From a Trans-Atlantic Nomad

On 19th of August I went to visit a friend in Raleigh called Allison. We were both on the Youth Festival on Iona in 2002 and it was really great to see her again. She is from upstate New York but has just started a doctorate there in Virginia in Industrial Organisational Psychology. A very clever girl.

Anyhoo in Raleigh we met up with some of her friends and went to a bar/grill and to my delight they had Belhaven Best and I nursed a pint of it and reminisced of glens and rain and all other things Scottish. The following day I, left to my own devices, found my way onto a Segway tour of Raleigh. For those of you that don’t know a Segway is one of those funny two-wheeled space-age things that George Bush fell off. I was very excited. I didn’t really take in all that much of the tour as I was trying to make the thing go as fast as it could without getting in trouble with the tour guide. I got it up to a whopping 9.6mph and managed to avoid the wrath of Toby the tour guide. A double success I think.

Whilst on the tour a section of downtown Raleigh was closed off and it turned out it was because Barack Obama was in town to speak at a town hall. Despite not having ticket’s Allison and I  tried to see if we could wing it and get in. We got there and I put on my finest, ‘dear sir… all the way from Scotland… ever so pleased if we could get in… would make this the most fantastic trip ever, sort of spiel. He was buying it when the nasty Fire Marshall came out and shut the door because the room was at capacity.

Anyway they brought out a loudspeaker and we listened intently and I got very excited everytime a secret service agent came into view.

The following day I went to the North Carolina state history museum in which they had a huge collection of duck decoy’s. The display had the rather hammy title, Art Ducko. Apparently shooting bird’s there is a big deal, and it would seem crap patter is too. It was a spot on the bizzare side I have to admit.

Then I went onto the North Carolina at War display which I found all a bit distressing by the end. I noticed that the US has been in a war pretty much every 30 years since it’s inception. Next up there was a piece on the bombardier Thomas Ferebee who, along with his team dropped the first atomic weaponon Hiroshima. Interestingly a friend of mine spoke of the military alternative, a land invasion of Japan using a million allied troops, and how the projected fatalities and casualties was estimated to be higher than using the a-bomb.

All this military talk makes me think of how as a 17 year old I applied to join the Royal Navy. I was accepted but they offered me a contract amounting to 29 years with two earlier exit options. Thankfully I baulked at the length of the contract and turned down the offer. My life would have been drastically, almost unimaginably different had I joined.

Moving on from all that on my last night in Raleigh I played at an open mic which was mainly a blues jam sort of evening. I played some completely unbluesy songs of mine and no one really appeared to listen much.

I left Memphis and to be honest I was ready to leave, I was getting a bit sick of hostelling and so was looking forward to staying in a family home. I stayed in Decatur Georgia with an Iona Community associate called Horace Holden. He and his family were extraordinarily hospitable. I arrived late on the 12th of August and Horace kindly collected me from the Greyhound station to begin a week packed with a variety of events.

I stayed in his family home just one night as Horace had arranged for me to spend a couple of days volunteering at a place called the open door communtiy. The open door community is based in a big old house in Atlanta that is home to a community of volunteers and staff who work locally with disadvantaged people.  A snippet from their website reads, “we seek to dismantle racism, sexism and heterosexism, abolish the death penalty, and create the Beloved Community on Earth through a loving relationship with some of the most neglected and outcast of God’s children: the homeless and our sisters and brothers who are in prison.” http://www.opendoorcommunity.org/

On my first night there was a medical and foot clinic for local homeless people. Some medical students from the nearby Emory University volunteered and I think maybe a fully qualified doctor was present too. I was put to task in the foot clinic. My role was to sterilise all of the utensils, and to clean and refill the foot-spa tubs ready for the next person. The young volunteers working on our friends feet did a great job and there were lots of banter flying around the room. Unsurprisingly everyone using the foot clinic was in high spirits. After a couple of hours of scrubbing and honestly feeling slightly relieved that I wasn’t let loose on some poor fellows I zonked out for the night.

The following day I attended a Greek class at Columbia Seminary with a couple of students who volunteered at the open door and in the evening I helped prepare the evening meal which basically involved a lot of chopping.  After seeing such a great deal of poverty and homelessness here in the U.S. I was really grateful to have the opportunity to contribute at the open door even if it was only for a short time.

Horace took me to Emory to see the University there and it turns out he is a bit of a legend there. Each of the sports coaches we walked past knew him, I found out that he is in the sports hall of fame there, a fact he only admitted after I cajoled him a wee bit. After that Horace took me up to his farm in the Wesser area of North Carolina near the Smoky Mountains. Horace, his wife Jody and I drove up and we met some of their friends Bill, and his two children Nolan (18) and Caitlin (20), and also Bill’s partner Mary and her friend.

On Saturday 16th August we went paddling on the Nantahala river in a variety of different vessels where there is a good bit of whitewater. The outdoor centre there was actually founded by Horace in the early 1970’s and so he is a bit of a legend round there as well (he even has a bridge named after him which I thought was pretty cool). After the paddling we off to a nearby wee town, the name of which escapes me, had a wonderfull family style soouther meal and watched some fantastic bluegrass musicians led by a fellow called Wayne Henderson. The fellow Mr Henderson was a fantastic guitarist and a great story teller, he told lots of funny stories about mountain life which I shant attempt to retell here but he had the knack. He makes guitars and was letting people have a look during the interval and I got chatting to him, he mentioned me in a wee story about kilts that he told which was kinda fun.

On Sunday Horace and I drove up to Asheville to meet a lovely couple called Mason and Prue Wilson whom are also Iona Communty associates. We had a spot of lunch together and then I was kindly hosted by Mason and Prue which was very kind of them. Horace left to head beack to Wesser and I was sad to see him go. He is one the kindest, most generous people I have met and I am grateful for the time I got to spend with him, his friends and family. The following morning I headed for my trusty bastion of budget travel, the old Greyhound, to move on to Raleigh.

I completely forgot to talk about the Civil Rights museum in Memphis.  The museum is located in what used to be the Lorraine motel, the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The museum was really well presented with lots of interactive stuff like sitting on an old bus and being asked to move by the driver. It was especially moving at the point when you get to see the room Martin Luther King was using the night he was shot, which his been basically left unchanged since that night. They also have a museum across the road showing the sniper’s nest from where James Earl Ray fired. There are tons of conspiracy theories of course.

After the museum outside I noticed an african-american woman protesting against the museum. I went and chatted to her and her problem was that the Memphis state government owned the museum, have turned it purely into a tourist attraction and make money out of it. She thinks that the museum should be used to ‘further the dream’. I think she has a point. After that I was pleased to read that in Birmingham Alabama, and in Atlanta Georgia the venue’s important to Dr King were owned by the King family. I heard that the King family are in a great deal of conflict over who gets what with regard to the Dr King’s estate. It really is a sad state of affairs.

The thing I find most perplexing is that the 60’s civil rights movement is hailed as a wonderful time of change and progress. Civil rights leaders and prominent figures are now celebrated. There are statues, museums, awards for all these people. It is spoken of like they won the battle against racism and segregation. Most neighbourhoods I have been in have one racial majority, the vast majority of homeless people I’ve met or seen have been african-american, the american army has platoons divided on the basis of race, the amount of young african-american men in jail is disproportionately higher than those of other races. Even the election news, who’s got the white vote, the black vote, the hispanic vote. My impressions are of a hugely divided culture here, formal equality there may be but social equality there certainly is not.

I was very much looking forward to Memphis and it turned out to be a bit disappointing. It was still quite fun but very frustrating.

I got there on August 9th for Elvis week which is the annual commemoration of the death of Elvis. Well after 31 years of it it seems to have gotten a bit flat. I went to the opening night party on Beale street with a guy from the hostel called Justin and the place was completely empty. We’d already paid $20 for our tickets so we hung around and got chatting to a couple of very pleasant southern belle’s. They were regulars and managed to convince the barman to give us a free drink because of the ticket price. Then when the head chef came over and started chatting to us he felt bad and gave us a big plate of food each as the kitchen was super quiet. The restaurant there was quite and the food was excellent. The pork was worth the $20 alone so we left happy.

Aside from that the buses in Memphis were awful. From the hostel there was one bus an hour during the day and they stopped at about 6.30pm. This meant I had to spend quite a fair old chunk on taxi’s during my stay there.

I played a song-writers open mic in a coffee shop there which was fun, the owner asked if I would be around next weekend to play a longer set. It was nice to be asked but again disappointing to miss out on.

I went the annual music and movies night on the lawn at Graceland on my final night there. That was good. The band playing Elvis covers were excellent and we watched jailhouse rock afterwards. Apparently that is one of the better Elvis movies, I liked it but it makes me wonder what the less good ones are like. He was no actor! It is pretty cool though that the first time I saw an Elvis movie was on the lawn at Graceland.

As final note from Memphis the taxi driver that was dropping me at the Greyhound station was a really loud woman. She barked down her cell phone for most of the drive then she asked me where I was from. When I replied Scotland I thought that she didn’t seem too certain about where or what Scotland was. My fears were confirmed when she asked me if I was getting the Greyhound to Scotland.

The Hurricane and Greyhound stories are interwoven so I’ll start with them.

The Greyhound from Austin to New Orleans was going swimmingly. I had Fred the nicest bus driver ever (and I told him so at the end of the Austin-Houston leg) who’s bus had tv’s and we all rode merrily along watching Kung-Fu Hustle 2. Then a hurricane warning left me stranded in Houston at 1am. I decided to find a room and ended up in a rather damp smelly motel room for the night. That was fine as one of my wants for this trip was to spend the night in a dingy roadside motel for the evening.

The Hurricane turned out to be only a tropical storm so the following morning the bus just drove on through it. It was kinda cool, the traffic lights were all swinging on the wires like it happens on the news.

So got to New Orleans on Tueaday 5th August and it was great with tons of live music. I watched a local 12 piece brass band playing jazz/dixie/funk on the first night and they were amazing. I bought a couple of their cd’s they were that good. I watched a lot of good music in my four days in New Orleans and on the last day I was in this really cool record store called Peaches records buying a cd of the brass band. I had been playing my guitar in a park in the french quarter so I had it on my back when I was in the store and after a while of chatting to the owner she asked me if I would come and play in the store. This was at 6pm on Friday the and I was booked on the bus to get me to Memphis at 8.15am the following morning. I was pretty disappointed but never mind.

In the middle of all this music I hit the Honey Island Swamp for some alligator spotting. It was great. I got tons of photo’s so I’ll let them do the talking but there was one really amazing fact the guide told us. He said that the sex of alligator hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the eggs in the first 21 days of incubation, below 86 degrees F will produce all females, above 93 degrees F will produce all males. He also said that the hurricane wiped out about 30% of the population of alligators in the Honey Island swamp and that since then all of the hatchlings have been female. This is because the more females that mature the quicker the population can recover as one male can impregnate many females in season. How clever!

Check out the photos

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2202458&l=e3021&id=61006708

First of all apologies for not writing in a while. The last couple of hostels I’ve stayed in have had really poor internet facilities.

I ended up not going to San Antonio and just staying in Santa Fe for a couple of days extra. It was a good choice. Bruce took Sophie, a girl we met at the hostel, and I to Taos Indian reserve which was fine and we then went to the Rio Grande gorge and took photo’s from the bridge. As I’m not too keen on heights I didn’t stay on the bridge for too long. When we drove back the three of us went for a dip in the Rio Grande and it was amazing. It was early evening, the sun was setting, the scenery was astouonding and the company was good. It really was one of my favourite times on the trip thus far.

After leaving Santa Fe I had a mammoth greyhound bus journey to Austin, it was meant to take about 15 hours but it took about 22 hours in the end. I arrived on Saturday 3rd August. Despite being knackered a few others from the Hostel, including Sophie who it turned out also visited Austin and New Orleans, went to check out some music on 6th street in town. Austin is a big music town so we did the same again the following night and saw a couple of really good bands.

On the Sunday I got invited to go tubing on the river just south of Austin in a wee place called San Marcos. Tubing is basically sitting in a rubber ring and floating on down the river for a couple of hours. It was fun but one of the guys who drove us down was really quite aggressive and his behaviour quickly became irritating. I just bit my tongue and tried to enjoy the sunshine.

On the Monday Sophie and I went to check out the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum. We were both leaving that night and we didn’t really set aside enough time to do it properly. It did include an imax cinema show Called the Lone Star of Destiny which was pretty much a propagated movie centered around the famous ‘texas spirit’. It was entertaining nonetheless.

As a bit of a footnote I’ll write a spot about Greyhound. A huge part of my trip thus far has centred around the Greyhound buses, it has been an intriguing experience. They are extraordinarily disorganised. None of the stations I’ve been in have a departure board which means that when you are getting a connection you have to queue to ask when and where it will be leaving from. Of course everyone else with the same connection queues to get the same answer.

There is a great deal of visible poverty on the buses and surrounding most of the stations. There are lots of poor and homeless people begging, or panhandling as it is called here. Greyhound is like the default travel system for those who cannot afford to fly or get the train.

The worst part though is the, ‘restroom onboard for your convenience’, as the bus drivers say. It is basically just a big ol’ tank at the back of the bus with a toilet seat on top and a hand sanitizer. I managed to avoid using it entirely until my Santa Fe-Austin experience. Let’s just say it was not fun and that I’m glad I can stand up and use the loo.

I can think of two positives about Greyhound off the top of my head. The first is that I’m nearing the East Coast and the cities I’m planning on visiting are much closer together. The second is that watching the landscape has been incredible. The difference between the brown hills of California, the barren Nevada desert, the red mountains of New Mexico, the flat plains of Texas and the wetlands of the Louisiana delta is quite extraordinary. I can look at a map of the U.S. and think that it’s kinda cool that so many thousands of miles have passed under my seat on a Greyhound bus. I just checked the distance online and I’m at about the 4000 mile mark.

Still got a couple of thousand more to go.

Just found out via wikipedia that Greyhound was bought in September 07 by Aberdeen’s very own First Group. Who’d have thunkit.