Day 8: Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi

On Sunday morning after healthy cupcake breakfast (leftovers from yesterday's party) we jumped to the car and headed off to Arkansas. This was our "drive-through-the-Netherlands-landscape" day. It was very flat, lots of fields and only thing missing were the windmills. Besides the very dutch landscape the place names sounded familiar. We passed places such as Stuttgart, England, Moscow and Altheimer. We ended up having lunch at the Taco Bell, which was surprisingly good. While eating, a bunch of kids were organising a church charity where you could get a car wash free. We (=Anu) felt sort of bad for spending churches money for us, so we decided to skip it.

Brabant? No, that's Arkansas.

After Bill Clinton's home state we entered to Louisiana. The southern state is not doing good by the looks of it. The amount of trailer/mobile homes was outnumbering the old mansions. The trailer homes looked just so sad - not maintained at all and you could still see people living there. What was even more amazing were these old French colony mansions, that had been abandonded and left to fall apart.

There wear countless food places, shops and companies that had seen their glory days. Many places also had their advertisements still visivle while clearly they've been out of business for a long time. There were lots of cities with population less than 1000 people, and majority living movable homes. We drove through Pine Bluff, which was really sad, with just people wondering in the streets and all buildings looking like nobody's taking care of them.

Also the further south we got, the more we saw places who would be buying gold, or buying your car/home and renting it back to you with probably some crazy deal. Also pawn & gun shops were not a strange sight. Not to mention, that all the cities we drove through were simply just left to fall apart. We concluded, that the recession must've hit this area much harder than Europe.

We crossed Mississippi river once again and stayed in Best Western, Natchez. We went for few hotels, but the prices were bit too much for us. Like 130$ for a shabby casino hotel - thanks, but no thanks. Even though they offered a continuous transport to the actual casino :) apparently according to the law there you can only have casino's on the water, so the hotels are on located on the land and the casino's are then on a floating barge.

For dinner we went to Fat Mama's Tamales. The food was good and plenty, but we did not actually found out what the tamales were.