by The organised tour, which ran from Chicago to New Orleans over ten days, was very well run. Our guide was exceptionally good. He knew all the history and always gave us maps and plenty of other information. If there was ever a hitch, he could come up with a plan at the last minute. I saw, heard and tasted a ton of stuff. But having to constantly be at certain places at certain times, and never staying more than two nights in any one place, became quite tiring. And there was this unwritten rule that you had to be there ages before, as I found out when I turned up at the coach four minutes before our scheduled departure and was quite unpopular. And I did feel out of place at times: most people were travelling with a partner, were about double my age, and were doing about their tenth tour. I’d give the tour a 9 out of 10 because it was really very good, but if there’s a next time I do one, they’ll have self-driving buses by then.
Gross generalisation, but Aussies and Kiwis are better travellers than Brits. They kind of accept that you might not be able to get a decent bowl of porridge in a hotel in Lafayette. (I mean, I like porridge as much as the next guy. I’ve had a bowl every day since I got back.) Brits seemed less willing to try new things or to adapt. Big generalisation as I say, but I think I’m being objective there.
Elvis was the big draw card for a lot of people on the tour. I get Elvis, I think, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one person’s face so many times in one day as when we went to Graceland. That got a bit much!
I enjoyed country music much more than I ever expected to, and the two shows we saw in Nashville were so much fun. It’s opened up a whole new world of music for me (and it’s a vast world) that to my shame I’d been almost totally ignorant of before. Those shows and all the bars with the live bands made Nashville my second favourite place on the whole trip. The second night we saw the Grand Ole Opry – the music there was absolutely awesome – just so much variety. That night was 9/11, so we saw even more overt patriotism than the rest of the time. Memphis was pretty cool too; I think I really liked that whole state of Tennessee. And isn’t that word just so evocative? Tennessee.
I got the sense that in the states of Mississippi and Louisiana and probably the rest of the south, the value placed on human life is smaller than elsewhere. I even saw that in New Orleans when three blokes were doing a manhole inspection in the middle of the road and there was virtually no traffic control. Katrina was absolutely devastating and heartbreaking, but had the same thing happened further up the country the death toll would have been far smaller.
People really do talk quite differently in the south; they really do say “y’all” all the time when talking to more than one person. In New Zealand “yous” is creeping in; this is nails-on-a-blackboard for some people but it does the same job as “y’all”.
