Miles driven: 542
Statelines crossed: 3
New foodstuffs eaten: about 7
Nice beers discovered: at least 1

No sooner had I got used to the plural of "you" being "you all" than I had to get unused to it again.



One thing we've noticed generally is a higher degree of friendly politeness to random strangers than we're used to, including a number of people whom we simply bumped into in the hotel lift in Knoxville (although not the Goths, of course). It made us wonder whether the guy who addressed us on the subject of the weather had a small fund of topics-to-talk-to-strangers-about, or if he could only do weather. Perhaps Americans learn talking-to-strangers as part of their basic socialization in a way that the British mostly don't... which then led us to speculate as to whether it would be harder or easier to be British or American and have an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Possibly, we mused, the solution to growing up with ASD in the South would be to learn to speak with a British accent.

So before we left Knoxville I had my first diner breakfast: coffee so weak I could drink it black without risking reflux, scrambled eggs and 'country ham' — which turned out to be much more like the nice, salty bacon we get from our butcher in Oxford than anything else I could compare it with — biscuit (which was good) and gravy (which turned out to be a white sauce, probably thickened with cornflour, and flavoured mostly with pepper and onion as faas I could tell); and I tried some of J's grits, which were quite inoffensive but... well, just quite inoffensive, really (I may be damning with exceedingly faint praise, but it was a bit like having semolina for breakfast).

It was quite a long drive from Knoxville to Chicago, which we relieved by much commenting on things seen from the interstate — things that would in many cases no doubt be somewhere between everyday and utterly banal for a North American audience, but they kept us amused — and trying to photograph them from a fast-moving vehicle, occasionally with some degree of success. Any settlement of more-than-moderate size that we approached or passed through seemed to be surrounded by a veritable forest of ads on long stilts, but we both found that when we tried to photograph this phenomenon it really had somethig to do with how the human eye's attention can be directed and focused: our 'veritable forests' always looked to the camera just like a sparse sprinkling of mostly mundane hoardings, and we just couldn't convey an impression of the sheer density.

A number of these hoardings were advertising Cracker Barrel, at one of which we finally succumbed to lunch — partly on the basis that the advertising of "home cooking" and "family recipes" on an altogether industrial scale was something that we just had to try sooner or later; and partly for sheer cheesiness. It was, surprisingly, OK, and added catfish and turnip greens to our list.

We also couldn't manage between us a photo that clearly showed the incredible density of trucks on the interstates: at more than one point while J was driving I did some quick counts of traffic to find that about half of the vehicles I could see were trucks — which, given the sheer size and weight of them compared with that of the cars, actually meant that you felt quite outnumbered and outgunned. I really wouldn't fancy driving an old Cinquecento or a Smart car on American roads...

But driving turns out to be a good way to grasp the scale of the spaces and the types of physical and human landscape we're passing through. Having been through the mountains the day before, we began to find ourselves in flat, flat, flat landscapes of grain and distant white or red farmbuildings glimpsed across them. Needless to say, we tried with varying degrees of success to photograph these, along with all sorts of roadsigns: apart from our collection of bizarre placenames — and we were really sorry not to get a shot of Romulus, which is presumably where Romulans come from — we were interested to see subtle variations in signage from state to state. In particular, although there are federally-required warnings on federally-approved standardized yellow diamond signs about the possibility of ice on bridges in every state we've passed through, J was able to work out that we'd reached Indiana (having missed the Welcome signs) by the fact that the wording on said signs had changed yet again.

I was also amused to note that we're looking at some of these photos not only in terms of "This will make a great Livejournal entry" but even in terms of "This will make a great Livejournal icon." It's sad, really it is.

jinty's GPS lady got us to and into Chicago without issue, and then started getting confused by the profusion of tall buildings, especially when stationary. "At the end of the road Turn Right... perform a legal U-Turn... No, wait, let me think..." All slightly unnerving, when you're in an unfamiliar city, with no maps, and relying on milady to get it right. But at one point in her confusion I looked up from the roadway to see a fantastic cityscape; and then only moments later we were at asajeffrey's place, where we got another fabulous view of the city at night from their deck.