I should have done this as I went along, but this is what I'm left with
Random memories of the honeymoon, in no order:
*Stopping at a tiny railroad town in southern Tennessee and going to a proper old soda fountain, where the waitress thought we were French because we said we lived in Paris
*The Grand Ole Opry on our last night in Nashville - sheer genius. Although I remember the adverts best
*The lush cottage in the Great Smoky Mountains we had over Christmas, with a real log fire and a porch with rocking chairs looking over the peaks. On our first night, staff came in while we were out at dinner and covered our room in rose petals and left champagne and chocolates on the pillow
*Oh my God, how I will miss diner breakfasts. The food in the US is always amazing, why are people so critical of it? It's brilliant. We basically ate our way round the Volunteer State. Pulled-pork barbecue, oh my lord. A good meat-and-three everywhere we went pretty much. And Gus's fried chicken in Memphis, voted by GQ magazine one of 10 restaurants in the world world flying to eat at. I have come back the size of a house. A waitress in Knoxville asked us, ‘Are y'all wanting proper portions, or pansy-ass European portions?’ Pansy-ass European ones please, we replied meekly
*OH AND GRITS. Why did no one tell me about grits? I think I had them three meals a day for several days in a row, I wonder if I can get any in Paris. I am in love with grits
*Getting to Chattanooga at dusk, and driving straight up Lookout Mountain, parking the car and watching the lights come on across five states
*Our enormous American gas-guzzling rental car. I'm telling you, everyone is driving around in tanks over there. They must think Europe looks like Noddyland. We could have probably fitted a Smartcar in there as a dashboard ornament
*Everyone we met, with no exceptions, was completely friendly and lovely to us, including all kinds of strange nighttime encounters in motel parking lots, or old railway sidings in downtown Memphis
*How can one state have so much unbelievable music? This is a place which gave birth to country music (Nashville) and bluegrass (in the mountains); Memphis is of course the home of the blues, as well as being the major incubator of soul music thanks to Stax Records. And, you could argue, what with the Sun recording studio and Elvis, it also started rock 'n' roll too. We didn't stop listening to music for two solid weeks
*I remember looking at old archive footage in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, and being frozen to the spot watching Jimmie Rodgers playing his guitar and singing
though my pocket-book is empty
my heart is full of pain
I'm a thousand miles away from home
waitin' for a train
and thinking...in 1929?! I mean this is a fully-formed Dylan or Waits lyric. I had heard Rodgers before of course, but the museum also introduced me to loads of people I'd never come across - I came back home with a bag full of CDs
*We went to Dollywood so Hannah could squee and buy a T-shirt, although we didn't actually go on any of the rides because Hannah's afraid of rollercoasters. About the most exciting thing we went on was the tram ride to the car park. ‘Remember you're in parking lot C, folks,’ said our driver. ‘That's C for cheeseburger.’
*Having read his autobiography, I spent a lot of time vainly trying to find some Davy Crockett appreciation in Tennessee. Down in Lawrenceburg where he lived for a while, I finally found a ‘Davy Crockett and Cherokee Museum’, but it was run by a crazy man who spent half an hour explaining to us that the Cherokee are one of the lost tribes of Israel, and who had turned most of the museum into a cigarette-making business, with packs of raw tobacco and skins everywhere, rolling machines sitting among the exhibits. On the back wall was a series of frantic, typewritten statements of the pseudo-millennarian, apocalyptic kind, linking the AIDS pandemic to immorality on the west coast and claiming that computers are the Beast of Revelation. It also warned that ‘hello’ is a satanic word formed from ‘hell’ + ‘omega = the end’. So the museum was only a partial success really
*Being a whisky snob I have always been very dismissive of bourbon, but visiting the Jack Daniels factory in the still-tiny village of Lynchburg convinced me that there is a lot to like about the double-mellowed stuff which is labelled Gentleman Jack. I don't remember ever seeing that in the UK? Jack Daniel himself sounded like an interesting guy, 5'2" tall, and he died of gangrene after kicking a safe in frustration when he couldn't get it open. It's pretty amazing to see this huge operation going on in a little town with one stop light - AND, in the height of irony, they can't even sell the stuff because it's a dry county. It's amazing, I mean I'm a grown-up man and I'm not allowed to buy a bottle of alcohol
*I didn't expect to love Graceland, not really being an Elvis fan, but it was unmissable. Just to see a house preserved right at the zenith of 70s kitch - it had carpeted ceilings, orange leather sofas, TVs embedded in the walls, pianos everywhere - just an amazing place to see. Although kind of nauseating, it made me wonder if he decorated with a view to stopping him wanting to eat so much
*My biggest memories are just of driving west on Highway 64, heading for Memphis and taking a few days over it, with the Tennessee farmlands sliding past, the Osbourne Brothers on the stereo, horses in the fields, drunk men with chickens asleep on their porches, collapsing old barns everywhere that would be terrifying in the dark, a lot of sky, and reaching the outskirts of a town in a cluster of signs for Waffle Houses and something called Rita's (the slogan is ICE - CUSTARD - HAPPINESS, which leaves me with no idea what they are selling) and Arby's and Wendy's and Hardee's (‘chargrilled thickburgers’? Seriously? Why don't they just go the whole hog and call them ‘girthburgers’), and Super-8s and SEXY STUF roadside erotic superstores, ‘IMPEACH OBAMA’ bumper stickers, anti-abortion billboards that say scarcely-believable things like ‘Mummy I'm in heaven now but I forgive you’, Crackerbarrel Country Stores, Love's Travel Stops, 18-wheelers and Winnebagos, huge intersections with dangling traffic lights and interstate signs that made me want to keep driving for years, and my wife beside me and both of us just trying not to break out into spontaneous laughter every two minutes out of sheer, I guess, happiness