’s amazing how far you can drive once you got used to seeing the road and traffic as if underwater…) It’s lucky Regan is such a good mechanic and that she came well prepared for all the motoring mini-catastrophes. When we got to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Smokies the rain eased up, only to be replaced by fog. Getting up at 4am, driving for an hour and climbing a big hill to watch said fog didn’t make for the best sunrise experience ever, but luckily as we drove back down the cloud lifted and we got to see some amazing views across the Smokies (and pretend we were in Last of the Mohicans).

It wasn’t long before we got our first taste of good ole’ Southern cooking – grits, (a cross between polenta and porridge) biscuits (scones) sausage gravy (white sauce with little bits of sausage in it), and my new favourite beverage pink lemonade (although still not really sure what flavour the pink is…) One surprising discovery was boiled peanuts – soggy and messy to eat, yes, but also really tasty.

Pretty soon we’d driven through New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland (stopped for cookies), Virginia, West Virginia (sang Country Roads in honour thereof), North Carolina and were headed for Tennessee.