End of the Road Trip

Once again you'll get two posts about the same events, redundancy and all.

After we left the Chatanooga library we got on the road. The interstates are pretty good really, real fast and always enough lanes so it moves at the speed limit. We drove until we got to the turn off to go to the JD Distillery, and once we were off the interstate the speed slowed down and we got a real taste of what backcountry redneck America looks like. "kill all gays" inscribed into public toilets says a lot I think, but the people are generally nice, they wave at ya from the street even though they don't know who we are.

The Distillery was amazing. I have a new found respect for JD now, and really respect the Tennessee Whiskey, and it fully contends with Bourbon. I had always thought that the JD Single Barrel was the smoothest whiskey I had tasted, and now seeing how it gets made, well, it was a golden experience. I was impressed with how close you got to everything (standing over the fermentation vats, I could have spit in it if I felt the need) and where they burn the wood to make the charcoal and also a bottling plant. Man they make a lot of whiskey though. It's quite hard to fathom just how much they have in stock considering it has to be aged for at least 5 years, and so you have to have enough barrel houses to hold 5 years of stock at any one time.

We finished that evening by rolling in Nashville, and we went to a mall! How authentic. We looked around the stores and some people tried to sell us a time-share and then we went to the "Rain Forest" cafe which is like a themed restaurant. Nice enough. We toured the main street and it was full of country music funnily enough. We found another rest stop and slept.

Next day we got up and intended to go to these mountain ranges, and on the way got a log cabin. The place was mint, and I loved every second there, and I made pancakes with sugar-free syrup which was enjoyable! If I ever get another chance to upload some photos you'll get a chance to see it!

We got back on the road and drove into Virginia, and the scenery changes again. The scenery around America is really nice, quite different to NZ and quite a lot like you see in TV, saw a few farms with white wooden post fences. The scenery doesn't change as often either, but that's more or less expected.

Stopped somewhere random, close to DC, which we then drove into in the morning. What a mission! The traffic was horrible and the signposting even worse and no parking. We basically played car tourist that day, and didn't even see that much! We did go to the Arlington cemetary, a massive military cemetary (all the little white uniform tombstones) and that was kind of interesting. We drove to Baltimore and stumbled across a baseball game which was cool, Orilose vs Red Sox, we got a hot dog but not peanuts and enjoyed American Sports atmosphere. It felt a lot more civilised that going to a rugby game back at home.

Next day (today) we got up early and tried to get to DC early but it actually took us 2 hours to get 30 miles and park. We walked so much and so a whole bunch of thing. The big Lincoln Memorial with him sitting on a seat is really big in real life, and then you turn around and see the reflecting pool reflecting the Washington (maybe?) monument and it's really impressive. The reflecting pool was in Forrest Gump when he does the unintended speech in his Army Uniform and Jenny runs into the pool to come to him? Remember that? Well, I was there. The Natural History museum was AMAZING and I saw some cool rocks and some dinosaurs and a whole bunch of awesome things which aren't really all that interesting to talk about but were interesting to look at.

Now we're close to Dulles Airport just outside of DC in Virginia, having a night NOT sleeping in the van, about to fly to New York (thanks lastminute.com, you were cheaper to fly than to train, no wonder no one trains) for a few days then to visit the Scott of Jeremy in London.