Day One - Durham, NC to Nashville, TN

Its hard to believe that we've started what is sure to be the most ambitious trip anyone in the international crew has dared to undertake. The itinerary will be attached when the trip is over, but here's the fill-in for the first 24 hours of the trip that will criss cross America with two British lads and a young lady from Paris.
Having slept in over my alarm until 15 minutes prior to departure time from Granville Towers we all got into a very kind Erin Meachum's 4x4 and attempted to find our way to the Greyhound Station in Durham, NC. I'd not bothered to get directions to the terminal as I thought I could remember my way once we'd found our way into Downtown Durham, but getting into Durham in the abyss that is the signpost-lacking interstate highway system in the USA was the real issue. Still, having had a last hug from Erin we then waited the 90 minutes we'd given ourselves before getting the Greyhound bus headed for Knoxville, Tennessee.

The greyhound ride was an eccentricity-filled experience as one always expects, but the fact that it ran on time all the way to our final destination was incredible and made the journey much better. The bus ride was interrupted between Greensboro, NC and Winston Salem, NC by a small boy heading into a tantrum. His 'momma' took him to the back of the bus to isolate him from his siblings and forcefully kept him in his seat. This exercise of swift southern-style discipline did not go down well with the boy, who proceeded to SCREAM for the next hour. Literally. A whole hour. The screaming was so loud that eventually a guy sporting a handlebar moustache, a Harley T-Shirt and an NCS Wolfpack cap came to the back of the bus and yelled "Boy, I ain't your Daddy, but I'm gonna..." as he raised the back of his hand, only to be reprimanded by the bus driver who told him he was tredding a thin line to say the least. This was a lively interruption to the trip to say the least, but from thereonin it was a generally quiet trip filled with conversation between Sam and I, and casually eavesdropping on the stories people were telling each other about where they were headed, how much Elvis had changed their lives and how they were heading across the state line "to find something else." I finally felt like John Voigt in Midnight Cowboy.

I'll get to the episodes from evening that followed in a later post as I'm stuck for time at the moment, but needless to say we got into Nashville with plenty of time to hit the city streets and find a bar with cold beer and live country music.



More to come in the next post which will no doubt be enormous, but here's me signing off on Mother's Day in America - (love you, Mum!) - Good Night and Good Luck.