We woke up well rested in Georgia on Thursday and started our first "real" driving day. We drove through Georgia which offered us quite different views from Florida. Big fields, lots of non-built land and of course those houses in the middle of nowhere with big porches with rocking chairs outside. Just like Forrest Gump!
We stopped for lunch in McDonalds (yes...) and continued our driving. The road signs are just completely amazing. Anything from divorce lawyers to saying Jesus is alive and "after 16 days of conception I have a pulse - choose life". Also the signs on the trucks and cars are either politically or religion-wise very strong, definitely not something you see in Europe. We saw a sign for very cheap book store and went in. It was a bookstore where all books were either religious related (how did solomon and hannah raise their children?) or politically very republican. We did not find anything for us there.
We also stopped on a health spa, that was very popular until 1970's because of its sulfur springs. It looked quite empty now, also the bridge we were on was not maybe maintained since the 70's.. We also saw our first forest fire smoke/fog and noticed the the switch in the car which stops taking air from outside is actually quite handy.
We started looking for a place to sleep around 6 in the evening and stopped to a Comfort Inn, which offered smoking rooms for 80$. Well.. Thanks but no thanks! We drove somewhat further and found a really nice sleeping place with 1) warm breakfast 2) freshly baked cookies 3) indoor pool. The first was okay, the second was excellent and the third we didn't try :-) We went for a dinner in a local bbq house, and the portions were amazingly big. We couldn't finish them and started to get an idea of the food size around here. The highlight of the day was when R needed to show ID when buying one pint of beer :)
Friday the 13th started with a beautiful weather again and we decided to continue our journey with top down (and just for clearing it out: it means having the roof open - we had some discussion of the terminology ;-). We had a really nice driving day through Alabama & Mississippi ending up in Memphis, Tennessee. We put Graceland to our destination in the navigation, but after getting to a suspicous neighborhood with a sudden entrance to Graceland we thought of that well.. Maybe we can do without this also! We drove around it, saw one pink/green Cadillac and then headed off downtown. We found the Vista Inn & Suites and this is our first real shady-motel experience :-)
We entered the reception and there was the whole circuit board of the hotel open. This meant that no connections were working, not also for the hotel staff. Our check-in was handled by actually calling Expedia and confirming our reservation. The room is surprisingly ok, even though it smells like someone smoked something in the bathroom. Later on getting eg clean towels turned out to be a bit of a challenge.
We headed off to Beale street, and as any good American city this is also built for cars. However Beale st is closed from car traffic and full of bars selling drinks, food and having the most amazing live blues. Also in the street were the local gymnastic guys practising and doing cool tricks on the asphalt with all kinds somersaults and backflips. As the plan for Memphis was to meet Terri for her 40th birthday, we texted her to catch up. Through Peabody hotel's rooftop we ended up to the right place and it was great to mert her and her friends. After too many glasses of Terri's wine (yes, she makes her own wine..) we headed off for something to eat.
We ended up in Beale street for some nachos and hamburger, and a cider! We were just finishing our meal and thinking of sms'ing the others when from the speakers we started hearing a birthday song for "Terri who is 40". Well it was mot hard to guess the group of girls had ended up on the same place :-) After some time we decided to call it a night so that we could enjoy the Peabody ducks and rooftop bbq party on Saturday :-)
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