Standing at a Crossroads

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We are both standing at a crossroads. Life decisions. Future directions. Deeply profound. Heavy meaning. Yadda yadda.

No.

We are standing at THE crossroads. The legendary crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi where Robert Johnson famously sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the blues guitar. THAT crossroads.

Down to the Crossroads by the Patrick Dodd Trio (a great, yet struggling Memphis bluesman, who we saw in a dive bar on Beale Street, and whose CD we now obligatorily own)

 

I guess it’s only fitting. We started this morning at Al Green’s All Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, where Bishop Green himself saved our souls with a two hour, all-singing, all-dancing, tongues-speaking, Lord-praising, barn-storming hallelujah of a Sunday service. So I suppose it’s appropriate that we should be drinking beer and making Faustian pacts at sundown.

Al Green's Church

The Reverend Green will be glad to see you, if you haven't got a prayer...

We don’t have any photographs of the inside of Al’s church – we didn’t feel it appropriate. That said, how are you supposed to behave when VERY large VERY elderly ladies are moshing in the pews to the power of a funk Gospel breakdown? Bowed heads? Applause? CPR? It was like nothing either of us had ever seen. Bishop Green was deeply, deeply charismatic, if … erm … slightly hard to follow in the logical thread of his preaching. Just go with it – Church of England this ain’t.

Clarksdale Mississippi, on the other hand, is home to the Shack Up Inn (thanks for the intro LouAnne!) – a motley collection of renovated shotgun shacks down by the railroad tracks (der DER da da DUM!) surrounding a bar / impromptu performance space. Our shack for the night used to belong to Robert Clay, another long suffering blues man whose spirit suffuses the place. If Lucy leaves me, and if my dog up and dies in the night, I will know who to blame.

Shack up Inn

The Shack Up Inn - how exactly does one "dust a broom" anyway?

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On today’s journey from the deeply holy to the merely spiritual, we paused for a few hours at the National Civil Rights Museum. Built in and around the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King was assassinated, this was yet more deeply powerful stuff. Seeing the iconic images of race hatred and determined struggle set in their proper historical context (it was unbelievably recent) was a two-wide-eye-opener for a couple of measured Brits, and a reminder that modern day New York and 20th Century America are two very different places.

And On the 7th Day, God Made the Creation Museum

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America is a diverse country. Full of the bright, the beautiful and the downright bonkers. Having covered off bright (Washington) and beautiful (Skyline / Blue Ridge), we felt it high time for something a little less serious. We already knew where might fit the bill and in fact had spent some time in NYC working out how to fit this particular gem into our trip: the Creation Museum just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. Yep, that Cincinnati, Ohio. The one about 300 miles north of our ending point coming off the Blue Ridge Parkway. And also about 300 miles north of Nashville, Tennessee, our next scheduled hunting ground. Small detour then … but worth it we thought not only for the museum, but for the opportunity to pass through the famous Kentucky bluegrass country afterwards.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard of this esteemed establishment, it is, simply speaking, a museum which portrays the views of the Creationist movement – an increasingly prevalent movement in the United States which believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Amongst the key truths espoused by Creationists are that the world was created by God in six days (well earned rest on the seventh), and that this Creation took place about 6,000 years ago. Those of you who know James and I may by now be suspecting that our attitude towards this may not have been without a certain amount of tongue in cheek-ness. Indeed, several days later, my tongue has only just about begun to straighten back out again.

Yep, we went in prepared to mock.

And yes, we did LOVE the diorama of Adam, Eve and the dinosaurs. AND the depiction of the mammals that COULD have been the starting point for all future mammal species (tiger stripes plus giraffe spots plus a lion mane, anyone?). The learned discussion on how Noah might have designed his ark to avoid too much hard work in the way of pesky animal poo cleaning (well, that’s a pretty important consideration when you have dinosaurs on board) was inspired on oh so many levels.

And no, fundamentally, my mindset hasn’t been changed. I still hold onto that good ole’fashioned view of evolution spurned by the museum in favour of a theory primarily reliant on apparent fossil aging caused by the catastrophic effects of the subsidence of Noah’s flood. Blame it on my scientific mother, engineer father and a maths degree, if you will. Or perhaps on the fact that STILL no-one has been able to explain to me what the carnivores ate on the Ark when two of each animal came in and two came out (I’ve given quite some thought to this one, believe me. Yes, pregnant animals will get you some of the way – though isn’t that kind of cheating? A life is a life and all? – and some frisky bunnies would certainly help too. But enough to be able to satiate the appetite of at least two large and hungry DINOSAURS? I just don’t buy it).

Still, at the end of the day, what the Museum basically sets out to do is to provide a venue for the representation of an alternative viewpoint of how we all got here to the big bang / evolution based model shown in pretty much every mainstream natural history museum you can think of. And you know, I can’t bring myself to laugh at that.

After a heavy day we landed up at our campsite for the night – you’ll already recognize this from one of our backgound pics. A gorgeous setting in the midst of rolling Kentucky hills, surrounded by race horse stables. Eating ribs then settling down for a night by the fire with marshmallows and fine malt whisky, life felt pretty good … And waking up the next morning to send out final leaving emails to our (ex) work colleagues from this beautiful spot in the middle of rural nowhere is a memory that will stay with me for a very long time.

Kentucky Sundown

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Another background picture, this time from the most picturesque campsite in the world (at least so far – we currently seem to be finding the most picturesque campsite in the world about twice a week!).

Kentucky sundown

Camping in Kentucky: marshmallows, strawberries and fireflies

 

Jan Johnson Day

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We had two bites at Nashville. We arrived lateish on a thundery Thursday evening, went out for fried chicken at Monell’s (meeting a lovely couple – Richard and Karen – whose college-age son is considering a career in investment banking, even after speaking with us). We then hit the town, which was staging an extended Amateur Drinking Hour. After a couple of hours listening to interminable sound checks and getting pushed around by all-beef-fed meatheads (male and female) we went to bed somewhat frustrated. Nashville hadn’t really been what we had hoped for, and we were due in Memphis.

The next morning we decided to indulge in The Ultimate Luxury, which is – of course – time. We didn’t have to be anywhere we didn’t want to be. We would take a mulligan day and do Nashville all over again, Jan Johnson style.

For those of you who don’t know Jan, she rocks. Before we worked together in New York, Jan had spent a little time in Nashville, no doubt being talented, and awesome, and awesomely talented. She had given us a long list of recommendations, which we had initially not paid enough attention to, and we decided that this was our problem – we would spend our extra day in Nashville purely following Jan’s advice.

First stop: pancakes out by Vanderbilt university. Piles of fluffy deliciousness, with maple syrup, and sausages (just go with it, OK?).

Pancakes!

Next stop: daytime drinking and live music. We eventually worked out that the key to excellent country music is fiddles. And old dudes – old dudes are to good country music what fat chefs are to good cooking.

Day drinking in Nashville

Next up: Country Music Hall of Fame. Rhinestones, twangy guitars and hillbillies. Actually deeply engaging, even for an Underworld fan such as myself.

The main event: Bluebird Café. In suburban Nashville in the least pre-possessing strip mall you have ever seen. Cue two hours of finely nuanced, carefully crafted, funny singalong singer songwriting.

So Wrong For You, by Treva Norquist (a great, yet struggling Nashville singer songwriter)

 

Then we strayed. We were weak. We slipped from the path of Jan. The next recommendation was a fried catfish and hushpuppy joint (Caney Fork) a $65 round trip taxi ride from where we were. Jan, we are truly sorry, but we balked, went to a crab shack you didn’t recommend … and were rewarded with the worst meal we have had in the USA. Truly terrible, and not in a bad New York Zagat review kind of way (“it was my birthday and they only gave me one glass of free champagne” etc.) but actually really hard to eat. We retired hurt to Doritos in our hotel room (actually they weren’t Doritos, but we have a friend who works for Pepsi, Doritos are a Pepsi product and we are under pain of death not to eat anything else, so they were Doritos, OK?).

Despite the weak ending, we had a lovely time, and came away with the obligatory CD – nothing says “I was in Nashville” like owning a CD of a struggling singer songwriter. Yee haw!

Jan we miss you.

The Open Road

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DC was great.  But you’re not really on a road trip until you’re out on the open road, in some beautiful rural area.  Preferably overtaking a tractor or two for extra authenticity.

Fortunately, DC happens to be very close to two of the USA’s longest and most scenic parkways – the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Together, these make up about 575 miles of gently (well…for the most part anyway) winding roads passing through some absolutely spectacular countryside – views for miles at every turning point.  To put it into perspective, that’s the same distance as driving from London to Inverness – but all on National Park designated roadways.

In total we spent 3 and a bit days cruising down from DC through West Virginia and down into North Carolina.  We loved it.

The Nature!

Oh yes, lots of nature.  Mainly to be fair in the form of nasty little beasties trying to eat my lunch time sarnies but also some proper stuff.  We saw some men on horses, some ground hogs (is that why it took 3 days?), lots of birds, plenty of insects, a snake (fortunately dead) and 2 dung beetles with requisite ball of dung (JUST managed to avoid the temptation to boot their dung off into the far distance).

We didn’t QUITE see a bear but apparently were about 10 minutes away from having done so. Quite a relief that we didn’t actually as at that point in time we had yet to put in place a formal “peeing your pants doesn’t count if it’s because there’s a bear” amnesty.  Now that’s in place I’m much more relaxed about a potential encounter with possibly the only wild animal who could kill you without blinking yet whose reputation (at least in the UK) is based primarily on the honey loving grizzly from that popular kids TV series, Gentle Ben….

We did however spend the next few days both practicing our bear scaring tactics as well as initiating an advanced awareness testing game of skill: “Spot the Predator”……

The Trees!

Do you like trees? Do you really, really like trees? Are you utterly fanatical about trees? Do you have borderline pathological personality traits regarding trees? Is your name Daniel Simon? Good.  Because on the Blue Ridge Parkway you are going to see a LOT of trees. Our record was probably a four hour section of a six hour hike with a view of … wait for it … trees.

The Great Outdoors!

The drive took us through some amazing countryside, including the famous Shenandoah national park, and for quite some way ran parallel with the Appalachian Trail (this is an INCREDIBLE trail running 2,178 miles up the Eastern Coast of the USA.  Some lunatics have apparently been known to hike the entire trail over the course of a few spare months.  (sans deodorant).  The perfect place to get our hiking on.

Walk 1 was short (well, 2.5 hours), deeply scenic and entirely wonderful.

For walk 2 we wanted a bit more of a challenge, so plumped for a 10.8 mile “moderate” trail, which proved to be a slightly unexpected six hour marathon comprising a steep 2,000 foot vertical descent followed by a (slightly less) steep 2,000 foot vertical ascent.  Through trees.  Did we mention the trees?

Boy we ate well that night.

Such a beautiful area and such a great intro to our road trip – really it’s hard to express in words.  So check out the gallery – the pics really do this part of the trip justice.

The L-Plates come off (passenger’s version)

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We have a method for making difficult decisions. We’re both pretty rational people, and if we can’t between us weigh up the pros and cons between two different courses of action and come to a sensible conclusion then … we toss a coin. The key is this: if we don’t both like the outcome the coin chooses we immediately do the other one. Believe it or not, this actually works surprisingly well.

Over the last few days, however, Mr Coin has had it in for Lucy. We have been choosing driving shifts on the coin toss method. I (James) have had beautiful straight interstates through long rolling grasslands with occasional stops for petrol and ice cream. Also, as driver I get to subject Lucy to my truly vast Led Zeppelin collection. Road trips are great!

Lucy, on the other hand has been journeying through an extremely scenic circle of hell reserved for newly passed drivers:

 

Low bandwidth travel

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Half Man, Half Machine, by Goldie Lookin' Chain - those of you who do not know this legendary group of Welsh rappers are in for a treat!

Low bandwidth travel eh? Well, right now we aren’t. Bandwidth in the good old US of A is like free refills of your gallon sized buckets of coca cola. Every man, child and service animal has free wifi nowadays, and we are happily chugging across the States swilling data like so much watery light lager. I downloaded half a gigabyte of yoga videos the other day – before I realized that I used to play rugby, and that therefore I shouldn’t do such things. Ahem.

But this cannot last. Oh no. Dark times will come. Papua New Guinea and Turkmenistan will be like deserts of bandwidth, and blog posts will be few and far between. There BE NO internet cafes in North Korea! (or so I’m told). We have a stack of special worldwide SIM cards, two laptops (one with 3G), one iphone, one soon-to-be-unlocked blackberry, a spare GSM phone and a partridge (plus pear tree accessory) so we should be reasonably accessible most of the time. But more importantly, perhaps, we have X!-TREME! low bandwidth experience…

A couple of Septembers ago Lucy and I were on an RV trip in California / Nevada. We knew there was likely to be no cellphone coverage, and we were deeply embroiled in a couple of important transactions, so we took the fateful decision of bringing a satellite phone / broadband unit with us. Now, Satphones are great. They work just about everywhere you could possibly want them to; the deeply laborious process of navigating by the stars to point a piece of high-tech kit at a satellite thousands of miles above you is like finding the entrance to geek heaven; and they look pretty 007 to boot. That said, data was a cool $16 a megabyte (see above re yoga videos). Ouch.

After much expensive trial and error I can definitively say that the lowest bandwidth way of communicating is … wait for it … Blackberry. But no ordinary Blackberry – whilst your common or garden Blackberry is extremely good at bandwidth-efficient email, they don’t tend to work in the middle of nowhere. The full setup, therefore, is:

  • BGAN 500 satellite phone / broadband receiver, running on batteries charged every six hours from the RV generator
  • Sony Vaio Laptop, again running on batteries, wired into the satphone using an ad hoc Ethernet connection (you can easily make one yourself with just some tinfoil and a pair of stockings)
  • Local wifi network, created by tricking the laptop into believing it is an infrastructure wifi access point using the Connectify program
  • A common or garden Blackberry, tuned into aforementioned wifi network and happily sending and receiving emails like it is in a tower block in NYC

It worked. It WORKED! I was in the desert. I was deeply desperate. I made the above all by myself, from scratch. I was so, very, VERY proud. I sat back, mopped the literal and metaphorical sweat from my brow, gave myself a pat on the back (see above re yoga videos) and went to make myself a well deserved cup of tea.

At which point, my shiny Sony laptop looked at me, saw it was connected to the internet, sighed, shrugged, and downloaded $1,000 of itunes updates.

Skyline Drive

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Our new background picture – us happily motoring down the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park.

Skyline drive

Bendy roads, Lucy driving, fixed smiles!

The L-Plates come off!

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[Or for those of you who aren’t British – I pass my driving test and am unleashed on an unsuspecting American driving public]

Baby Driver - Simon & Garfunkel at their road trippiest

They say that amongst the most stressful things to go through in life are (i) leaving / changing job; (ii) moving house; and (iii) getting divorced. Well, I am of course a fantastic over-achiever – whilst (i) and (ii) were firmly in reach (see the stress-wrinkles!!), (iii) seemed sadly unlikely given my single status. Hence I decided to throw one more challenge into the mix: how’s about learning to drive? Too easy?? How’s about learning to drive IN MANHATTAN. With a total of 3 WEEKS to get your test.

In all seriousness, this was something I’d always promised James I’d do before we set off together on our RTW trip, incorporating as it does a 2,500+ mile drive across America. Lesson one – starting (in rush hour) on 52nd street before turning down Park Avenue – had me questioning the depth of our relationship: was I really willing to go through this? Really?? Many phone calls / active counselling sessions with my poor unsung parents later, I was calmer. The lessons continued, my prowess (confidence? lack of fear??) grew, and within a few weeks, I was the proud owner of a NY state driving licence (which, for those interested, in its temporary form looks JUST like a receipt. Haven’t accidentally thrown it away…yet).

This was a week before our road trip. Yep, that’s right, a road trip involving all SORTS of challenges rarely seen in a Manhattan driving lesson: motorways, bendy roads, supermarket car parks, calm and non-aggressive drivers (how does it work when no-one cuts you up whilst swearing at you in something very foreign and very fluent?). The challenges are endless. This post, then, is the first of a confessional series. First off the go:

Driving on an interstate [check out the SERIOUS expression]. Turns out I’m a SPEED DEMON. Who knew?!!

Very serious Lucy

Skyline Drive. We’ll post a map of this. Suffice to say: BENDY. Think Alpine roads, then supersize (this is America after all). This puppy has a “runaway truck ramp” – 100m of gently upward sloping gravel bed – coming off it in event of truck-speed-bendiness emergencies! Day one: no-one died. Day two: starting to get the hang of it. I think. Also, no-one died. Bring on day 3!!

Skyline drive

Driving…I guess it ain’t ALL bad.

It’s REAL Rustic

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It must be something to do with my accent. Whenever I telephone to book accommodation I seem to throw whoever it is at the other end into a fit of utter panic.

I like to think I sound reasonably normal. But now we are in North Carolina, and we have been in Virginia, and we are going to Kentucky. Whereas most accents involve the occasional mispronunciation of a vowel or two, in this part of the world entire new syllables and grammatical forms are invented round the campfire on long winter nights. As a result, perhaps, Lucy and I are most definitely not from round these here parts (y’all).

We have been staying in a series of beautiful countryside cabins and campsites, yet whenever I call to make a reservation I get a long speech as if the Queen was coming to stay:

It’s rustic (nervous) no, it’s really rustic … it was built in the 1930s (panicked) you have to walk ten yards to the bathroom … wifi only works near the main lodge (really panicked) you may have to run the hot tap a little before it heats up … the fridge is only small … (desperate sounding) the cooker runs on gas … your cellphone might (pause) not WORK!

Despite the physical hardship, we are sleeping ten hours a night. Life is tough.