Originally written in April 2014 – Part of the Deep South series

Hello readers

Up until now, I have been telling you what we saw on our trip to the Deep South. I have been writing about my recollections of what we saw, and, with a bit of luck, you’ve been able to imagine what it all looked like.

I have, however, been avoiding the elephant in the room: surely if it was a road trip there were many hours spent in a car. The answer is yes, but you can make those more amenable and even shorter.

The first long day was from Savannah to Mobile. Grab a ruler and measure the distance… Yes, it’s a lot of kilometres, particularly as we were choosing to skip spending any time in Florida, as we were going for the traditional South approach. Hours and hours of driving, for which I have several recommendations:

1) Bring an iPod with a lot of cool music

2) If you don’t have data in your mobile phone plan, get a SIM card that does. Trust me, this will not only sort you out if you suddenly get lost, but it also helps with the long hours as a co-pilot.

3) Bring water. Lots of it.

4)Bring a couple of snacks too. Fruit is good.

5) Bring SPF. Yes, you can burn even in a car.

We left Georgia, this time we saw the sign for the last time for 10 days and we entered Florida. We went from being “Southerners” to being ” Latino” in 10 metres: all signs of towns included very famous names in Spanish, we even went through a Madrid and a Barcelona. We were told gracias in petrol stations (well, I was) and I could hear Spanish everywhere. There were also southerners around though, I did see for example a family blessing their food in a Subway.

Finally, and after some serious time driving, we got to Mobile in Alabama. Mobilians (is that their name??) believe the town is similar and as important as New Orleans. I’d love to be able to say that that’s the caw but to be fair we got there late and went straight to our hotel outside of town. We stayed in a resting area that may not have been glamorous, but the hotel was amazing and only cost $30.

We left the following day towards New Orleans, which is just 2 hours away. The weather was bad, however, so we had to stop somewhere in between for brekkie. It was in the coffee place that we discovered just why Alabama is considered the “largest” state in the US: 2 eggs, spuds, toast, bacon, butter, bacon and coffee sold for $5!!

How did we get to New Orleans? I’m still not sure. The wind and storm were terrible. We could’ve been falling into the gulf and we wouldn’t have known. We could’ve crashed into the car in front of us and, no, we would’ve not been able to stop it. We literally could not see 1 metre in front of us. Nothing at all. It was all rain, fog a couple of hazard lights here and there and not much else. We did get there safely, and I don’t think we had ever been so happy to get anywhere before. I did not expect New Orleans to have such a calming effect on the two of us in the following 4 days but thank God it did.

I’ll tell you all about it in the next post

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