Chattanooga Choo Choo, Cowboy Style!

We woke up vaguely early and Beth and Tom were having a yard sale, something we steered clear of, as getting involved would just mean buying more things we couldn't bring back to England!
The car was packed up, we said our farewells and we headed off to the Jack Daniels Distillery, in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

The wierd thing about Lynchburg is that it's a dry county.
You can't buy or drink alcohol there.
What a place to put a whiskey distillery!!!

We took the (free!) tour, which was actually really good! We had an awesome tour guide called Billy, who shared all his stories of English folk with us, and was pretty knowledgeable about the whiskey. He had a great beard too!
The tour lasted about an hour, there was just time for an ice cold lemonade before visiting the official store where you could buy bottles of whiskey for souvenir purposes only (because this made sense......).
We purchased a bottle of single barrel that was only sold in the distillery, no other place in the world(!).
From the distillery we headed into Lynchburg town, a place that at first glance looked pretty cool, but on further investigation turned out to be a bit of a tourist trap. It had the feel of what you imagine a southern town to have. Dusty, old, lots of bikers and accents. But full of overpriced items branded with the Jack Daniels logo. EVERYTHING you could possibly imagine branded with the Jack Daniels logo, and priced far too high.

We'd had enough of the town, so we set off for our second destination of the day, The Unclaimed Baggage Centre in Alabama. A place we'd been told a lot about, and we wanted to see what it could offer us!
http://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/
Check this place out! There's only one in the world, and it's where all the..well...unclaimed baggage ends up, where it's sold for cheap prices in a sort of warehouse!
A lot of what's on sale is clothes, but there really are some crazy things you can buy. Tiffany jewellery, expensive perfume, designer clothes, video cameras, you name it, they sell it!
I walked away with a couple of Ipods, a 30gb for $45 (£29 ) and an old school 3gb Ipod for only $10! (£6.50). We made a few other purchases and headed out to Chattanooga, a place we only knew by song, who knew what we'd find there!?!?!

Well, we didn't find much. Chattanooga was full to the brim! A combination of it being Labour Day and a ball game, every hotel was packed out and the streets were wierdly empty.. we couldn't really afford the $170 for an awful outskirt hotel room, so we headed out of the silly city and went to seek our fortune elsewhere!

Cleveland was our next port of call, luckily there was room at the inn! We settled down for the evening and got us some sleep.

Getting our country onn.

We woke up late-ish and headed into Nashville, where we visited the Farmer's Market to collect ingredients for dinner. We had decided to make our hosts spaghetti bolognese, a general crowd pleaser and something we're pretty good at, plus, we knew we were visiting the market, so it seemed like a good time to cram in some local veg.

We had a look around the market, were given a free bulb of garlic as a present for being English, visited an Indian food shop and decided to grab some lunch.
I had some strange chicken which tasted like it'd been boiled for far too long and was covered in lots of pepper and spices. It came with a roll.
Mum was more successful and chow'd down to some falafal, salad and flatbread.

Satisfied (to a degree), we scouted out the free Nashville bus and took a trip to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The tour was pretty awesome, we paid Elvis' gold car a visit, saw some old school country music videos and saw Dolly Parton's original lyric sheet for 'Jolene!
It was a great place to spend the day, although the hall of fame had strange metal plaques which didn't really fit the musicians! The gift shop was full of things we definitely needed to buy, so we stocked up on our country gifts and headed back to Antioch.

On the way back we stopped at a discount liquor store where we (once again) remarked on the ridiculously cheap prices, and amazing selections of spirits and purchased a bottle or two...or three..or four.

We cooked up quite a fantastic dinner with a nice, fresh salad (something we'd both been craving!) and spent the evening drinking wine, chatting more and generally having a lovely time!

Headin' down South

We left Gabi's house and headed south to Tennessee, passing through Kentucky on the way. In true nature of 'when in Rome..', we headed to a KFC to sample from the source.
We were pretty disappointed by the KFC BUFFET!! Which was a horrific combination of overcooked 'vegetables', badly fried chicken and entertaining customers.

We headed onwards to Nashville to try out our second couchsurf.
Driving through the streets of Antioch (the town we were staying in) we wondered about all the piles of rubble and half houses that we kept seeing. We later found out from our hosts that there had been a terrible flood in Nashville, and what we'd seen was the aftermath.

We arrived in Antioch in the early evening and met our couchsurfing hosts for the next two night, Beth and Tom, and their crazy cat Polly (who likes to jump at walls)!
Tom is an artist, and Beth, a photographer. They gave us a tour of their amazingly artistic home and showed us our SEPERATE bedrooms (a luxury that's rare on the road!). We then settled down for a lovely home cooked dinner, which was so refreshing after all the fried food at the rest stops. We shared some English shortbread and some Gin and Tonic's and settled down for a lovely evening of chats and drinks.

BARBIE and Dinosaurs!

We decided to head to Denny's for breakfast.
Mum got her favourite cup of tea of the trip (so far)*

*Tea is a ridiculous theme of this trip, the Americans just don't seem to drink it. She's had many an arguement with Mcdonalds workers over milk, creamer, teabags, cups..you name it..she's argued it!

We ordered pancakes and breakfast things..and then grits.
Grits were on the menu, we'd heard of them but never tried them, and we didn't really have a clue what they were.
We asked the waitress to explained, but the best she could come up with was 'well, they're kinda gritty in your mouth'.
We had to try these things!!

Grits turned out to be a cross between oatmeal and rice pudding. They can be savoury or sweet, depending what you put in them. We poured in a jug of pancake syrup, but we still weren't sure.

Gabi took us to the Children's Museum for the day, which was great, as there were only about 10 children in the whole place! Definitely outnumbered by adults!!

It's a great museum, with fun exhibits on barbie, dinosaurs, rock 'n roll..etc.
It also had a lovely (?!?) section on 'Children who saved the world', which rolled in a couple of cases of casual racism (Nazi's and segregation)*
*With some very authentic shouts of 'go away, we don't want you here', and a ridiculous book entitled 'Crafty like a fox' (google it for pictures)
mixed in with a less-than-child-friendly true story about the first boy to die from AID's.

Lovely.

We took many pictures (which will be shown on facebook sometime soon, as the blog seems to have a problem with me uploading pictures onto it....probably has something to do with the poor internet connection in the hotels!) of us frolicing about, dressed as dinosaurs/rockstars/barbies.
We had quite a wonderful experience, but then it was time for 'The end of day parade!!!', where they ushered us out of the building with flags, a song, and an oversized dinosaur!!
Yippee!!

We felt it was time for some shopping, so we visited the local mall for a bit of retail therapy.
We grabbed some amazing Japanese chicken on the way (chicken, chicken, chicken!!) and took a stroll around the stores.
I had my first Icee (yuk), and mum finally got herself a cup of coffee (which we made her leave outside when we visited yet another T J Maxx!).

After a busy day of reliving our youth we were ready for a night in, so we stocked up on Walmart (theme...) goodies and headed back to watch some awful old movies (which we fell asleep during).

'I've never seen one of those before'

We woke up bright and early and hit the I90 once more..to backtrack along our steps.
We'd heard of an Amish cluster of villages that were sort of on the way to Indianapolis and we wanted to check them out.
A few hours (and an easy GPS fueled ride) later we arrived in Shipshewana and headed for the flea market. This turned out to be a bit of a disappointment as it sold mostly horrific things that wouldn't be too out of place in the back end of Wimborne Market.
We did play a game or two of 'spot the Amish', which wasn't too difficult as they were wearing bonnets, dresses, and were riding 'buggies' (horse and carts). There were even buggy parking spaces!
Shipshewana also had some shops, a couple of which were interesting...many of which, weren't.
A bit of a disappointment really, but we'd have kicked ourselves if we hadn't gone, as it looked pretty amazing in the leaflets!
We bought some sausage and olive bread and were on our way!

We arrived in Indianapolis a little early and decided to pay Taco Bell a visit. We asked a local for some advice, as we'd never ventured into such a place before.
Her little boy (aged about 7) turned around with shock at our voices, and remarked 'I've never seen one of those before, only on the TV!' -talking about English people- US!
He continued to be amazed when we explained that we'd never eaten at Taco Bell and we wanted to know what was best!!

We ordered something off of the menu, not sure what. It was edible but nothing to write home about (oops). Then we headed off to Gabi's house (which we found easily with the help of our GPS!).

We were met by Gabi, her mum, and their very enthusiastic dog, Panda (who decided the best greeting would be to cover us in as much slobber as possible!). The mum's settled in for the night and Gabi and I hit downton Indianapolis.

We ventured into a bar for $1 well drinks ($1 = 65p!!!) and I discovered a definite new beverage of choice! Amaretto and Sours!! Yum! Gabi was chatted up by a boy with a watch on his head, we made friends with a man who enjoyed Vodka +Tonic, spent at least $5 (£3) on drinks, and then headed out for a tour of the bars/clubs/pubs/shisha bars and backstreet alleys.
Indianapolis seemed like a great place to spend a night on the town, but we were feeling a yearning for double cheeseburgers and Walmart. We paid the shops a latenight visit and headed back for a sleepover!

Chicago, day 2.

Our second day in Chicago was one of relaxation!!
We had a bit of a lie in, got ourselves together, and then headed off to the shops ( you can see a theme occuring here, can't you?).
We paid T J Maxx a visit.
Name sound familiar?
That's right, it's JUST LIKE T K Maxx, and you all know how much we love that store!! *

*we've been in America so long that we've started to say store instead of shop. We also now have to use GPS instead of Satnav, and restroom instead of loo. That driving on the right side of the road thing is tending to be a little inconvenient too!

We stocked up on some things we didn't really need, but wanted to buy anyway, just because they were such bargains (or so we told ourselves at the time!), hit a few more stores, then headed back to Jasmine's, as she had to go to work!

Jasmine directed us to a lovely hotel, and we were on our way! The hotel receptionists obviously hadn't seen many English folk before, and were very excited at our arrival. We paid a Chinese takeaway a visit (we were getting pretty sick of fried chicken by this point), snuck it into our hotel room, and nom'd down on some ridiculous portions of first class foods (we both somehow managed to order chicken....again)!

Chicago!

So, we've decided to add a new post for every day, as it breaks the reading down into bitesize chunks and makes it easier for us to know where we're going!

Sunday.
After leaving Toledo we headed West towards Chicago. We made good time until we got closer to the city and tried to locate Jasmine's house.
Unfortunately, Chicago is a city full of toll charges, high bridges, crazy drivers and police; and we managed to hit rush hour.
We ended up paying a ridiculous amount in toll charges, and drove across the skyway at least four times. After two run in's with Chicago police, and a lot of beeping and shouting, we decided to call Jasmine. We needed rescuing!
10 phone calls, and a lot of directions later, we met the lovely lady at a Walgreens (where we spent some time fawning over beautiful nail-varnishes).
Jasmine escorted us back to her house, we settled for a while, made some tea, talked to her lovely mother, and then we were off again for a night on the town!

This time we headed off in Jasmine's car, she took us on a tour of downtown, Buckingham fountain, and the general area, before taking us to Navy Pier.
We paid $25 for parking!! before taking a stroll along the pier. The views of the skyline from across Lake Michigan were spectacular, and we enjoyed a very sugary funnel cake while watching the crowds go by.

We headed off from Navy Pier, this time taking in the lit up views of night-time Chicago, to The Cheesecake Factory, where we, yet again, paid extortionate rates for car parking!

Let me tell you know that The Cheesecake Factory isn't actually a factory. It does, however, make exceptionally good cheesecake in a huge selection of mouthwatering flavours!
The building itself was pretty spectacular, and extremely hard to describe! Needless to say, it was very artistic!
The food was good, the company excellent, and the cheesecake? Not too cheesy, and very cakey!
We headed home via a midnight spree around Walmart, where we finally invested in a GPS!! (A wonderful idea, we highly recommend them!).