Now we actually get to normally numbered days: Friday was scheduled to be the first day of the road trip! However, the first chunk of the day wasn’t actually spent on the road; it was spent doing yet more sorting. I’ll spare you the details. I never knew we could have that much to sort out and resort, but we did. All the while, Nannie was trying to clean the house around us, as SJ’s brother would be coming to stay that night, and she had to get things ready for him! Things got a little bit frantic, but we left around noon. Nannie had asked SJ which way we’d be going, and where we were aiming for while we were getting things together. SJ told her, “North!” We hadn’t actually decided on that yet, or even looked at the map yet, and we think this horrified Nannie a bit…

That’s not strictly true. I had looked extensively at the map in planning the trip before we left; I had to decide where we could get to, where we couldn’t, and which order we’d go in. I’d arranged to stay with various relatives along the way, with tentative dates for each of them. The path, of course, was circular. When it came to the nitty gritty details of each day’s path, though, you have to understand that part of my joy at roadtripping is NOT having a fixed, firm schedule. After dealing with English public transport for a solid three-year chunk, part of why I NEEDED this road trip was the freedom to be able to just stop if we found something that looked interesting – the freedom to go and stop and go again at will, rather than dictated by a timetable that isn’t followed anyway. So, while the highlights were planned already, the in between wasn’t. On this first chunk, our first planned stop was in Michigan, 1100 miles away, so we had a bit of flexibility in how we got there.

However, even after leaving Nannie’s, we still weren’t On The Road proper: we had a number of stops to make around Bossier City before we could leave, including SJ’s parent’s house. SJ’s dad was waiting for the new waste bag for their riding lawnmower when we called by, to be delivered by a guy in an 18-wheeler. I remember that sort of thing from when my lathe was delivered: it’s a very strange experience to see this big truck pull up and a guy checking that you’re waiting on a delivery.

We also headed to Target (now that it was actually open). Now that we had a better idea of the things we needed for the trip, SJ went around picking up those things while I went and hunted for jeans. I apparently earned myself Good Husband points by actually trying them on there (in the fitting rooms, I hasten note, not in the middle of the store), and when one pair didn’t fit I even went and found a different pair and tried those on too! There were several other errands, including extending the Junk Food Tour of America with Arby’s and an Icee for me. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but I will say I still miss white cherry Icees, and Arby’s was actually surprisingly decent – less greasy than I remember.

Image by Steve Snodgrass.

The last stop we had to make was for doughnuts. We had been trying to get to Southern Maid, the makers of the most tasty doughnuts in the entire world, and the well-deserved recipients of the only commercial endorsement Elvis Presley ever made in his life, but we had consistently failed to get out early enough on the previous days to get to the Southern Maid near Nannie’s in time to get any. We remembered that there was one on East Texas Street, and that one had been open later the last time we had been in the US, so we decided to try it just in case.

Thankfully, they were still there, and still open. Not only were they still open, they had doughnuts too! We bought a variety to last us a couple of days – although a couple of them didn’t last very long at all for some reason. Outside Southern Maid, surrounded by the delicious smell of awesome doughnuts, we pulled out the maps and decided where we wanted to try and get to that day, eventually settling on aiming for Memphis, Tennessee following I-220 East to I-20 East, and then I-55 North.

Day mileage: 340
Southern Maid Donuts, 4701 E Texas St, Bossier City, LA 71111 to Super 8 Grenada, 1451 Sunset Dr, Grenada, MS 38901 via Shoney’s Restaurant, 1526 Sunset Dr, Grenada, MS 38901

And then, finally, around 2:30pm we got on the road!

Ever since we’d washed the car the day before, we’d started to hear a high-pitched whine when the car was moving at speed. I’d tried to work out what was causing it, but it was over on the driver’s side and I couldn’t really root around to work out what was going on. It was pretty easy to ignore at city driving speeds, but when driving at highway speeds it grew into a loud, high-pitched whine akin to the collected, extended caterwauling of an entire girl’s school of petulant, spoilt teenagers being fed feet-first through a woodchipper. Somehow SJ managed to block it out, but it slowly began to drive me ever so slightly unhinged. I should imagine the girls would be considerably louder, dear. Also, you left out the “more” in your last clause. 😉

Our route east along I-20 took us south of El Dorado, Arkansas. SJ has an old acquaintance there, and was considering diverting north to visit her. We eventually managed to contact her son, and he told SJ that his mother was actually over in Dallas visiting a relative, and would be there the entire time we were in the US, so we wouldn’t be able to meet her in El Dorado. The northward detour no longer being needed, we continued along I-20 and tried to get hold of SJ’s brother in Memphis to try to arrange visiting him. This proved to be more than a little tricky: he had only fairly recently moved to Memphis, so we had no phone number for him, I sent him an email (that data connection was starting to be useful already…) but had no expectation of a quick response, and then SJ suggested that I try to contact his wife through Facebook. Now, I Don’t Do Facebook, but under the circumstances I agreed that it was probably necessary – unfortunately, trying to log into SJ’s account from the phone tripped security measures, and we were unable to get past them (in no small part because they didn’t work properly).

So, we decided to shoot for Memphis anyway, passing through Monroe, into Mississippi and through Vicksburg and then around Jackson on the loop (also called I-220. At this point I should have started to suspect that the US road system had it in for me) before joining I-55 north.

As we approached Canton, Mississippi we drove past the absolutely immense Nissan plant. I can honestly say that, until that point, I had never seen a single building that big, it just seemed to keep going and going as we drove past. Measuring it on the map now, it comes out at over 1.63km (1 mile) of continuous factory!

Image by Brad Montgomery.

On we drove into the evening, north past places with names like Pickins (one of the many names I enjoyed saying in quite silly tones during the journey…), and past Holmes County State Park (we never found a corresponding Watson County; we were most disappointed!). Soon after we passed Winona we started to get really hungry, and as we approached Grenada, SJ saw a sign for Shoney’s. “Shoney’s! We have to stop at Shoney’s!” SJ exclaimed, practically bouncing in the seat. “It’ll probably be foul, but it’s a nostalgia thing, you’ll just have to go with it.” I sat there kinda going “Bwuh?! Well, you’re driving!” so we pulled off the interstate at Grenada and passed a variety of hotels before spotting the Shoney’s sandwiched between a Holiday Inn Express and a Wendy’s.

SJ warned me that Shoney’s would have a menu and a buffet. We checked out the buffet, and then the menu, and decided to go with the menu (neither of us are great fans of buffet restaurants): SJ had a salad, and Philly Cheesesteak sandwich she didn’t have to cook for a change, and I decided to try a Turkey Club. The server was helpful, cheerful, and competent, and the food was tasty. After a few minutes I looked up from my food and had to exclaim, “Wait, there was a sandwich on that plate, I saw it!” SJ must have been really hungry to have inhaled it that quickly! Our original plan was to share main dishes at restaurants (having gotten used to the smaller portions served everywhere outside the US), but in the end this only happened on a few occasions – and if we’d tried it that night there just wouldn’t have been enough food, we were that hungry.

We finished eating at around 9pm, and we were both tired and wanted to stop. We hadn’t gone as far as we wanted, but we’d covered over 320 miles, and even though we were still 100 miles south of Memphis, we decided we’d gone far enough, we should just get a room and head to bed. We didn’t want to spend too much, so we started with the Super 8 Motel just across the road from the Shoney’s (once we managed to get across to it, which was surprisingly difficult even at that time of day). The lobby was nice, the clerk was efficient, competent, and friendly, the price of the room was good, so we decided to stay there rather than traipse around the other properties in the area. She told us that our room was “three doors past the pool,” but when we asked her when the pool was open she replied with, “May.” So alas, no chance of getting any swimming in before we left in the morning.

We were in a ground floor room, and the motel had exterior corridors, so it was easy to get stuff into our room. The room was clean, decent, and surprisingly spacious, and we managed to get ourselves settled in quite quickly. Unfortunately, the wifi refused to work correctly, and at this point SJ really needed to sort out our money. Thankfully I was able to tether the laptop to the phone, and she used the data plan on the phone to get to the internet. It worked very well, and SJ managed to get everything sorted, but shortly after she was done I noticed my phone behaving oddly: sending data unexpectedly, turning on the GPS, and generally acting odd. I eventually worked out that Prey (an anti-theft app) had decided that my phone had been stolen and had gone into active reporting mode, but trying to fix that was hilarious over a rather pedestrian connection, especially as the Prey website is as slow as molasses going downhill in a Candian winter at the best of times! I eventually fixed it as SJ finished showering, and explained to her why I had been feverishly working away and stressed. Next it was my turn to shower, and we collapsed into bed around midnight.

The data connection on the phone was SO SLOW compared to what we’re used to. We determined in the end that the US simply has slower connection speeds than Europe. I feel I should clarify: we each have a smart phone, but we opted to just get the Red Pocket plan on one phone and share it for the duration of the trip. We decided to use the other phone for audio logs, playing music (my car radio doesn’t work, and being in a car without soft music on is absolutely torturous to me), etc. Since my phone had the 16GB microSD card, mine became the music & audio storage. Sharing phones was a bit trying at times, but we managed.

Thursday was primarily Car Day. We set to work on going over Iolana to prepare her for the road trip. The first thing we concentrated on was the headlight problem we’d experienced the previous night, and at the time we thought we’d solved it! The headlight bulbs and their wiring harnesses push and twist into the headlight assembly, and they had worked loose so that the headlight bulbs were no longer firmly held in place. We came to the conclusion that the problem we had been having the night before was caused by the bulbs falling back into the engine compartment, and then back into the headlight assembly as a normal result of acceleration and getting bumped around by the road surface. This may well indeed have been part of the problem (it was not, as we later found out, the fundamental issue. But we’ll get to that later, dear reader), and it was a really easy thing to fix.

On the other hand, while checking the headlights, we found that the passenger side parking light wasn’t working at all. There were no fuses we could find to check for that, so we decided we had to get to the bulb to check whether it had blown, and that proved easier said than done. The owner’s manual contained information on getting to the headlights… but nothing about how to get to the parking light bulbs, so I had to consult the Great Internet Oracle to find out what to do. I determined that we needed to unscrew a couple of screws on top of the headlight assembly, and pull the entire assembly out to get to it. Sounds nice and easy!

What the Great Internet Oracle didn’t tell us was that the headlight assembly is held in at the bottom by a very stiff and awkward friction pin that defiantly holds on for dear life, so getting the assembly out requires a lot of cursing and pulling before it deigns to release its death-grip on the car. Thankfully, after all the effort to get to the bulb, we found that it had indeed blown: an easy thing to fix! After replacing bits so that the car didn’t look like a complete mess, we headed to the auto parts shop to get replacement bulbs, spare fuses just in case, and some of that most important of substances: WD40. I was shocked when I realized I didn’t have any in with the car supplies in the trunk; we had to fix that post-haste.

We ended up in conversation with the cashier, and he told us he was a Fugitive From The Law in the UK: he had visited England, and failed to pay the congestion charge while driving in London. What started out as an £8 charge had, by the time they found him and demanded payment, ballooned into over £500 of charges and fines. He’s been told not to bother paying it, and not to go back to the UK… I do wonder how much has been added to the fines since then!

We got the bulb replaced quickly and easily once we got back to Nannie’s – the headlight assembly was much easier to get out and put back when we knew the trick – and then we tidied and emptied the car so that we could go over to a nearby self-service carwash.

On the way to the carwash, we stopped for lunch at one of SJ’s favourite Asian places, a take-out called Mayflower that happens to have a few tables for people who want to just eat there. It’s unpretentious, definitely not fancy, but their food is tasty, and the staff is friendly and welcoming. We split a lunch of egg drop soup (which is impossible to find in the UK), spring roll, and lo mein. I wasn’t impressed by the soup, but the rest was great, and it was a welcome break from running around at this point.

I miss Mayflower, and American Chinese food in general. It’s different from British Chinese food – Chris recently learned that it’s because the Chinese who settled here in Britain mostly came from Hong Kong, whereas the Chinese who settled in America mostly came from mainland China, and those two cuisines are different. They each were adjusted to suit American vs British palates, of course, further adding to the disparity. The bog-standard soup in American Chinese is egg drop, whereas it’s chicken and sweetcorn in British Chinese. I like both, so I miss egg drop soup. Thankfully, it’s very simple to make, so we make it at home. American Chinese lo mein dishes are another thing I sorely miss – and, though we’ve found lo mein noodles, I’ve yet to manage make it taste right.

At the carwash, we began feeding a quarters (in a quantity I don’t even want to think about) (it was less than $10; I got a roll of quarters from the bank specifically for this. Rolls of coins – another thing I miss.) into the wash and vacuum systems so we could give Iolana a pretty thorough cleaning, inside and out. They’d changed the setup since we were last there, replacing the half-useless “vacuum and perfume” system with a proper “vacuum and carpet cleaner” option, and SJ and I worked in tandem passing the hose around as quickly as we could to get the most out of our quarters. It wasn’t a perfect job – when racing the timer on the car wash equipment, you can’t really do as good a job as doing it by hand at home – but it was decent enough, and a vast improvement on the grimy condition the poor car had been in.

Returning to Nannie’s, we finished the detailing: Armor All, treating the leather, hand-cleaning the inside fittings, cleaning windows and mirrors properly, and so on. (Yes, I’m very particular about my car, why do you ask?) We were going out for dinner with friends later, but we had time to get properly cleaned up, so inside we went to get sorted. At that point we discovered that we had been horribly mistaken: we hadn’t actually been washing away the three years of dirt on the car! As it turned out, we’d actually been collecting all of it under our fingernails; that’s the only way to explain how they could have become so horrendously dirty. Shortly after this discovery we determined that there doesn’t appear to be a single nail brush anywhere in Nannie’s house (she wasn’t home to ask). We managed to extricate the Muck Of Ages through Vigorous Cleansing, but my fingers were complaining for a couple of days after this…

We got to Peggy and Rodger’s exactly on time, despite managing to get somewhat misdirected on the way to their house (it’s a left, then a right, then the first left … no, wait, it was the second left … oh, phooey, where’s the map?), only to be greeted with “About time!” from Rodger. We’re pretty sure he was referring to the three year delay since our last visit, though… We visited for a while, catching up on things that had been going on in our lives since our last visit. Talking with Peggy and Rodger is always highly amusing for me: Rodger is a big, rough South Louisiana Cajun, while Peggy is… definitely not, and their interaction is always fun to watch. Eventually, Rodger declared that his belly was rumbling, so we piled into their car to go to Imperial Cathay. The meal there was wonderful, and they have been added to the list of places we know we can go to to get decent food when we’re in Shreveport. (Yes, that’s Chinese for lunch and dinner. What can I say? I was really jonesing for Chinese.) We chatted over dinner, and eventually returned to Peggy and Rodger’s house for more catching up and dessert in the form of cakes baked by the children of their neighbour as part of a charity fundraiser and educational exercise. They were pretty tasty, and were cooked into Easter bunny shapes as we were pretty close to Easter at this point. Neither SJ or myself are religious, but that Easter Sunday would take on some significance during our trip…

When we left Peggy and Rodger’s we finally looked at the time, only to find it was 10pm – time flies when you’re with good friends! On the way back, we decided to go to Target, as I needed new trousers: I’d found that the black jeans I’d brought over with us had a hole in them, so I only had one pair of wearable trousers at this point! Unfortunately, when we got to Target, they had just closed; the doors were still open, but when we walked in we were informed that they were closed by a very peeved-sounding worker over the store PA system. So we headed back to Nannie’s, did a bit of sorting for the next day, and generally prepared ourselves for bed, although we had to stay up until 12:20! SJ was still taking antibiotics at this point, and the timing of the pills, and fitting food around them, meant that we couldn’t have any more of SJ’s ice cream birthday cake until 12:20. We’re generally up til around then usually, but it would’ve been nice to get to bed earlier the night before setting off on our road trip. Hey ho.

After consuming cake, we headed to bed for the last night at Nannie’s before the Great Road Trip.

Why yes, I am using Roman numerals for the day numbers at this point. Much like preface material in a book, the first few days in the US were preface to the road trip; days will be numbered in a more conventional decimal form when we get there.

I woke and shambled (he’s good at shambling, especially before his first cup of tea) into Nannie’s kitchen a while before SJ, seeking hot water to apply to the bags of precious life-giving Tea I had carefully packed to bring with us (US tea is, in my experience, almost universally bletcherous). (So very true; we’d brought his and hers tea supplies.) To my immense shock and amazement, Nannie had a wireless access point right there in the kitchen (in fact, she also has a tablet and a kindle, something that completely blew away SJ and I!) I could even get my phone to talk to it, thanks to strategic placement of the password! After correcting the alarmingly high level of blood in my teastream, some food, and some chanting of the Ancient and Forbidden Words of Command (“Work, damnit, useless thing! Work!”), I had the data connection on my phone working properly.

I had no idea at the time just how massively helpful, if not vital, that data connection would be for us over the next few weeks…

After SJ had emerged from the depths of slumber and consumed breakfast, we headed out to deal with earwax. Yes, wax of the inside-the-ears variety, specifically SJ’s. SJ suffers from slow but inexorable wax buildup, to the point that it will seriously impair her hearing if not addressed from time to time. In the UK the local GP practice (and all others I’ve heard about) is incredibly reluctant to syringe ears, and when they do the method is so horribly ineffective as to be pointless, so we decided that one of the first things we would do when we got to the US would be to get SJ’s ears thoroughly evacuated.

Off we went to visit a doctor SJ has seen in the past, the inimitable Dr Lippton, an individual who can best be described as being “something of a character.” (US readers: you should note this is Chris employing that infamous British understatement thing you hear about sometimes.) He was more than happy, if not positively enthused, to clear out SJ’s clogged ear canals, presenting the extricated globulous clumps with something approaching a paternalistic pride, all the while providing a commentary that, if a British doctor even attempted it, would cause massive scandal. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his patter, mind – it was highly amusing and entertaining. I’d thoroughly recommend Dr Lippton to anyone in the area (or passing through) – his amusing banter helped lighten the mood during this uncomfortable procedure, and he’s always known just the thing to fix me up – including my first ear syringing some years back, before I’d ever heard of it. It’s just that British doctors are supposed to have Zero Personality, it seems. Despite this, his ministrations were spot on: SJ’s ears were cleared, and as soon as he’d finished he saw what our GP couldn’t (because of the earwax in the way!): SJ had an ear infection. (I’d gone to the Dr a few days before leaving.) Dr Lippton prescribed ear drops and antibiotics – of a strength I don’t think you can get outside of hospitals here (Judging by how big my UK doctor’s eyes went when I got back and showed her the paper for it, I think Chris is right). With vouchers [coupons] in hand, we headed off to a nearby grocery store to get them filled.

While waiting for the pharmacy we wandered the grocery aisles in a sort of daze, “So much lovely stuff! So much stuff the import stores don’t carry! What is their problem?!” Despite us being on the Junk Food Tour of America, we managed to resist the urge and did not stock up on… well, everything, but a few things did manage to end up in the cart anyway.

When we’d finished there, we returned to Nannie’s, and were bundled into her car to go to Sam’s Club. ((For the UK readers: Sam’s Club is a warehouse-style, membership-only retail chain run by Walmart, where goods are often sold in bulk or with no frills, and sometimes – but not always! – for lower prices. Much like Costco or Booker Cash&Carry, but anyone can pay the fee and join; you needn’t meet any criteria to qualify.)) We prefer a few American things enough to import them, so we wanted to take the chance to stock up before we returned to the UK. However, we found that there was very little we needed that we could get there. While they had a lot of stuff, there was very little selection within any given type of item: for example, I found exactly one type of one brand of toothpaste, and this singular form of tooth goop is not one that either SJ or I use. We found a few things on our list there, got some boxes of snacks for the trip, and managed to get a 2.2 litre Airpot flask for my Life-Support-Tea-While-Roadtripping needs. However, the majority of our list included things we simply couldn’t get there, and we left somewhat disappointed.

For dinner, we went to a Mexican restaurant called Trejo’s. SJ actually used to work at Trejo’s back in her wild, rebellious youth (I had one of those? Learn something new every day!), and we were both looking forward to some real Mexican (well, Tex-Mex) food that we hadn’t cooked for ourselves. Unfortunately, we were both quite disappointed with the meal: SJ’s entrée (Bistek Mexicano) was entirely too spicy, mine (a chimichanga) was okay but it was certainly nothing on the food we cook, and the sides – refried beans and Mexican rice – were similarly disappointing. Maria, one of SJ’s old co-workers, was our server, and she and SJ caught up a bit. I mostly looked on with bemusement, and couldn’t really join in the conversation, as I could barely understand a word Maria said, her accent was so strong! (Oh, yeah, it is … sorry, love, totally didn’t think about that!) When we’d finished dinner, on the way out to the car, SJ ran into Joey Trejo (He’s a classmate and former co-worker of mine – he runs this location now, I believe. Sweet guy; I was glad to hear he and Danielle are busily living their own happily ever after.) and caught up with him a bit, and thankfully I could actually understand him.

Just as we were sitting down to eat, SJ’s dad had called. After dinner we decided that it was rather silly to phone him back when, for a change, we could just drive over and see him, so we did! We visited for a while, chatting about a variety of things, but then he showed me some of his workshop, the cabinet he was making, and made me immensely jealous by showing me his stores of hard woods (which, in the UK, would be insanely expensive). Much of the work I do has to be with pine, simply because hardwoods tend to be ruinously expensive in any useful quantities, and seeing all that hardwood there made me very tempted to find a way to sneak it back in to the country. Alas, I suspect that wandering through airports with large pieces of hardwood shoved under my shirt wouldn’t work too well. We did discuss cutting it into lengths to fit in a suitcase, but Chris oddly vetoed this idea.

After tearing me away from the shiny, shiny wood store, SJ and I picked up a few things from the shop. Water was high on the list of needs, as Bossier City water is drinkable, but it didn’t taste like what we’re used to. We decided to opt for bottled water. We also got some bottles of a drink I love, but can not get in the UK: Bolthouse Farms Vanilla Chai Tea. I find this drink weird bordering on gross, but hey, to each their own.

By this point it was getting late, so we headed back to Nannie’s and headed to bed.