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New Orleans And All That Jazz

“Hey y’all. Y’all havin’ a good time?”

Everyone responds.

“O’ course y’all havin’ a good time. You is in Nawlins and in Nawlins everyone has a good time. If you ain’t havin’ a good time, den you is in da wrong place”

And so the scene is set for our time in New Orleans…..

We’ve given ourselves some changes of scene which have bordered on culture shock in the past, but we’re not sure we’ve ever made quite such a leap as this one. One minute we’re in the Amazon rainforest listening to the gentle lapping of the waters of the Rio Negro, the next we’re taking a stroll down Bourbon Street, New Orleans with our ears full of razzmatazz. One small move from trees to sleaze, 24 hours from tranquility to iniquity.

One day we’re listening to the calls of exotic birds, the next it’s blasts of rock or the foot stomping beats of jazz. Walking down Bourbon Street when we’ve just blown into town from Amazona is about as big a jump as you can imagine: we may as well be on a different planet. Gaudily coloured neon signs invite the passer by into a multitude of strip joints, topless bars and places with names like “The Barely Legal Club”. The whole street smells of stale beer and marijuana. Gangs of inebriated men lean over wooden balconies, leering at passing women and draping a banner which says “show us your tits”. Shops sell T-shirts bearing obscene slogans; girls in scanty lingerie mingle with the crowd to tempt men into “gentleman’s clubs”. Just when you thought the encouragement of misogyny was on the way out….

But this is New Orleans and, when I jokingly eschew the cocktail list in the breakfast cafe next morning at 9am, the waitress says, “don’t rule it out Sir, you gotta remember where you are”. Of course, Bourbon Street is just one street, and no one street defines a city anywhere on Earth. It doesn’t do so here, either. The crossover in New Orleans, or NOLA as they like to call it, is undoubtedly the music: Bourbon Street’s music may be loud but it’s joyful and it’s terrific, and music is most definitely one thing which DOES define this particular city.

The appropriately named Louis Armstrong Park centres around not just a statue of Satchmo himself but also the evocative space of Congo Square. During the time when the plantations were filled with slave labour, Congo Square was the place where, in the short spells of time away from the gruelling work, usually on Sundays, slaves from West Africa would congregate to remember the homeland and celebrate their culture with drumming, dancing and music. It must have felt like a few short hours of joy prised from their tortuous lives.

Hundreds would gather. As different factions mixed, so the music evolved until eventually on this very spot jazz music was born. You don’t very often get to stand on a spot with such strong claims to be the birthplace of a major music genre. We can only guess what New Orleans is like at Mardi Gras or during the jazz festival which actually starts just after we leave: this is another city which seems to live in the grip of a perpetual fiesta.

The music scene is simply breathless, and not just in Bourbon Street either. It’s toned down counterpart Frenchmen Street bursts with the sounds of live bands and, even away from the main areas, authentic jazz clubs issue soulful strains from darkened interiors. No exaggeration, there is simply music everywhere in New Orleans, most of it live, bands in bars, buskers in streets, impromptu performances on sidewalks and in plazas. And make no mistake about it, the quality is consistently high: soul divas, guitarists and trumpeters who are so good that one can only wonder how and why the big break favours just a few lucky ones and passes so many of these talented people by.

On day two in New Orleans, my daughter Lindsay and her wife Stacey fly over from their home in California and join us for most of our time in the city. It is just great to see them again and spend time together exploring and unravelling this vibrant, pulsating enigma of a place. 

A number of significant factors merge together to create the patchwork of New Orleans’ history, most notably slavery on the plantations, music, food, the founding by the French and, of course, hurricanes. The utter devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is still in the collective mind nearly 20 years later, physical scars still visible and mental scars still bringing pain. 

New Orleans sits on the banks of the wide, sweeping Mississippi as it ambles towards the Gulf of Mexico a few miles downstream, the city famously sitting mostly below sea level and built entirely on swamp land. Surrounding the city even now are hundreds of square miles of swamp and water – it’s so easy to picture the devastation wreaked by Katrina when land is as low lying and as flat as this. When the levies built to protect the town were breached by the storm, New Orleans was submerged by the relentless waters, bringing an astonishing 108 billion dollars worth of damage and causing over 1800 deaths. Katrina is still to this day a major topic of conversation, such was its terrible impact: it crops up in every guide’s commentary and in every local’s story.

More than three hundred years since founding by the French and 250 years since they were ousted by Spain, the Gallic influence is very obvious and very visible in everything from street names (Decatur, Chartres, Toulouse etc) to cuisine, with beignets and cafe au lait being an everyday indulgence for citizens of the “Big Easy”. It should be said, though, that in food, as in music, the creole influences outweigh the European.

It is impossible to overstate the role played by “NOLA” as a slave trading centre. As a major port on the Mississippi in a climate entirely suitable for the cultivation of sugar cane, large numbers of sizeable plantations grew, so creating a need for manpower in that labour intensive industry. Over 135,000 slaves passed through the port to be traded here, the vast majority from West Africa, with trading posts cropping up throughout the city, making New Orleans the largest slave market in the US. Market squares, parks, civic halls and even the lobbies of elegant hotels played host to the trade in human flesh.

Thirty minutes out of town the Whitney Plantation is today an open air museum with many of the actual slave houses, kitchens and workplaces from both Whitney and other plantations still intact and presented as they were in the days of intense farming. Personal accounts from former slaves tell of their brutal treatment, both out in the fields and as retribution for perceived misdemeanours. Boys as young as 10 were removed from families and sold into slavery; female domestic slaves presented to house guests for sexual gratification; workers sent into the fields to complete gruelling work from “kantsy to kantsy”, meaning from “can’t see” to “can’t see”, ie dawn till dusk.

Just as with our time in Jamaica, it’s impossible not to be completely humbled by the evolution from the terrible history of enforced migration and the brutality of slavery, to the joyous and proud life lead today by the descendants of those very slaves. Fascinating that the brief moment of freedom grabbed each Sunday in Congo Square was to give birth to jazz, a music genre associated with enjoyment and fulfilment. Learning this history hugely shifts our understanding of precisely what this music really represents: and this is only the beginning of piecing together the story of this unique city.

We are to see much more of how life in NOLA has evolved into the eclectic and diverse extremes that form its illustrious character today. Too much to fit into one post…..more to follow….

Oh, and yeah, we’re havin’ a good time y’all.

New Orleans Is Unique, Y’All

Unique is an adjective regularly used to describe New Orleans, with guide books and websites consistently referring to the city as “unique in the whole of the USA”, a description based largely on the amalgam of cultures which have clashed, fused and evolved into the persona which The Big Easy enjoys today. To us, it feels like this fusion and integration has created a single style: a Nawliner is one particular type of person, regardless of historical cultural background. No barriers, no segregation, joyous inclusivity. You are more from this city than from any one particular background.

A big guy is playing Barry White and Bill Withers on his keyboard on Decatur just off Jackson Square, his gravelly tones perfectly re-creating Lovely Day as we gaze across the sunlit river contemplating the fact that we have seen both the Amazon and the Mississippi in the space of just a few days. Two mighty rivers, two of the World’s most famous, in one week. We are to learn later that 41% of all of the water in the USA drains into the Mississippi – a mind boggling piece of trivia that’s difficult to get your head around.

Unique is definitely a word one could use to describe New Orleans cuisine, too. Seafood is utterly dominant, with gumbo, redfish, crawfish, catfish and shrimps on every menu in a variety of forms. Whole crawfish, crawfish tails, boiled crawfish. Redfish in crawfish sauce. Crabmeat balls, oysters in half shell, crawfish étouffée, shrimp bisque, grilled oysters, fish soup. And then, just when we think meat is going out of fashion, a fabulous jambalaya with chicken, rabbit, pork, shrimps and, of course, crawfish, all in the mix together.

Do you know how to eat a crawfish? Snap off the tail, pull out the meat with your teeth. Then with the meat still in your mouth, suck the juices from the head and let the two flavours combine. Delicious. But with a modicum of imagination you can probably now picture some of the obscenely suggestive T-shirt slogans in town. Anything goes here. Vegans would most likely starve to death in NOLA. Oh, and boy do these guys LOVE deep fried – it takes up at least half of every menu. “Y’know, if it’s fried, it’s good” says a guy on a boat, with not a hint of irony.

There’s just so much to do here, but some things are must-do’s that you just can’t miss. Take a boat ride on the bayou, get on a streetcar, journey up the Mississippi on a paddle boat, walk the suburbs and go mansion peeping, drink the local beers (“can I get another Abita Amber?”….”you got it”) as well as the obvious joys of jazz, blues and food.

Wandering around NOLA’s different quarters is fascinating in its own right – the French Quarter away from Bourbon and Frenchmen is filled with art galleries, jazz funeral shops and outlets with a voodoo theme, all mixed in with those typically Southern low rise narrow wooden homes nestled tightly side by side through the neighbourhood streets.

But take a streetcar ride down St Charles and the homes become grander, the streets become wider, the amazing, ancient gnarled trees become more and more majestic. Take a walk right down Magazine beyond more of those classically Southern states timber houses, to reach hip juice bars and coffee shops and maybe a classic Jewish cafe where bagels and muffulettas top the order list.

Streets of New Orleans

The four of us take the obligatory swamp tour and it’s so much better than we could have imagined. Our guide and boatman Wade explains that “swamp” means flooded forest and “bayou” means very slow moving water, as well as conveying a whole heap of information surrounding the ecology and history of the Louisiana wetlands, the flora and fauna, the changing seasons, and, of course, the long term effects of Katrina.

Guys like Wade, more than twenty years into the job, know where those alligators are hiding: then again, the gators know who brings the fish balls, a combination which means we get to see at least a dozen of the creatures close up. There’s also wild pigs, ospreys and eagles and what Wade says is the smallest heron in the Americas – as well as a good look at a couple of purple dallinule, which he says he only sees maybe a couple of times a year.

Sunday arrives, the last day on which we enjoy Lindsay and Stacey’s company. Our earlier visit to Congo Square taught us that Sunday was the day of the week when slaves from the plantation, if the owner was sufficiently benevolent, were granted a few hours of relief from hardship, a precious few hours in which to indulge in reminiscences for their homeland and to dance, sing and play. Sundays where rare joys were abundant and whose child was jazz music.

Lindsay discovers that there is a modern day equivalent in the neighbourhood of Tremé, where the Afro-American/Creole community gather in numbers to take a jazz procession through the streets every Sunday, so commemorating that piece of heritage. Joining the procession is utterly joyous, listening to the ebullient music and just observing the expressions on the faces of the genuine participants is a piece of real magic. These Second Line processions, as they are known, are from a different culture, a different world, an overt expression of freedom from the kind of oppression we and our forebears are lucky enough to have never known. The whole community is here from children to grandmothers and it’s a privilege to be part of it for a couple of hours.

And so to our last day in this wonderfully diverse yet bonded city, and the last of those “must-do’s”: a trip on a paddle boat on the Mississippi. We would love to say “paddle steamer” but, even though the Natchez has been built to original designs and boasts engines from 100-year old steamers and calls itself the “only original Mississippi boat still in operation”, it is no longer driven by steam. Sure, the original boilers still drive the claxon and the organ (both incredibly loud), but these days the aesthetically pleasing red paddle is driven by more modern means. 

Nevertheless, that paddle is still mesmerising, the boat itself is beautifully evocative of childhood images of the Mississippi, and the ride up and down the mighty river is a splendid couple of hours.

So, how do you spend your last night in a city like New Orleans? Go back to Bourbon Street, dive one last time into that fervent, relentless atmosphere? Return again to the Mahogany Club where the jazz is so good and the mood so serene? Eat once more at Mulates, or Creole House, or Mambo?

No, we creep off down Decatur, shun the brighter lights, and head for those dingy, darkened bars where drinkers sit on stools, laughter echoes from the walls and every time we pass we say, we must go there. First to Molly’s, where the craft beer is outstanding and the barman hails, incongruously, from Wolverhampton, and second to Coop’s, where the exchanges are ribald, the language is colourful, and the food is as exquisite as it is rustic.

“Only place in town that serves it how Mama does at home”, she says as she places the steaming bowls before us. Well Mama’s cooking is fantastic, in that case. It’s half the price of downtown and probably twice as authentic. Don’t ignore the dingy bars of Decatur, embrace them and indulge! 

New Orleans is done and it’s been whatever the word is for a couple of notches up from a blast. We’re off on a road trip now to…..who knows where next.

It’s farewell to New Orleans, to Nawlins, to the Big Easy, to the “crescent city”. What an amazing, diverse, joyous city, a city with an incredible vibe and a massively colourful history.

Unique, in fact.

Seeking Small Town America: The Road Trip Begins

When planning this road trip out through the Southern states, we wanted our first stay to be in small town America, some off the beaten track small community kind of place where we could delve into how things work and what makes backwaters tick. Somewhere with a ring to the place name would be a bonus, so when we spotted a B&B named “The Wisteria Inn” in a town called Crystal Springs, temptation hooked us in without any further research.

Heading north away from New Orleans on the I-55 we get a real grasp of the extent of swampland, the first 20 to 30 miles of the highway is on elevated road on pillars above flooded lands, trees half submerged in the silent waters. Such terrain means no towns or villages, there’s nowhere here where the ground is secure enough to be built upon. Miles of bridge over miles of nothing but water. Swamps, lakes and bayous eventually give way to deciduous greenery and grassy meadows and we are on our way out of Louisiana and into Mississippi.

As we roll into Crystal Springs we are greeted by red painted concrete tomatoes on each street corner and a sign proclaiming this little community as the “Tomatopolis of the World” – in time gone by this was a farming town with a claim to be the first place to distribute tomatoes and lettuces throughout the USA, and they are still very proud of it. “Mississippi grown” was a label of quality and, even though those times are long gone, the pride remains. There’s even a tomato museum in town. No really, there is.

Inside the tomato museum

If it’s not tomatoes, it’s religion. Crystal Springs seems to have roughly one church for every seven houses and messages of love for God and Jesus appear every few hundred feet around town – there’s absolutely no doubting that we are in the Bible Belt here. We can only ponder how the town manages to fill so many churches at service time, maybe some locals do a church crawl every Sunday.

Crystal Springs is Southern state small town America just as you would picture it: timber houses sit on large plots of manicured land with perfect lawns and no discernible boundary. Wives tend gardens while husbands ride grass cutters or tinker with the RV. Out front of every house is a wooden porch with rocking chairs. Rising on tall stanchions above each small community is a water tower with the village or town name emblazoned on the tank at the top; the largest shop in town is the hardware store. The barber’s shop is run by Lee and the first two guys we meet are Stacy and Larry. Could it get any more stereotypical?!

Everyone in town stops to chat with us and a couple of times we’ve had pretty much the life story before we get chance to move on – but of course we don’t mind this at all, meeting people is how we learn the character of a place. When they pause to ask where we’re from, our response is met with a universal reaction of open mouths and dropped jaws, as if to say, “you’re travellin’ the world and you’ve ended up in our lil’ ol’ town?! Well, I’ll be….”

But it’s funny how absolutely everywhere has a claim to fame and, having literally chosen Crystal Springs for no reason other than its quaint name, it turns out to be a hotbed of blues music history. This little agricultural community was home to renowned exponents of what is known as delta blues – the delta of course being the Mississippi – including a blues legend in one Robert L Johnson. Johnson’s music has been covered by such powerhouses as Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, amongst others.

So, somewhat bizarrely, Crystal Springs has two small but notable museums, one dedicated to blues legends and the other to tomatoes. The Robert Johnson museum boasts a modest but remarkable collection of 78s, posters, photographs and other memorabilia and is a fascinating tribute to the local hero. There’s also a map of the delta showing the birthplace of each delta blues star who made good – and there are an awful lot condensed into a small area. Johnson is yet another member of the “27 club”, and music fans will know what that means.

The railroad runs right through the middle of Crystal Springs. There are barriers at the road crossings but no other fences or protection, the line simply cuts a swathe right through the very centre and several times a day a horn-blowing mile-long freight train powers its way noisily through, shattering the peace with a decibel level which shudders the buildings.

Its central location isn’t a coincidence – in fact the town moved about a mile eastward when the railroad was built, seizing the opportunity to use the new network as its gateway to riches as the “tomato trains” loaded up and distributed fresh produce to the waiting nation. Nowadays there is no station, the trains no longer stop, they just thunder through with a blast of noisy activity so out of keeping with Crystal Springs’ tranquility. And yet it all somehow adds to the town’s character.

Our amiable host at the inn, a male Stacy, engages us with tales of the townsfolk and the town’s history as we chat over breakfast and out on the porch. This is exactly what we were hoping for in our search for smalltown America, all our boxes are being ticked at our very first stop. We wander around the lake at Chautauqua Park, take a drive to a couple of neighbouring towns, Hazlehurst and Wesson, and laugh in our bed each time the next freight train blasts its ear splitting horn as it barges through, even at the dead of night.

Images of Hazlehurst

Wednesday morning, one last chat with Stacy, one last amble around town, and it’s back into the Chevy and on with the road trip, up through the greenery of Mississippi and into miles and miles of flat farmland and dead straight roads punctuated by tiny farming communities huge distances from the nearest big town. Strange place names pass by, some intriguing, many amusing. Just exactly how does a small village get named Yazoo City? We pass Prague and Moscow, McGehee and even Dancing Rabbit Creek. “You are now entering Grady, population 649”, proudly announces one road sign.

After 100 miles or more on pretty minor roads with very little traffic, suddenly out of nowhere there’s a giant suspension bridge which takes us over the Mississippi and across the state line into Arkansas, and eventually just a hint of forested hills starts to give shape to the horizon beyond those vast flat fields. 

With five hours of non-freeway smaller roads behind us, we roll into our next destination mid afternoon, past Bob’s Food City and The Armory Gun Shop, and on to Central Avenue. This is the town where a certain Bill Clinton grew up, and is over the next few days to provide some real intrigue.

Welcome to Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Hot Springs Arkansas And Its Remarkable Story

It isn’t difficult to work out why this town grew in the place that it did – the clue is in the name Hot Springs, after all. What is fascinating about this attractive little town though is its history, not just its social history but its centuries old geological history too. Unlike most other places centred on hot springs, this one is nothing to do with volcanic activity, there is nothing of the sort around here.

Here, the gushing of seriously hot water from numerous springs in what is now a National Park, is caused by a fascinating chain of events which literally takes millennia to evolve. The rain which falls on the ground here seeps through the topsoil into layer after layer of porous rock, not reaching an impermeable layer until a point some 1.5 miles beneath the surface. When it does so, the water is forced sideways and diagonally downwards to a chamber of limited size, where the continuous feed of water builds up enormous pressure.

This pressure then forces the boiling water upwards through narrow vertical chasms, racing to the surface in double quick time. The speed of this upward journey is such that when the water reaches the surface it has lost little of its heat, hitting the springs at temperatures of 143F/62C, sometimes filling the valley with vapour. But here’s the thing – this process is estimated to take around 4,500 years, meaning that the waters which surface today are rains which fell at the same time the Egyptians were building the Great Pyramids. Isn’t that incredible?!

Historians have established that ancient indigenous tribes knew of the benefits of this pure water, having found evidence of habitation from centuries ago. Hot Springs’ first rise in popularity was though in the mid 19th century as the springs and the hot waters began to garner a reputation for having healing qualities for all manner of ailments. Crude wooden bathhouses and the first of the small town’s hotels began to appear.

By the 1890s that reputation had spread across America, so much so that the Chicago White Stockings baseball team, forerunners to the Chicago Cubs, travelled here for specialist training and health benefits prior to commencement of the regular season. A precedent was set, and through the twentieth century Hot Springs became the major destination for what became known as “spring training”. The custom continues to this day and Hot Springs is privileged every year to see premier teams gearing up for the season. Top baseball stars became regular and eager visitors, the likes of Babe Ruth and Joe di Maggio among them, enjoying the saloon bars and social life as much as the training and the healing waters – in fact, it was in Hot Springs that Babe Ruth hit his record breaking home run of 573 feet and, according to records in town, changed the course of baseball history.

The primitive bathhouses were steadily replaced by more swish, state of the art (for the time) facilities, more and more hotels were added as Hot Springs became a sought after destination for those who could afford to avail themselves of its healing waters. Inevitably such attention brought with it more than just the industries of health and hospitality, and the town began to fill with gambling dens, casinos, saloons and brothels.

Hot Springs memorabilia- note the prostitution licence

Hot Springs soon descended into a lawless town where shoot outs were regular features of daily life and sheriffs bit the dust on several occasions, until the town carried a dual reputation as a place of healing waters but also a crime ridden, dangerous town in the style of the Wild West. In 1935, Hot Springs was to change for ever when a certain Owney Madden walked into town.

Madden is not a name we were familiar with before coming to Hot Springs. An Englishman by birth, Madden is now believed to have been the overlord of the underworld, the boss of gang bosses, the highest ranked member of the mob, through the biggest years of mob rule and gang warfare. Feeling too much pressure from the New York Police, Madden fled to Arkansas where state laws meant that federal agents had no jurisdiction over arrest of criminals and, more specifically, to Hot Springs where the gambling culture provided opportunities for control by the mob. The health benefits of the waters were a mere bonus.

Al Capone in Hot Springs

It wasn’t just those factors that brought Madden here: state governors under the auspices of the notorious Orval Faubus and the local police were known by the underworld to be corrupt. Once here, Madden took over the town: known to be in control of protection rackets, bootlegging, casinos and illegal gambling but also as a genial, philanthropic member of the community. From his new home in the Ouachita mountains, Madden continued to control the mob and organised crime back in New York and in many other major US cities, whilst becoming something of a celebrity on his own manor.

With the top man installed, mobsters and gangsters from around the country gravitated to Hot Springs to seek advice from The Boss, aka The Killer, and also of course to stay on side. The list of inhabitants and regular visitors reads like a Who’s Who of major gangsters. Al Capone took up residence in the Arlington Hotel, John Dillinger, Lucky Luciano, Machine Gun Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde all spent considerable amounts of time here. In fact, Bonnie and Clyde were headed for the refuge of Hot Springs when fate caught up with them and they were gunned down.

These were the times when the mob ran everything. Madden doubled as a boxing promoter, and listed Mae West among his many girlfriends. As well as boxing and baseball stars, mega performers like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie all performed in this little town, all allegedly at the behest of the mob.

What days those 1930s and 1940s must have been – imagine walking down Central Avenue and rubbing shoulders with baseball stars and world champion boxers, the most famous performers like Sinatra and Ellington and the USA’s most notorious and powerful gangsters strolling in the sun or spending time in a bathhouse. It must have felt like the centre of the universe – or at least a certain type of universe.

In 1966, Winthrop Rockefeller was appointed Governor of Arkansas, on a wave of reform backed by supporters determined to rid the town of its mob status and gangster reputation. His appointed detective, one Lynn Davis, took on what was surely a daunting and dangerous task, first aiming to seize gambling machines rather than targeting the arrest of known gangsters. Confiscating all such equipment and handing it over to the local Police, Davis noted the serial numbers and secretly marked the machines, confident that they would be back in the hands of the mob within days.

He was right, and with those moves was able to prove beyond doubt that the local Police were corrupt and under the control of the mob. It was the end of an era, the successors to Capone and Madden were arrested and the entire Hot Springs network of organised crime collapsed like a pack of its own cards.

The dark history of Hot Springs

So too, though, did the town’s economy. As criminality left town, so did the money. Hot Springs fell into ruin, the bathhouses deteriorated, and this raucous, lawless place under mob control became a ghost town  – a situation which endured, remarkably, until just a few years ago. Only since 2015 has there been a resurgence in interest in the hot spring waters and the true attractions of a genuinely unusual natural phenomenon, and the bathhouses which are all active again in the style of a spa destination. Hot Springs lives again, reborn.

The town now loves its dark history. Sleazy clubs and Speak Easy’s have been restored and reopened in their original style and plaques and monuments around town tell its amazing story. A statue of Al Capone sits contentedly outside the Ohio Club which he so loved. Best of all, the Gangster Museum Of America, with its superb exhibits and expert and informative guides, brings the whole incredible story to life. It’s nothing short of astonishing that such a small, remote mountain town can hide such radical, intriguing histories.

FOOTNOTE #1: This amazing story was, we felt, so worth telling that it’s become such a long post that it’s filled the space on its own. Our other experiences in Hot Springs will be in our next article.

FOOTNOTE #2:  And all the while, studiously listening at lessons in Hot Springs High School and learning the saxophone from local teachers, was a young man named Bill Clinton. As if the history of Hot Springs wasn’t already illustrious enough, a local boy from the Ouachita mountains is to go on to become President. 

What an astounding little town.

Hot Springs & Little Rock: Exploring Arkansas

Bathhouse Row is once again an elegant and proud place. Thoughtfully restored in the last decade after years of decay following the collapse of Hot Springs’ illicit economy, the eight buildings now form an impressive collection which speaks of quality and indulgence. Once again visitors flock to the town to enjoy the calming – some say healing – properties of the pure, hot waters from the springs.

The adaptation of the bathhouses to the modern day vacation market has been cleverly done. Five of the bathhouses have been developed into your typical spa resort destinations with attractively presented updated facilities and prices to match. One has retained more of the original equipment and is only open for walk-ins rather than appointments and is more modestly priced; one, pleasingly, has been turned into what is effectively a bathhouse museum, restored to exactly how it would have been in its heyday. The eighth, would you believe, is now a brewery – and a brewery which claims to be the only one in the world which uses water directly from hot springs in the brewing process.

Predictably, I suppose, we take the walk-in option and ignore the ones which look overpriced and threaten to be the same as spas anywhere else on Earth. Equally predictably, we visit the museum and, of course, the brewery. 

The bathhouse museum is in fact completely absorbing, partly because it is fascinating to see the primitive looking clunky equipment that was state of the art back then, including some implements which brought electricity and water into dangerous looking proximity, and partly because despite its heavy duty look, you can clearly see how the equipment really does constitute direct forerunners of today’s gyms and spas.

Males and females were separated and there was strictly no crossover; most likely because all treatments were enjoyed in the nude. Outdoor rest areas were similarly segregated, men sunbathing naked but women were requested to don togas – suntanned flesh on a female being seen as unattractive and unflattering.

When we leave the museum and enter the walk-in bathhouse, we are amused to see that not too much has changed, the equipment and treatments here still look pretty archaic despite being back in use and in reality aren’t so different from the museum. As in days gone by, Michaela and I have to go our separate ways, male and female treatments being on different floors, but then pass through identical sequences: first climbing into a hot bath of agitated water more like an oversized food whisk than a jacuzzi. 

Next there is the “sitz”, a kind of ceramic chair which sprays hot spring water on the small of the back, followed by a session in a “steam box”, one of those hilarious looking contraptions which only leaves the head visible. We finish with hot towel treatment, a 20-minute body massage which is over all too quickly, and finally a hot wax bath for the hands. We actually feel pretty damn good afterwards. And, in case you’re wondering, the brewery is good, too.

We came to Hot Springs expecting to do some mountain hiking, but become so absorbed in the bathhouses and particularly the gangster history that we end up following just a few hilly trails and the hiking boots never make it out of the car. We do though take a DUKW tour – never done one before – out through the suburbs and across Lake Hamilton where the skipper seems intent on pointing out each sumptuous lakeside mansion and telling us how much they last sold for. It’s still fun, though.

Grey skies and rain blight a lot of our time in Hot Springs, and the locals are complaining about humidity levels – they must be used to breathing mountain air because it doesn’t feel at all humid to us. It rains a lot though and, admittedly, we do get a couple of long lasting thunderstorms which would support the locals’ case.

I did not want to come to Arkansas without taking a trip over to Little Rock, scene of one of the most significant chapters in American social history and the fight for racial equality. For a few weeks in September 1957, this unassuming town became the centre of national attention with no less half the population of the entire country tuning in to live TV broadcasts as the astonishing scenes unfolded.

This was, of course, the story of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black teenagers, and their families, seeking the right to be educated to the same level as their white neighbours. As federal laws began to address desegregation throughout society, and the Civil Rights Movement began to gain momentum, the southern states sought to defy directives and continue to segregate. Arkansas, led by the infamous and bigoted Governor Orval Faubus, was at the forefront of that battle.

The nine children, walking to school on their first day, were met with an angry mob, hell bent on keeping blacks and whites separate and with some, appallingly, calling for the nine children to be publicly lynched. There are in existence some television interviews with locals openly saying that they would happily do the lynching. The nation’s press descended on Little Rock and the scenes of brutal violence were broadcast live on screens the length and breadth of America – this at a time when TV was in its infancy and live news broadcasts were a novelty.

Governor Faubus, under pressure from federal Government to obey the desegregation laws, solved his problem by closing Little Rock’s schools altogether and denying education to all; the youth of the town lost a full year of schooling. As the White House responded, Arkansas’ state laws perpetuating segregation were overturned by the Supreme Court, the very first time this federal body had acted in such a way.

Ultimately President Eisenhower lost patience with Faubus and with Arkansas, and sent in an astonishing 1,200 troops to keep the peace, quell the riots, and usher the Little Rock Nine into their new mixed classrooms. The Nine, and their families, had won, and segregation was on its way out. Nine children, and a little town in Arkansas, had paved the way for change. There were, of course, other simultaneous developments across the USA, but the broadcasts from Little Rock had shown the violence first hand to the nation.

Of course, the Nine had to battle on. The offsprings of bigoted parents will be bigoted themselves, and the Nine faced threats, abuse and ostracism for a considerable time to come. But they fought on, somehow finding the strength of character to continue to stand for what is right even in the face of extreme adversity. 

The whole story is told in a rather excellent museum and visitor centre across the road from the school, a school which now stands for equal education for all yet still looks pretty identical to how it did through that awful but powerful year. We feel privileged to stand on the very spot where such a significant and auspicious piece of history unfolded.

Dotted around the museum are a large number of quotes from the time, some displaying appalling bigotry and racism but most providing a wonderful narrative on the determined fight for equality. We had looked forward to visiting Little Rock and reading first hand accounts of the time. The experience of doing so doesn’t disappoint, though some of the footage of extreme violence is harrowing.

It’s been a pretty remarkable few days in Arkansas, one way and another.

Fittingly given our time here it’s beneath more grey skies that we leave Hot Springs behind and head off towards the music fans’ mecca of Memphis. Most of the journey is on the straight, nondescript I-40, heading towards the state line which in the end doesn’t appear until we’re crossing the Mississippi on the very edge of Memphis itself.

After spending time in each of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, our next three stops will be in Tennessee. We’ve been looking forward to this next stretch for a very long time. It’s Memphis next….

FOOTNOTE: Whilst in the ladies’ section of the bathhouse, Michaela was approached by another customer in the midst of treatment: a lady who didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes off Michaela’s legs. “Excuse me, ma’am”, she says, “do you have one leg shorter than the other?”. Michaela is not aware of any such problem, but the lady lifts Michaela’s legs by the ankles, and claims that her point is proven. “Do you mind if I pray for you?”, she asks, and proceeds to pray to God that Michaela’s shorter leg is lengthened. Michaela, being only five feet tall, secretly wants to ask this lady to pray for both legs, not just one. But she stays quiet, and, she tells me, just a little unnerved.

Walking In Memphis, Singing The Blues

“Hey guys, how you doin’”, calls the guy on the corner of Beale Street as we wander out to explore Memphis for the first time. “Well”, he continues when we tell him we’ve just arrived, “Memphis is about four things. There’s barbecue, there’s the blues, there’s Elvis Presley and there’s Martin Luther King”. Interesting that he says barbecue first.

You know, when learning about a new place on our travels, we often feel as if we’re unravelling history to piece together what has made that town or city what it is today. Memphis is to turn out to be the exact opposite: our time here is all about learning that the different stories and different people, the significant changes and momentous events, are all so entwined as to all be part of the same story. It’s fascinating, if complex, to put it all together.

Such is the huge context of the Memphis story, the times around the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, the unjust times of the Jim Crow laws, that it would be banal for a couple of amateur travel bloggers to try and squeeze it all into one post, but we can at least try to convey what we’ve learned here. And how those stories and histories are ingredients in the same melting pot.

Like the guy on the corner, let’s deal with the barbecue first. Ask for recommendations here and you’ll most likely get the response that such things are pointless when “we got over a hundred great barbecue restaurants”. Indeed, the Barbecue World Championships are held here annually; what’s more, so are the Chicken Wing World Championships and the Rib World Championships. Didn’t know there were such things? No, nor did we.

Whether we eat on Beale Street, elsewhere in Midtown or Downtown, the compliments are justified, this is exceptionally good barbecue food. It is absolutely all about the meat – side dishes are just token gestures. Pork ribs are so, so tender that they start to fall off the bone if you so much as look at them: put a knife in your hand and the meat makes the journey from bone to mouth all on its own. It’s THAT tender. Well nearly. The barbecue coating is sticky, spicy, sweet and smoky all in one go – simply great food. Just when we think we’ve already hit the jackpot, we eat at Central….and it just goes from heavenly to sublime.

Anyway, on to the more serious stuff as we go through that process of finding just how the stories and histories of Memphis all merge into one. The city is rich with places to study the past: the vibrant Beale Street which is the designated “home of the blues”, Sun Studios where a teenage Elvis made his first demo and started the journey towards immortality, the Rock’n’Soul Museum, the Stax museum and the Civil Rights museum to name but a few – as well as the theatres and street memorials each contributing another piece to the story. And, of course, there’s Graceland.

1950s in the southern US states was a time when segregation was the norm, operating under the auspices of the notorious Jim Crow laws which effectively forbade any crossover between the lives of whites and non-whites. The mantra of the Jim Crow years was “separate but equal”, borne out of the belief that whites and non-whites should be segregated in everything: not just education, but transport, restaurants, cafes, cinemas…..you name it, it was one for whites and one for “coloureds”, to use the words of the time.

It was separate and it was segregated but it sure as hell wasn’t equal. The 50s rumbled with the discontent which was to explode in the 60s. Out in the cotton fields and plantations, labour was poorly paid and badly treated, still tied to employers six decades after the abolition of slavery. Realistically unable to leave the plantation, workers were forced to obtain essential supplies, including clothing, from shops owned by the plantation, so amassing debts so large that leaving the employment was all but impossible.

Two music genres collided in the cotton fields as the country music of the white population met with the black peoples’ gospel music. As more and more machinery was introduced to the harvesting process, so workers became dispensable and migrated in huge numbers from rural settings to cities in search of work. When they arrived in Memphis, the melancholy of blues music had already taken root, especially in Beale Street, where the strumming of guitars wiled away the day and lyrics reflected the challenging and downbeat lifestyles.

Inside the Blues bars of Beale Street

Now, there are suddenly three music styles which clash: gospel, country and the blues, and, as a mural in Central Barbecue puts it….. 

“The blues had a baby and named it rock’n’roll”

The Sun Studios tour is absolutely excellent and completely awe inspiring to stand in the spot where, truly, rock’n’roll was born – in fact, arguably the point where the course of music history was altered and everything I came to love in the world of music began. We learn how Sam Phillips, boss of Sun, first rejected the young Elvis and how his assistant, Marion Keisker, saw something special and kept a note of his name.

We hear Elvis’s first ever demo, followed by the first ever single, “That’s All Right”, and a wonderful recording of Elvis and his two fellow band members, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, jamming in the studio unaware that the mikes were still on. Fabulous.

Possibly most inspiring of all was learning just how far ahead of his time Sam Phillips was – perhaps that’s why he was open to discovering such talents as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Rufus Thomas as well as The King himself and many other famous names. Phillips was a rarity: a man who created a recording studio open equally to black and white artists, setting up the world’s first all female radio station and flying right in the face of the Jim Crow laws by promoting bands of mixed race. “It can’t be done”, was one narrator’s comment on hearing that Booker T & the MGs had both black and white members.

Phillips was obviously a proper pioneer, arguably the Godfather of everything that transpired in the story of rock. 

Yet rock’n’roll wasn’t the only child of the fusion of the three genres and before long soul music was growing in the same city from the same sources. Whilst Detroit was giving birth to the polished sounds of Motown, Memphis and in particular the Stax record label was creating a more earthy, raw soul sound more closely linked to its roots. 

Stax Museum

Again, tours of both Stax and the Rock and Soul museum are fascinating and informative, especially the videos of stars reminiscing and describing just what it was like to be part of the start of something so special, so new. An era of music history which by definition can never be replicated.

And so back to Beale Street, home of the blues, birthplace of the blues. Beale Street isn’t a tourist gimmick even though nowadays it’s a destination : this was genuinely where musicians sat and played, wrote lyrics reflecting their challenging lifestyles and their sorrows and trials as well as their everyday events, long before blues was known to the rest of the world. It was soon to become the place to be for any aspiring blues musician. 

The neon signs of Beale Street

Less manic than Bourbon Street and nowhere near as sleazy, Beale Street is all about the music, and still mostly about the blues. Choose any bar and lose yourself in the atmosphere, down local beers and swoon over the barbecued meat, get into the groove and dance the night away in BB King’s bar. We do it all.

BB Kings Blues Club, Beale Street

And of course we visit Graceland, home of the King, and the Civil Rights Museum. Two very different places but, as we said at the outset, chapters in the same story rather than isolated tales.

More on Memphis to come….

When Bloggers Meet

It’s a slightly strange concept, to have been engaging with someone in a virtual sense only, someone on the other side of the world, living in a different culture, and then have the opportunity to meet physically. But once we’d arranged to come to Nashville, Tennessee, and Meg at grandmisadventures told us they live here, a meeting was very definitely on the cards. We intended to include the story of our meeting it in a later post, but Meg has summed it up so perfectly that the best thing to do is provide a link to her post:

grandmisadventures

We spent a lovely few hours together and found connections you could only ever guess at from virtual contact. Meg’s post is the first time we’ve ever been called “travel rock stars” but how can you not like that moniker!? Love it!

A thank you again to Meg and Brad, and of course their delightful daughter Tess, you gave us a happy travel experience which we will treasure for ever….

Memphis 2: Elvis Presley & Martin Luther King

Beale Street is alive any time of day, but away from there the rest of Memphis is as quiet a city as you could ever find. Sidewalks are spacious and largely empty, streetcar seats have only a handful of takers and traffic is sparse – there never seems to be any congestion anywhere. The “home of the blues” buzzes but the rest of the city snoozes. There’s a kind of Sunday morning feel regardless of what day of the week it is.

Those places where the crowds are always to be found are the blues clubs and the barbecue restaurants, though twice daily at 11am and 5pm people also gather inside the Peabody Hotel to view a spectacle which is as oddball as any English eccentricity you would care to name. Crowds assemble, the red carpet is rolled out, the uniformed master of ceremonies cranks up the anticipation…then eventually the celebrities from the penthouse emerge from the elevator and walk the red carpet route to the fountain in the lobby.

Who are these revered celebrities? Ducks. Ducks who live in the penthouse but occupy the fountain and its pond from 11 till 5 each day, the trips back and forth being the centre of much attention and much pomp and ceremony, apparently this is a ritual which has played out for over 80 years. Not with the same ducks, obviously. It’s all a bit bizarre!

Less of a trivia and a much more influential part of the history of Memphis are the stories told in the Civil Rights Museum.

Back in the 1960s life in the southern states was on an ever sharpening knife edge. Nowhere else in the USA was as reluctant to adopt desegregation and repeal the Jim Crow laws, nowhere else was the reaction to change so violent and so animated. It’s unbelievable to discover that kangaroo courts held by the Ku Klux Klan to try those perceived to be black activists, were actually given credence by State Police and State Governors, who turned a blind eye to punishments meted out to those “found guilty”.

But the rumble was becoming a roar, the support for the Civil Rights movement was gathering pace, and the days of the Jim Crow laws were numbered.

All around America things were changing, but still the southern states resisted. Racial tension spilled into violence in Alabama as separatist vigilantes sought their own kind of justice and launched attacks on peaceful rights marches. Black youths staged sit-ins at whites only cafes, barring the way for whites to place orders, often joined by white students sympathetic to the cause. “Stand up by sitting down”, implored the posters.

In Montgomery in 1955, a lady named Rosa Parks had refused to surrender her bus seat to a white lady, and was arrested and thrown into a police cell for her trouble. Rosa was to become a heroine and a symbol for reform, and the consequent boycott of the bus service by the entire black community brought the city’s finances to its knees.

Music, as ever, was becoming a vehicle for the narrative. The arrival of rock’n’roll had given a rebellious voice to youth for the first time ever; now it was becoming the norm for teenagers to have their own views, opinions and politics, often in opposition to parental values. This was new territory, the music was new territory, the two issues were becoming inextricably entwined.

And so to February 1968. A strike by the sanitation workers of Memphis, triggered entirely by a desire for better pay and better terms, was turned into a racial battle by city authorities, the majority of sanitation workers being black. Developments attracted the attention of the leader of the Civil Rights movement, Dr Martin Luther King. The “I Am A Man” marches gathered pace, the signature phrase conceived to demonstrate that black workers were people, not the property of the employer.

Dr King, preparing his speech to the workers, chatted with colleagues in his room at the Lorraine Motel, the only Memphis hotel which catered for blacks, then stepped out on to the balcony… Shots rang out from a boarding house across the block, Dr King fell to the ground, slain in cold blood. From that moment, the course of history was changed, and once again Memphis was host to seismic storylines of social history.

Lorraine Motel

The former Lorraine Motel is now the Civil Rights Museum, which tells the whole story of those struggles in graphic detail, a story which ends at Room 306, King’s room, restored to exactly how it would have been on the fateful night of April 4th, 1968. It’s a powerful, hard hitting museum.

Back to Elvis and so, finally, to Graceland. The Presley home is a major tourist attraction, supposedly the most visited former private home on Earth. Whilst being obviously impressive, Graceland is not a gigantic mansion and is smaller than we had imagined, though of course the grounds and the former possessions speak of immense wealth. Gold plated seat belts in your private aeroplane, for instance.

Otherwise it’s all pretty much as you would expect: gold records, stage outfits, Elvis’s cars, motor bikes and aeroplanes and many stories of family life at Graceland. It’s a highly eulogistic and adoring display, presenting Elvis not just as the iconic immortal star that he was, but also as a saintly family man who never put a foot wrong. A story with a couple of chapters missing, maybe. 

More costumes

The house is fascinating, not least because Elvis’s obsession with constant change created themed rooms such as the “jungle room” modelled on his favourite vacation destination of Hawaii, and ahead-of-its-time multi screen TV rooms. Such is the extent of the entire Graceland tour – house, grounds, museum, cars, aeroplanes – that it takes just shy of three and a half hours to complete it. Throughout that entire time I spot just one tiny reference to Col Tom Parker, interesting but perhaps not so surprising.

It’s time to move on from Memphis, reflect on all that we have learned about the city, its histories and the birth of rock’n’roll, with one last night on Beale Street and one last blues session. 

Next stop Nashville. 

Non-Stop Nashville: 4 Days In Music City, Then Time For A Change

The Interstate cuts a sunken swathe right through the heart of Nashville, the gleaming skyscrapers of the city telling of its recently gained reputation as an economic powerhouse. Giant companies such as AT&T, FedEx, Nissan and Bridgestone have all set up major bases here as Nashville grows in confidence and influence, commerce clearly adding another string to its bow. Or maybe another string to its guitar.

It may have made that move, but as we walk down Broadway (aka Honky Tonk Highway) for the first time there’s absolutely no mistaking the fact that Music City is still Music City, not only another site of huge musical origins and influence but a massively vibrant, pulsating mecca of live music where it is instantly possible to believe that more musicians make a full time living here than anywhere else. But that’s all from Day 2 onwards, the Nashville leg begins a day earlier.

It’s early Saturday afternoon as we pull off the Interstate and into the hotel parking lot – this will be our first hotel room since we left Brazil, America has been all airbnb houses, apartments and a b&b up to now. Dark storm clouds hover over the skyscrapers and we wonder whether the torrential storms we passed through on the way here are about to catch up with us again.

Our time in Nashville really begins with our rendezvous with Meg, Brad and Tess which we linked to in a previous post – a lovely evening where Meg makes a great choice of venue at the delightful Loveless Cafe about 30 minutes out of town. A really great few hours and the perfect start to our time here.

Nashville’s live music scene is up and running by 10am and powers on till well after midnight. It is absolutely and utterly full on and virtually non-stop. There’s only a handful of shops on Broadway – most of them selling cowboy boots – the rest is made up entirely of music bars, and from any point on the street you can hear the sound of at least four different bands clashing. In every bar, the stage is by the window, so that the band face the customers in the bar but have their backs to the open windows, right by the sidewalk. Consequently the street is full of drumbeat. It must be one of the loudest streets on Earth.

Famed of course for country music, nowadays rock seems to have all but taken over. Sure, there’s some venues true to Nashville’s country roots, more during the afternoon hours, but at night this is rock territory – we hear more Metallica and Kings Of Leon covers than we do true country music. These aren’t really just bars, these are concert venues with a bar in the centre – large raised stages the domain of wannabe stars strutting their stuff, appreciative crowds joining in with the choruses and digging into wallets to fill the tips buckets.

For so many of these guys, this is full time work and, with this many bars running 16 hours of live gig per day, there’s room for plenty of talent. Not wanting to miss the legendary relevance of Nashville, we do pay homage properly to Music City’s country origins by touring the revered Ryman Auditorium and by visiting the Johnny Cash Museum. The Ryman is surprisingly compact given its massive back catalogue of top performers and its significant place in music history, being roughly the size of an average West End theatre in London.

The Johnny Cash Museum does full justice to the legend which is The Man In Black, but it’s so busy that it is for the most part a crowded shuffle through the Cash story with a loop repeating a short extract of “I Walk The Line” every few seconds which starts to grate all too quickly. Maybe we’ve done one museum too many.

For some air and a change of scenery we wander over the John Seigenthaler Bridge for views of the river and the city, and up the hill to the State Capitol, which is closed despite signage inviting us in via the West Entrance. Impressive building and gardens, mind you, even though we can’t get in. So instead we soon find ourselves in another Broadway bar as another lead guitarist makes his axe cry and wail and another singer milks the crowd like a true pro.

And then it dawns on us : we realise at the same moment as each other that we need some variety, we suddenly want to be out of the cities. Great music, fabulous histories, three vibrant but diverse cities in New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville – and terrific bars and music venues in all three – but we’re done with the city vibe for now and we need a change. We’re even done with barbecue. Maybe it IS possible to have too much of a good thing after all.

A small amount of research has us heading by car the short distance out of Nashville to Radnor Lake, where a hike around its perimeter is a breath of fresh air in both senses. Turtles bask in the sunshine on fallen boughs, deer move stealthily through the woods, and then a real treat as we spy a Bald Eagle, the symbol of America, resting proudly up in the trees. Just as we think about a second hike up into the surrounding wooded hills, the predicted rain finally arrives and we abort – a good decision as a heavy 2-hour deluge follows.

So it is that with a desire to move away from the city, we pack our bags on Wednesday morning and head for the mountains – The Great Smoky Mountains to be precise. Over TV in the breakfast room though, the screen is full of severe weather warnings across the southern states with major thunder storms, a month’s worth of rain and even tornadoes forecast. 

They’re not kidding. At least the first two hours of the drive is in horrendous conditions, with heavy rain and spray reducing visibility to a matter of yards in places, deep surface water adding to the hazard. At times it’s as bad as driving in thick fog so poor is the visibility; traffic slows to about 35/40mph and we pass a couple of nasty wrecks. When visibility improves slightly, all it means is that we can now see the fork lightning more clearly. It’s a relief when it finally, finally, starts to ease.

We’re headed for Gatlinburg. Way back in Crystal Springs, Lee the barber had recommended it when we mentioned the Smoky Mountains, and, having liked what we heard in his description, we identified it as our destination mountain getaway. With our desire to quit the cities now about to be satisfied, we discuss what we would ideally hope to find when we get there: fresh mountain air, fast flowing rivers, hiking trails, rolling mountains, a change of cuisine and – maybe, just maybe, fresh trout for dinner.

Forty minutes or so from Gatlinburg, we’re at last out of the weather bomb and on to dry roads, finally leaving the Interstate and heading up, up and further up into the evocatively named Great Smoky Mountains. With just a handful of miles to go we pass through Sevierville, Dolly Parton’s home town, and Pigeon Forge, where we’re surrounded on both sides of the road by some dreadful Disney-like quasi metropolis of theme hotels and adventure parks, roller coasters and pretend scenery. Not our scene at all.

But then we’re soon out into greenery, mountains towering above us, a young mountain river crashing and frothing over rocks alongside the road. As if by magic, as we enter Gatlinburg the heavy clouds, present all day till now, suddenly lift, and the town basks in glorious sunshine under a sky quickly turning blue at the very moment we see the town for the first time.

We take an exploratory walk into town among Alpine style wooden lodges and trailhead way markers, crossing bridges over the fast flowing rivers and looking up at the tops of the mountains way above. The air is clear and a delight to inhale, so fresh and sweet after the muggy air of the cities. Turning a corner on the main street, there’s a little wooden restaurant which is called – and we can scarcely believe our eyes – The Trout House.

It’s as if our every wish has been granted.

Smoky Mountains, Black Bears & The Trail Of Tears: Gatlinburg, Tennessee

It’s the sort of thing you take with a pinch of salt, advice placed inside the apartment on what to do if you meet a bear when you go out the door. I mean, it’s never really going to happen, is it….

Except it does. On our fourth, and last, night here, we set off towards town for our last evening meal, and get no more than 50 yards from our door when we come face to face with a young black bear in the street outside. Thankfully he or she is more scared than we are, and turns and trots the other way, soon joined by what looks like Mummy Bear. To our absolute amazement, we then realise that Daddy Bear and two more cubs are eyeing us suspiciously, and, what’s more, are coming towards us along the tarmac.

We had previously heard talk that a family of five were occasionally venturing into town in search of food, but we never dreamt for a moment that we would have such an astonishingly close encounter right on our doorstep. We watch them for a while as they search for food – Daddy Bear even checks out the vending machines – before they disappear behind the buildings. We know we’re supposed to be scared and take precautions but the joy and excitement of such a sighting just takes over, snapping photographs and making videos as the bear family go about their business. It’s so exhilarating and we feel elated to have been so close.

Gatlinburg has been about more than just bears though – it’s a small town tucked in a river valley in the Smoky Mountains, very much geared to its role as a getaway destination for outdoor weekends. At this time of year, in May, it’s all about hiking trails and scenic drives, whereas in the winter months the town is a gateway to the snow for those who like to ski. There’s no white in the scenery today, just a spectacular collage of verdant shades as the forested mountains watch over the town below nestling amongst a network of fast flowing rivers and streams.

The much anticipated fresh trout is as good as we had hoped, after which we sit on the balcony of our apartment, the dark line of the mountaintops, the sweet fresh air and the sound of the rushing water in the creek below are just the most perfect antidote to our city fatigue. It feels great, and so, so relaxing. Roughly thirty minutes later, the thunder which has been rolling around the mountains crashes into town, bringing torrential rain and spectacular fork lightning with it.

Before long the roads look like rapids and the creek is flexing new found muscles. We wake next morning to a repeat as a second storm calls in for breakfast, pounding Gatlinburg with extremes to encourage everyone to linger just a little longer over morning coffee. What an effect the storms have though : the rivers and streams have become thrilling high speed white water spectaculars, crashing against walls and racing through town just inches below the underside of footbridges, frothing and swirling as they go.

It adds a thrill to our first hike along the trail towards Grotto Falls. It also cuts it short as one cascade has breached the top of a footbridge and is hurtling by at far too fast a pace to risk taking it on. Instead we continue in the car along the tiny winding road through dense forest, along the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail, through shady glens and past raging torrents, stopping regularly for brief strolls. This is a truly beautiful area and a drive which lives up to its interesting name.

At one such stop, commemorative boards tell the story of the Bales family who lived in the tiny wooden shack on the hillside. Somehow, this family, with their NINE children, lived together in this cramped space, grew what they could on the unforgiving rocky ground in the little clearings between the trees – in a climate which is stiflingly hot in summer and snowbound in winter. As harsh lives go, the Bales family’s was right up there.

Gatlinburg has three different chair lift routes up the mountainsides, one of which, the Skypark, leads to the Skybridge, a suspended footbridge which not only gives great views of the town and countryside but is also America’s longest pedestrian only suspension bridge at 680ft long. A section of reinforced glass in the centre gives vertical views to the valley 140ft below and probably vertigo to those who are prone.

The drives out from Gatlinburg up into the “Smokies” are fabulous, stopping regularly to admire the panoramic views or take a short hike along pretty trails. Along with quite a few other visitors we climb the tarmac pathway from the parking lot to the peak of Clingman’s Dome, the summit of which is a whole 6,643ft above sea level. A board at the top tells us that the peak is named after the man who measured the height of each of the Smoky Mountains, although it stops short of telling us exactly how he did that.

This is truly beautiful country, so good on the eye that it’s impossible to avoid making regular stops just to admire the amazing scenery. From Gatlinburg to the top is roughly twenty miles, which makes it even more remarkable that when we leave town the temperature is in the mid 70s (around 24C), then at Clingman’s Dome it’s just a whisker above 40 (around 5C). It’s cold up here in our T-shirts!

Our final excursion from Gatlinburg is out over the Smoky Mountains and across the state line into North Carolina, to the Indian reservation town of Cherokee. There is some serious history to unravel here, this little town strung along its shallow river is one of the epicentres of native American history.

In 1830, the US Government introduced the Indian Removal Act, bringing about the enforced displacement of thousands of Cherokees and other Indian tribes, taken nearly 900 miles from the land they called their own and placed in unfamiliar territory west of the Mississippi. This route, along which a quarter of Cherokees perished during the arduous journey, is today referred to as The Trail Of Tears. By coincidence we find out much more about this at our next stop, more on that piece of history in our next post.

Cherokee the town remembers this unfortunate episode with storyboards, a museum and a large number of gift shops – the museum recording not just the history of land seizure and enforced displacement, but also how in more recent times the Cherokees have used the “white man’s stereotypes” of Indian appearance to build a micro economy through selling souvenirs that match that imagery. We’re not quite sure how that dovetails with the “Made in China” labels which we spot on some of the heavily priced goods in the shops, mind you.

Saturday brings a different feel to Gatlinburg, the town has filled with weekenders and day trippers and is a different place, with gridlocked streets and rammed sidewalks, and even queues at candy stores (alien to us!). Despite the extra people the atmosphere is lovely, with almost a seaside feel in the afternoon sunshine. 

It isn’t in the slightest bit surprising that Gatlinburg is popular, the surrounding Smoky Mountains create beautiful scenery and the town plays its gateway role neatly without ever feeling overblown.

It’s been a lovely stay here for many reasons – but there is no doubt that our fabulous close encounter with the bears will be our memory of Gatlinburg which lingers the longest.

On The Road Again: From Smoky Mountains To Sweet Home Alabama

It’s with a real sense of occasion that we set off from Gatlinburg through the greenery which is this morning made even more intense by the glorious bright sunshine brightening the leafage and dappling the roadway. We’re on the road again on the final leg of our southern states road trip. Ahead of us lies an 850-mile journey from the Smoky Mountains back to New Orleans where we will return the rental car and catch a flight to Los Angeles; splitting the trip into three sections means two more small town one night stands on the way. Anticipation is buzzing inside the Chevy.

With more time between check out and check in than the first day of the journey needs, we take the back roads for the first hour, ignoring the interstate and instead taking narrow, curvy roads through anonymous villages where the only sign of life is an occasional sit-on grass cutter ridden by some country guy separated from the world by his ear protectors. Silent houses sit in large plots with indistinguishable boundaries, each one occupying just a tiny percentage of the available space. The rest is grass. Neatly cut grass in dead straight stripes.

Clustered at one end of the village might be half a dozen prefabricated homes of corrugated sheeting, huddled together as if ostracised by the larger homes which look across with disdain. Some of these houses are smaller than the RVs which are parked just a few hundred yards away. Places of worship are a constant; even in places where houses are sparse churches are plentiful. We count five in a row, all next door to each other, at one point. 

Finally joining the interstate near Knoxville, lack of any breakfast starts to call and we pull in to an edge of town complex where only the CVS pharmacy, the Subway and Starbucks are open, this being Sunday morning. In this land of great American service, we’ve picked the Subway which is manned by Mr Misery, who evidently hates working on Sundays and is sure as hell going to let everyone know it. When three golfing types come in and jauntily tell him his “OPEN” sign isn’t switched on, Mr Misery blanks them completely, not a single word nor a hint of eye contact. Rude.

From Knoxville there is no perceptible drop in the quality of the scenery despite being on the bigger roads. Lush greenery rolls up and down gentle hills while tall trees trace the interstate route in sentry-like lines, on each side of the road and down the central reserve which is sometimes a couple of hundred yards wide. Place names pass by, some unusual and some downright bizarre, until we near Chattanooga and my mind drifts to railroad trains and the thought of my late Mum humming along to Glenn Miller. I wonder briefly what she’d make of our chosen lifestyle in retirement. 

The interstate takes us out of Tennessee and into Georgia for just a few miles as we cut across its top left hand corner, and then across another state line as the big “Welcome To Sweet Home Alabama” sign muscles into view. This state line is also a time line and the clock on the Chevy dashboard obediently leaps backwards one hour, meaning it’s now 1pm for the second time today – time changes on road trips are a novelty for us Brits.

A detour just a few miles short of our destination brings us to Mentone, a cute but curious little town where a collection of rickety wooden huts on sloping ground forms a kind of redneck olde worlde shopping mall. A shopping mall in sheds, effectively. Scents of vanilla and coffee issue from one such hut, we grab a milk shake and a Moon Pie each and sit in the sun, surrounded by conversations in that drawn out southern drawl which to our ears is as strangulated and distorted a form of English as you could ever hear. Somehow here, vowel sounds have developed a different character which forces the mouth to move in new directions. We smile as we listen to this oh so different dialect.

From Mentone, the Lookout Mountain Parkway runs along the top of the ridge past the Desoto State Park, through Little River Canyon and on to the next town, passing sumptuously positioned houses which must surely be the homes of the wealthy. Large ranch houses sit in the middle of even larger plots of manicured lawn – where the houses are concealed by trees the only clue to their existence is the monogrammed mailbox standing proudly at the roadside. Or maybe the Stars and Stripes flag rippling in the breeze.

At Little River Canyon, families play in the cold river water surprisingly close to the crest of the waterfall which drops attractively and with force into the valley below. A cantilevered boardwalk affords excellent views of the falls. This canyon hides a secret, one which reveals itself when we pull into town for tonight’s overnight stay. Welcome to Fort Payne.

The canyon, prior to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the enforced mass exodus of eight years later, was at the centre of land occupied by Cherokee Indians who were, as a result of the Act, about to be forcibly removed from their homeland and moved nearly 900 miles to land where the US Government had decided they should be. Fort Payne was precisely that – a fort where the rounded-up Cherokees were held against their will while waiting to be taken away.

The terrible, arduous journey along the route which has become known as The Trail Of Tears began right here in this little town. Some of the facts are truly shocking: in total, 60,000 were displaced, more than 1190 of them in one single collective expulsion starting at this very spot in Fort Payne. For those 1190, the entourage comprised 57 stagecoaches (that’s 21 people per carriage, each carriage 6ft x 9ft) and only 83 tents for overnight stops (14 per tent)- this for people who were already emaciated, poverty stricken and largely in poor health even before the journey started.

Where the Trail of Tears starts

Around a quarter of those expelled did not complete the journey, dying from malnutrition or disease along the way. The rest suffered the torture and sorrow of being placed in unfamiliar territory at the far end of the dreadful “Trail Of Tears”. A piece of history which doesn’t make pleasant reading, especially for Europeans, because, let’s face it, these were the acts of European settlers.

Sunday night in Fort Payne is the antipathy of places like Memphis and Nashville. Many of the shops are boarded up, permanently closed; the main street’s only bar has Sunday opening hours displayed on the door but is locked up and in darkness, the Vintage Restaurant where we are sent by a helpful guy cleaning out another empty joint who says it’s the best place to eat tonight, is equally deserted and the doors are firmly closed. Just one place is open, an Italian restaurant with Voodoo Ranger IPA among its draught beers. It’s OK, as it happens. So it’s pasta or pizza versus a drive out of town which would mean no beer. Italian it is, then.

Monday morning is cold and damp, the miserable drizzle adding a poignancy to the moment as we stand and read the memorials at the place where the fort stood, the start point for The Trail Of Tears. I grab a haircut, the first since Lee at Crystal Springs, we take breakfast at the strangely named Huddle In The House out by the interstate, and we’re on the road again, on the longest of the three drives.

Miles of interstate, miles of rolling green and several billion trees later, and after more than five hours on the road, we roll in to Bay Minette, another odd town name on the long list which now includes Athens, Palestine and, of all things, Nymph. Who the hell names a town Nymph? And why? We’re passed Birmingham and Montgomery now and we’re within twenty miles or so of the coast. 

New Orleans is less than three hours away tomorrow and our southern states road trip is almost over. Our Chevy has accompanied us through Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, from crazy city streets to mountain getaways, through torrential rainstorms and under clear blue skies, from tomato museums to tales of gangsters and mob rule. We have learned the atrocities of the Jim Crow laws and visited the birthplaces of jazz, the blues and rock and roll, seen the spot where Martin Luther King fell and the place where thousands of American Indians were evicted from their land. We’ve stood within a few feet of black bears.

There will be time to reflect in detail soon. For now, thunder is again rumbling and the rain is falling on our tin roof in Bay Minette, so heavy that a few drops seep through the roof and land on one of the pillows. If possible this little town is even quieter than Fort Payne, this time the silent town and the pouring rain do force us to drive out to a diner for a meal: a seafood diner where every sentence uttered by other customers seems to contain the word “church”. 

Tomorrow we head back to The Big Easy, say goodbye to the faithful Chevy and prepare to spend a few days at my daughter’s house in California.

Brazil already seems a long time ago.

California: Chill Time Before We Head Home

Underfoot the ground is parched, rock hard and dusty, the sun shines hot from crystal skies and occasional breezes rustle the trees and send dust clouds up into small eddies while only marginally cooling the heat. Tufts of weed and grass remain but seem to be turning to pale yellow by the hour, some already sun kissed enough to disintegrate into more dust if we step on them. It’s all very different from the verdant forests and regular rain of the last three weeks. Spring is turning into summer into the mountains above Los Angeles.

Acton, the small town which is my daughter Lindsay’s home, receives its hot days of summer just a little ahead of LA itself, and now in mid May the surrounding mountains are half way between the jade greens of spring and the golden browns of summer. The hot days will be here to stay now, whereas down in LA and along the coast it’s still cool and misty, summer needs a few more days to warm the Pacific air.

Our southern states road trip is over, via one last night in New Orleans – much quieter than it was three weeks ago, even on Bourbon Street – and a direct flight on the definitely-no-frills South Western Airlines into LAX. It’s time to chill now, spend precious time with Lindsay and Stacey, and enjoy the California sun. No rushing to see sights we’ve seen before, just good times in good company.

But of course it’s impossible to be in country like this without getting out there for at least a handful of short hikes, so as well as a few wanders around Acton we go out into the spectacular Vasquez Rocks Park with its weirdly eroded rock formations to get in a few miles before it’s too hot. Out here the hardy plants are already crisp and thorny, preparing their armour in readiness for the long hot summer.

Our walk is rewarded hugely when a large colourful snake crosses the trail – fortunately, as we have to get past it, a non-venomous type named the Pacific Gopher Snake – and, as if one isn’t enough, we stumble across a second, smaller one half a mile later. They are both surprisingly docile: we wonder whether the first days of summer have only recently brought them out of hibernation and they’re soaking up the sun in order to warm the blood.

A second snake and a Western Fence Lizard

The coastal stretch at Malibu is as beautiful and as incredibly expensive as ever, our shoreline and clifftop walk exercising our legs and lunch then removing one of those legs and an arm as well for good measure. Before we grab lunch, we pass large numbers of seals basking on the rocks or play in the sea at Point Dume, the familiar stench of their colony carried to the coastal path by the breeze. 

Spring flowers decorate the hillside with reds, blues and yellows, pelicans defy gravity on the thermals and lizards heat up the blood in the morning sun. A handful of surfers bob on the waves waiting for the big one, dotting the sea with black specks like flies on a windshield. The breeze seems to alternate between just too chilly and pleasingly warm as spring evolves into the first days of summer, neither yet winning the tug of war.

Phil, Lindsay and Michaela enjoying Malibu

Yet back in Acton, up in the mountains, the seasons are definitely more advanced, the mountains still holding their slender lead over the coast in the race towards summer.

It’s been a great way to end this trip, precious time with my daughter and Stacey, bonding with their amusing and endearing little dog Joni, unwinding after nine weeks of travel and reacquainting ourselves with California. It’s time to head home for a while. Here’s hoping that summer is arriving in England too.