Because the World is coming to an end, Jenny, Esther and I had no money for fancy presents. So we decided to make them. I embroidered a cushion for Esther and made a cross-stitch for Jenny. She has 'Patience' tatooed on her chest so I thought it would be a suitable message for her.
The blue linen cushion is from Ikea and the white frame from Habitat.
There's a file on my desktop called 'food'. It contains the notes I typed in the car to keep track of the nicest places we ate at. It goes something like this:
Swamp John Catfish in Muscle Shoals, Alabama
Where hush puppies and I first met.
Charlie Vergos Rendez-Vous, Memphis, Tennessee
We went to Charlie Vergos Rendez-Vous after hearing about it in Theme Time Radio Hour, Bob Dylan's radio show. If you've never heard it, get it now. It was our best travel companion. We heard that you can smell the smoke all the way into the Peabody Hotel's lobby and that's no lie. They pump that smoke out into the streets just to drag you in by your nostrils. The dining room is beautiful, packed with sports memorabilia and presidents' autographs. The menu's pretty simple, you can get a 'first thing' (a starter you won't need), a 'main thing' that comes in different sizes (racks o'ribs) and some 'things on the side'. One rack is enough for two. It comes with sweet and smoky baked beans with bacon and orange coleslaw. Our waiter was a big man full of sound bites. We watched him pour our tea saying something like 'Oh yeah that's right'.
Gus's Fried chicken, Memphis, Tennessee
We were ready to go back to fried. The lady in our hotel said that she felt frustrated after discovering Gus's because of all the years she'd spent eating fried chicken from other places. We waited for our chicken for a while, which is surprising in a joint that only serves fried chicken but it was well worth the wait. Enter generous portions of moist and tender chicken in the crispiest and tastiest batter this side of the galaxy. It was delicious and our bill came to $12.
Boudin King, Jennings, Louisiana
We went on bit of a detour on the way to New Orleans to go to Boudin King in Jennings, Louisiana. Ollie felt brave and had the boudin, which is supposed to be the best boudin in Louisiana. I couldn't gather up the courage to order it due to years of being force-fed the stuff and, instead, went for a plate of fried seafood. Fried oysters are good! And the crawfish came in its own little fishcake. I tried the boudin, which was very different to the one I had as a child. It was just a big bit of hairy gut stuffed with rice and cayenne. It looked a bit like a big grey pregnant slug or a giant ring worm.
Maria's Taco Xpress, Austin, Texas
The first thing you see approaching Maria's Taco Xpress is a giant statue of Maria raising the roof. According to the numerous newspaper clippings tacked to the walls inside the restaurant, Maria's slightly loca. I'm not sure you can be loca and produce such delicious breakfast tacos. Or maybe you need to.
Trailer Park, Austin, Texas
More Dulwich Park than Trailer Park. Nice Po Boys!
Whataburger
What a burger!
Texas Chili Parlor, Austin, Texas
Good meat-only hot hot chili. No beans, just raw onion sprinkled on top. Man food.
Dairy queen
It's hard to find somewhere to spend your money in Marfa. Everything seems to be closed in the afternoon. We couldn't find Food Shark on the first day so walked into Dairy Queen and had some delicious burgers and deep-fried jalapeños.
Cochineal, Marfa, Texas
It's very pricey, the food is mediocre but it's worth a visit just for the lovely waitress.
Food Shark, Marfa, Texas
He drove in, set up, and sold us the most awesomest falafel eh-vah!
This is a real quote from a real sign outside Waffle House somewhere in Tennessee.
The last few days have been quite unreal. We're now officially in the South. People's accents have thickened and they call each other 'y'all' like we're in a very big TV show.
While eating bananas around milepost 250 of the Blue Ridge Parkway, we had a quick chat with a middle-aged man. He heard our accents and said 'Doesn't it look like the hills of Scotland?'. We replied 'Yes. But bigger' and he replied with what has become the motto of our trip: 'Ain't nothing bigger than America!'
Reflecting on his comment, we pulled out at a café.
Bluff's café is not especially nice-looking but the waitresses are worth the trip. I won't describe them. All I will say is that they started working there between the café's opening in 1949 and 1952.
We got off the parkway after spending the night in what could possibly be called 'The best friggin' hotel in the world'. All the cabins had balconies with the most amazing view onto the widest sunset I have ever seen. The fact that we made the manager let us have the room for half the price helped too. We got up at sunrise and drank coffee on the balcony, waiting for the sun to come out to play.
Stumbling upon a Palin lookalike competition on TV, we realised it was Halloween and thought that visiting Ghost Town in the Sky would be an excellent thing to do. It wasn't. Well I guess it made us glad that we could now say we had been to the worst theme park in the whole wide world. If you drive past Maggie Valley, North Carolina, do not go to Ghost Town in the Sky. It sounds like the best place on Planet Earth (a theme park atop a mountain) but it is crappy and a little depressing. The only good good thing about it is that you have to get onto a chairlift to get there.
I have to stop typing. I feel ill from eating too much really really good fried catfish from Swamp John's in Muscle Schoal, Alabama.
We've left New York. We went to pick up the car at Newark Airport. It's a red Dodge Avenger. It has a drink cooler above the glove box, several cup holders and hidden compartments.
We got out of the car hire and had a look in an excellent book for ideas on where to go. We decided to head to Roadside America. Here's what the website says:
ROADSIDE AMERICA is an unforgettable panorama of life in rural United States. The exhibit spans more than two hundred years in time and lets you see, in exquisite miniature, how people lived and worked in pioneer days … through the years since then … right up to the present.It's one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. You pay for your ticket in a roadside gift shop, an old lady shows you to a tiny door, you push the door and enter a gym-sized room entirely filled with models of American villages throughout the ages. There are buttons to push (we chuckled at the inuendos) and a show every half hour. For the show, a man in a box dims the lights. A slide show about America and Jesus Christ plays and "God Bless America" comes out of the speakers. It is magical and Roadtrip USA weren't wrong when they said we'd find it hard not to shed a tear (well, I did).
In newspapers and magazines, ROADSIDE AMERICA has been acclaimed as the
greatest known miniature village—the most unique and detailed masterpiece of its kind in the world. Actually, it is not one village, but many—really the American countryside as it might be seen by a giant so huge that he could see from coast to coast.
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