Road Trip - Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis & St Louis

After leaving our hotel in Orlando, we had an epic drive to Atlanta, which was the start of our road trip, it took 7 hours to drive, Jess did the 1st stint and then I took over at 11am, we didn't arrive at our hotel till after 2am. We stayed in the Days Inn Motel on the edge of Atlanta and I was grateful to be lying in a bed after the long drive.

On Tuesday 22nd February we dragged ourselves out of the motel, and drove with the roof down to the bi-centennial Olympic park and went to the CNN building. The CNN studio tour was pretty cool as we learnt a lot about how American news is broadcasted, and we even saw the anchor film live. The big difference to English news is that the new is glamourized and made into entertainment. After lunch at the CNN food court, we cruised in our convertible to Margaret Mitchell's house; she was the writer of Gone with the Wind. After that we drove into the rich part of Atlanta to the Heritage centre. We went on a tour of a 1920's mansion called Swan House which was beautiful, but our tour guide was a bit of a Hitler and only knew what she had been told, she didn't really bring the house alive. We also went on a tour of a pre-civil war farm house; the tour guide for this house was a really cute old lady, who showed us round who seemed to be thoroughly interested by the house and the people that lived there so she made it so much more fascinating to see. After leaving the heritage centre we thought we would go to the 'Underground' as we read that it was a good place to eat and shop, however, whoever wrote this was wrong. It was in a bit of a rough neighbourhood and was not the sort of place I wanted to stay, I was offered drugs 3 times, so we made a swift exit and went back to a fancy burger house near the CNN studio.

Wednesday we woke up early and went to Coca Cola World, as Atlanta was where it was invented. The tour was really interactive and very well done, it had a 4d ride, which also proceeded to jab me in the back, an exhibit on the changing advertisements of coke and also a theatre that played lots of old adverts. We also had our photo taken with the Coke polar bear that attacked Jess, which was hilarious. The best part of the whole thing was that you could taste over 100 coke products from around the world, and we really did try and taste them all. Some of them were tasty, like grape Fanta, others not so much, and were even given a free bottle of coke. The Coke gift shop was just as awesome as the museum and we were sucked in, we probably spent the same amount of time in the gift shop as we did in the museum. I bought Jess a charm for her new charm bracelet, it was car to represent our road trip. We bought a Subway sandwich, 1st of many and started our 4 hour road trip to Nashville, TN.

The drive was only four hours, Jess drove the 1st through all of the rain and then I drove the 2nd half in the sunshine, and she was not pleased about that. We arrived in Nashville around 4.30pm and checked in to our motel in a stereotypical dodgy American motel. For dinner, we went into town to eat at one of the Honky Tonks, which was a strip of bars. The first one we went to was called Western world, where we ate hot dogs, chips and drank beer whilst watching a band play some blue grass and country music. The table we were sat at had a big picture of Dolly Parton next to us; this was when I knew we were in the right place, we also had some dodgy desserts called Moon Pies which were like cardboard wagon wheels. It was such a surreal place to be in but also a great American cultural experience. After enjoying that bar we then decided that we should move on to another bar, we of course chose a bar that was dead and that was holding some dodgy country music karaoke. We drank up and made a swift exit to Tootsies, which was my favourite of all the bars, it was rammed, it had two floors and apparently it was where lots of 'famous' country singers started out. We thought the upstairs bar was a lot better as the crowd was younger and the singers were younger, they even sang 'Honky Tonk Tennessee' which made my night.

Thursday 24th, we went on a Nashville city tour, we were the only ones on the trolley tour, as we were out of season and it was a wet day but we only had that day to do it. It was nice that we were the only ones on the tour though as he personalised it for us, although the tour guide was very hard to understand as his accent was very strong and he kept cracking jokes which just went over our heads. He took us to music valley, Vanderbilt University, the centennial mall, the capital, different musical landmarks and Taylor Swift's house. After we were done on the tour we went the souvenir shop called 'Cotton Eyed Joes,' where we bought our 'I <3…' t-shirts. We then were back on the road for the 4hour drive to Memphis; we wanted to get there early as we heard the weather was going to awful in the evening.

We arrived in Memphis around 3pm, and instead of going out to explore we chilled out in the hotel room till about 7pm. We heard there was going to be a storm, but we didn't think it was going to be that bad, oh how we were wrong. When we left the room the rain was coming down but it was not that bad. We pulled out of the hotel and the radio spoke about serve weather, we didn't think it was near us, but then all of a sudden the heavens opened and you could barely see the end of the car. The radio then started telling us there was a tornado warning and that we should stay in our homes, so we turned the car around and went back to the hotel, driving at 15MPH. When we got out of the car we were drenched running a couple of metres and also you could hear sirens and they were very loud, it was frightening so we rang reception. They told us that we should stay in our room and we could order food from Dominos…yes they still delivered. We tipped our delivery boy well and spent the evening eating pizza and watching American Idol.

Friday 25th February, we awoke to an eerily calm cool sunny day; clearly the tornado had blown over. We drove down Elvis Presley Blvd to Graceland, we parked in the complex which was opposite the house and bought our tickets. We were given an audio tour and had to take a shuttle bus across to Elvis' house, which felt a little lazy. The tour started at the main house where you entered through the front door, and then the audio takes you through the main living room, the dining room, parents' bedroom, kitchen and the jungle room, the TV room and the fabric pool room. You weren't allowed upstairs as a mark of respect, we think it's because he died on the toilet upstairs. The house tour was really interesting and the house was very well presented, you can see that Lisa Marie and his family really wanted to keep it how he wanted It, I was also amazed at how quirky all the rooms were in the house. Outside of the main house, you saw his Dad's office, the gardens, all of his gold discs, lots of Elvis memorabilia like his different outfits, his racket ball lounge where you could view the last piano he played on. The actual court was filled with his leather jumpsuits and more of his gold disks, and there were a lot of them. The audio tour brought the house and the exhibits to life; I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would and learnt a lot about the man and his family. The tour ended in the meditation garden, which was now the home of Elvis and his parents' graves. It was very weird to be able to photograph his grave but the actual place was very moving, it was covered in flowers and tributes to Elvis. Our tickets also included access to the car exhibit, where we saw a selection of his cars including his famous pink Cadillac called 'Glady' named after his mum.We also saw his two planes, Lisa Marie and Hound Dog II which had gold plated seat belts, we also the exhibits about his '68 special and about his fashion. The whole experience was well worth coming to, as we would have never done this if we weren't doing this road trip. I honestly enjoyed the tour around Graceland and I found it very fascinating to see the home life of this huge superstar.

After Graceland, we went on our self-guided tour around Memphis. First we stopped at Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jnr was assassinated. Then we drove around and saw Sun Records, Gibson Guitar factory, the Fed-Ex Stadium and the Pyramid Stadium. We parked up in downtown Memphis and walked to Beale Street, home of rock and roll and blues, which was full of souvenir shops and bars, I think this another place where it's well past its heyday. We walked around Memphis downtown, which is pretty empty, the mall only had 3 shops in it, and you can see that it has been hit hard by the recession as so many shops were boarded up. Clearly Graceland is the only thing to come to Memphis for. For dinner we went to the famous Rendezvous Rib place, which was down an alley behind the Peabody Hotel. This place was where all the stars go; our waiter who had been working there for 20 years served the likes of Justin Timberlake and Bill Clinton. We ordered some type of meat starter which was just chunks of meat severed on cheese and crackers, which was interesting, not long after that our Ribs came along. The ribs were amazing, they were cooked with a dry rub and you could put on one of their amazing sauces on them, they were so TASTY!

Saturday 25th we checked out of hotel and headed on the road towards St Louis, we shared the long 5 hour long drive. We arrived in St Louis around 3pm, we wanted to go on the tram that goes around the large Jefferson Expansion Memorial arch but the tickets sold out just before we arrived. The arch was very impressive as it was absolutely HUGE. Instead we went to the old court house museum in the centre of town, the museum was about the famous emancipation case of a slave and it also had lots of exhibits about slavery and local cases. We also wanted to see the city, so we hoped on the 'City Trolley' which we thought might have some voice over telling you about the city, like others we had been on, unfortunately this did not happen and we were just sat on a bus looping around the city. We had dinner in the 'historic' landing on the water front. After telling all the homeless people we didn't need directions nor had any spare change we found a nice Italian restaurant which seemed to be the only busy restaurant in the area. As we ate very early, we bought some wine and headed for the hotel, where we sat in our 'non-smoking room' that STANK of smoke and watched space jam. We decided that there wasn't enough to see in St Louis to stay another night so in the morning we would drive to Chicago a day early.

The whole road trip experience was interesting, as driving around and staying the motels at the edge of town enabled us to see the real America as our numerous amounts of stops took us in the back ends of nowhere away from the tourist stops and in many cases America is far from glamorous like it is portrayed in so many movies and TV shows. Our drive from Orlando to Chicago allowed us also to drive through a number of states starting at Florida and taking us through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois.