White Castle!

8^th of September

We woke up in Nashville, it was a slow morning and we took out time getting ready to leave. We casually left around midday. The night before, as we made our way home we spotted a White Castle and this was on our list of things to do in the US! So we stopped at White Castle on our way towards the highway. Ofcourse our fascination for White Castle stems from the film Harold and Kumar get the munchies. This is a burger joint with a difference, you get more than one burger per order, so in this case we got 4 burgers with our meal and some crinkle cut fries, these babies hit the spot! So much so that we both ordered more, you can just order a box of 10 or 20 or 30 even! They go down in one bite, I can see why Harold and Kumar went so out of their way for them.

The drive was about 3 hours to Memphis, we stopped at a visitor centre and got ourselves tickets to the Rock & Soul museum and tickets to Graceland.

We arrived in Memphis and it was almost a ghost town, there were barely any people there and barely any shops, we went to the Rock and Soul museum but parked quite a few blocks away and their was not much at all. The Rock & Soul museum was right opposite the Gibson factory.

The Rock & Soul museum was very interesting, it talked about the relationship between rural America and highlighted how big the race divide was in the USA back then. We did the audio tour and listened to some brilliant tunes!

To get back to my point of how there wasn’t much in Memphis, there was just one starbucks that we saw in the entire town, it was opposite the Rock & Soul museum. After we did the museum we were waiting to build up an appetite so we walked around the entire downtown area, and still we saw very little, there was a Walgreens and that was about it. We were building up our appetite for a Man vs Food restaurant that was here, it is called Rendezvous BBQ it is also ranked top 5 BBQ in the country, it is famous for its dry rub ribs, and it seriously was brilliant. The atmosphere was brilliant, very rustic and all the staff wearing old fashioned uniforms. The ribs were different from other ribs, the smokey flavour had penetrated right through the meat, then the dry rub spices contributed brilliant flavour that didn’t overwhelm the taste buds, it was brilliant. The coleslaw that came with the ribs was made with mustard instead of mayonnaise which, in my opinion was a lot better. Im sorry but these pictures do not reflect how good the meal was, they never will.

We got on the motorway and headed towards graceland, where we would be staying in a hotel nearby.

Jack Daniels!

We woke up at the comfort inn, the cleaning lady came in twice while we were sleeping, once at 8am and once again at 9am, and we were still asleep both times! So annoying, we had gained an hour because we had driven through a time zone so she actually came in at 7 and 8am, which makes it worse!

We went off the beaten track to get to Lynchburg; it took us about an hour to get there. This was real deep America, we saw about 2 cars on the roads on the way. There were farmers out and when we drove past people waved to us and we waved back, there was literally two old people sitting on their porch on rocking chairs, the guy with a piece of straw in his mouth!

We arrived at Lynchburg, it is a tiny town! There are only about 300 people living there, they have 1 set of traffic lights, the other set is about 16 miles down the road. Pulling into the Jack Daniels factory was exciting! Its practically the only thing in town, in fact the main store in town is also the Jack Daniels hardware store that he ran during prohibition. Lynchburg is the odd, because its so small they do not qualify as a city so therefore cant qualify to sell alcohol in the state of Tennessee, therefore Lynchburg is a dry town! They can’t drink what they make!

We had a tour guide name David; here is a photo of him.

He was essentially the stereotype of small town America and he had the strongest accent, we had to concentrate hard to understand him and he loved to be in all the photos! The JD factory was amazing, it is steeped in history, all the Jack Daniels in the world comes from this one factory and it all comes from one spring in the mountain that we were able to see.

Jack Daniels doesn’t have an age because they don’t keep track of how old they are, they simply release it when it taste’s ready; every barrel is tasted by the master distiller. I wont fill you in with too much information about it, its something that you have to do for yourself someday.

The closest you can get to taste is in the section where they filter it through the charcoal, they opened up one of the filters so we could have a smell, it was such a powerful smell, one of the most satisfying smells there is, aging whisky.

During prohibition Jack Daniels had to stop and so he set up a general store in the town, its still there and sells all the memorabilia, and it was really extensive! You could get everything from furniture to sweets.

While we were in the town a stray dog took a liking to us and followed us around, eventually we had to leave it, we named her Huckleberry and she followed us all around town and eventually to our car, as we drove off a group of people thought we were abandoning our dog!

On the drive towards Nashville I fell asleep so there isn’t much to tell. We arrived at our hostel, Music City Hostel, it had parking, which was handy for us, and it was a really nice place, made up of 3 bungalows we managed to have a 4-person room to ourselves. We chilled out for about 3 hours and then headed out to town, it was about 8pm by now. We had dinner, I had a pulled pork sandwich and Paolo had a deep fried catfish sandwich on the balcony of the second floor of a bar on Broadway. The neon lined high street was alive with music, we went from bar to bar having drinks of Jack Daniels in every bar and watching the live music, every bar had live musicians, playing classics to their own music, they were all taking requests and were interacting with the audience. Everybody raved about Nashville being an amazing place, which it is for music, but its quite small, the biggest place to go was Broadway and there were only a handful of bars

QOTD: from David the tour guide, take into account his accent and the fact that he is laughing while saying this.

"Yall think they learnt me ta speak like this!?"

Jack Daniels!

We woke up at the comfort inn, the cleaning lady came in twice while we were sleeping, once at 8am and once again at 9am, and we were still asleep both times! So annoying, we had gained an hour because we had driven through a time zone so she actually came in at 7 and 8am, which makes it worse!

We went off the beaten track to get to Lynchburg; it took us about an hour to get there. This was real deep America, we saw about 2 cars on the roads on the way. There were farmers out and when we drove past people waved to us and we waved back, there was literally two old people sitting on their porch on rocking chairs, the guy with a piece of straw in his mouth!

We arrived at Lynchburg, it is a tiny town! There are only about 300 people living there, they have 1 set of traffic lights, the other set is about 16 miles down the road. Pulling into the Jack Daniels factory was exciting! Its practically the only thing in town, in fact the main store in town is also the Jack Daniels hardware store that he ran during prohibition. Lynchburg is the odd, because its so small they do not qualify as a city so therefore cant qualify to sell alcohol in the state of Tennessee, therefore Lynchburg is a dry town! They can’t drink what they make!

We had a tour guide name David; here is a photo of him.

He was essentially the stereotype of small town America and he had the strongest accent, we had to concentrate hard to understand him and he loved to be in all the photos! The JD factory was amazing, it is steeped in history, all the Jack Daniels in the world comes from this one factory and it all comes from one spring in the mountain that we were able to see.

Jack Daniels doesn’t have an age because they don’t keep track of how old they are, they simply release it when it taste’s ready; every barrel is tasted by the master distiller. I wont fill you in with too much information about it, its something that you have to do for yourself someday.

The closest you can get to taste is in the section where they filter it through the charcoal, they opened up one of the filters so we could have a smell, it was such a powerful smell, one of the most satisfying smells there is, aging whisky.

During prohibition Jack Daniels had to stop and so he set up a general store in the town, its still there and sells all the memorabilia, and it was really extensive! You could get everything from furniture to sweets.

While we were in the town a stray dog took a liking to us and followed us around, eventually we had to leave it, we named her Huckleberry and she followed us all around town and eventually to our car, as we drove off a group of people thought we were abandoning our dog!

On the drive towards Nashville I fell asleep so there isn’t much to tell. We arrived at our hostel, Music City Hostel, it had parking, which was handy for us, and it was a really nice place, made up of 3 bungalows we managed to have a 4-person room to ourselves. We chilled out for about 3 hours and then headed out to town, it was about 8pm by now. We had dinner, I had a pulled pork sandwich and Paolo had a deep fried catfish sandwich on the balcony of the second floor of a bar on Broadway. The neon lined high street was alive with music, we went from bar to bar having drinks of Jack Daniels in every bar and watching the live music, every bar had live musicians, playing classics to their own music, they were all taking requests and were interacting with the audience. Everybody raved about Nashville being an amazing place, which it is for music, but its quite small, the biggest place to go was Broadway and there were only a handful of bars

QOTD: from David the tour guide, take into account his accent and the fact that he is laughing while saying this.

"Yall think they learnt me ta speak like this!?"

Coca-Cola, CNN, Man vs Food, ATL! USA!

6th of September

Big day ahead! We left our hotel around 10pm and set off towards Atlanta. It took about 20 minutes to get into the centre and we turned off towards Coca-Cola world. We parked up, the parking was $10 for the whole day so we were just going to leave our car there for the whole day and explore.
Coca-Cola world beckoned! It was a massive complex! A total Mecca! After purchasing our tickets we asked two American girls to take a photo of us infront of the Coca-Cola world sign, to prove we were there, check out the photo those idiots took!

The whole point of the photo was to have the huge massive Coca-Cola sign in it!
Anyways we walked into the main entrance and immediately we were inundated with Coca-Cola branded memorabilia and art, it would pretty much be like this the whole way through. We got an introductory talk from one of the Coca-Cola’s employee’s named Falisha who gave us a brief history and showed us some of the most impressive Coca-Cola artefacts. Like the original soda fountain bowls and vending machines from around the world etc.

We were walked into a movie theatre and shown a movie called ‘the happiness factory’ it was supposed to be what happens inside a vending machine when you put your money in it, it was an extended version of their advert on TV. The full brainwashing experience.

They had a cool selection of exhibits from Coca-Cola art to the history and making of Coca-Cola, my favourite was the history of Coca-Cola and also the Cola tasting room where you could taste different Coca-Cola brands from around the world. My favourite worldwide brand was perhaps the watermelon soda from China. They had one which was supposed to be from England called Kinley’s Lemonade, but I have never heard of it. My overall favourite was actually just the Cherry Cola which was in the originals tasting section, all the Coca-Cola was free.

We got a free limited edition Coca-Cola world bottle as we exited and then we spent about 30minutes in the shop, it was one of the best gift shops, America does gift shops well! Everything you can imagine had a Coca-Cola brand on it! I wanted to buy everything! But instead I just got a Coca-Cola polo.

We then went for a walk around the Olympic park, Atlanta had the Olympic games back in 1996.

At the end of the park was the CNN building, we initially walked in to get some air-conditioning because it was so hot! But where we were in there we noticed that they had a massive food court which was handy because we were also looking for food. We went to Arby’s and got a beef sandwhich, I ordered the beef and blue cheese burger and she miss heard it as the bacon and cheese burger, so that’s what I got stuck with, Paolo had the all American burger, which was basically a whopper but with sliced beef instead of a burger.

The CNN building was a brilliant surprise, we got tickets for the tour of the building after lunch, this was the main CNN building in the world, 60% of all their broadcasting was done from within those walls. We got the tour and managed to watch some live broadcasting and see how the system works, the news rooms etc. they said no pictures but I still took some ☺

We walked around Atlanta for a few more hours, saw the Georgia dome, and also drove up through some really nice area’s in uptown. We then prepared ourselves to take on a Man vs Food challenge! At other Man vs Food places we have been to they have always been the segments before he does an actual challenge, well this time we were going for one of the challenges. If we had called ahead then we could have entered in for the opportunity to win $250 but we didn’t. The place was called Big Pie in the Sky Pizza, and it was incredible! We ordered the 30” pizza, 30 inches! Check out the picture, it was massive! You may think that a pizza this size perhaps skips on quality, but oh you would be wrong! I’m not one to say this lightly but it was much better than dominos pizza, the toppings were delicious the pizza was just mouth watering! To be honest the wait was murder! While we waited for our pizza and everybody else’s around us came, we were beginning to be a bit apprehensive because there were families of 5 or 6 huge Americans coming in and they were only ordering the 25” pizza and leaving some! It smelt so good! Which added to the anticipation.
When the pizza came, I cant over emphasize how big it was! People were staring at us and couldn’t believe that just two of us were going to attempt to eat it.

Check out the look on the people's faces in the backround!

I was completely expecting it to be a struggle to eat, but when it came the smell and the taste helped a handful to make it go down. By the way this was called the Carnivore challenge, it was topped with a pound of ground beef, a pound of pork, a pound of pepperoni, a pound of beef sausage and obviously cheese! This was truly an epic moment in my life! I wish I lived around the corner from this place. After we left I was feeling great! I ran around the car a couple of times, only because Paolo was having problems moving, perhaps there is something wrong with me, I cried a little as we pulled out with our car, I may never return…

We decided that instead of finding a place to stay immediately we might as well save the time tomorrow and do the majority of the driving to Lynchburg that night, if we were in a hotel we would only be spending this time watching TV anyways. I can conclude that over the 1100 miles or so that we have done so far that Americans in general are bad drivers and you can multiply that by 10 at night!

After about 2 hours of driving we ended up pulling into a comfort inn about an hour from Lynchburg, Paolo managed to bargain down the price of the room by 20%! We had a long day and a lot of food so we dropped off to sleep.

Travel day.

The morning of 5th of September, we woke up in different places and I had to let Paolo in at 9am. This was the day that we were leaving North Carolina! We had an amazing experience and we owe it all to my friend Lauren! The 3 days thats we were there we did everything that we dreamed of at an American College! Tailgating, College Football game, Frat parties! It was brilliant!

Today was going to be our longest drive yet, 6 hours to Atlanta. We said our goodbyes to Lauren and headed onto the open road about 12 midday. For lunch we stopped at Wendy's and we had our fill of an another American burger chain.

We filled up with petrol, I've been making a point to stick to buying it from BP the whole way along! The time was burnt up by playing games like slogan games and quotes games, for example guess the brand and its slogan, guess the film by the catch phrase etc.

As we passed out of North Carolina and into South Carolina, we spotted a factory outlet area, we stopped and went shopping! Adidas, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Banana Republic etc. We got t-shirts from Banana Republic for $5 each and I got a San Jose Earthquakes top for $14! I also got some new kicks! Also I saw this car.

We stopped and parked up for the night just outside Atlanta at a Microtel motel and had dinner close by at a Hong Kong buffet. We then just chilled out for the rest of the night, itching with anticipation for Coca-Cola world the day after!

A short post, but it was just a travel day.

North Carolina, a round up! I love College!

Go Deacs! (3 days of posts)

I am a bit behind on the posts so I am doing a post of the whole of our North Carolina adventure. We begin on the 2^nd of September, Thursday. We had been catching up on some sleep and had an epic 11 hours. We departed from our Quality Inn motel before setting off on our long journey to Winston Salem. We quickly headed into Richmond to try meet up with my friend Tyler for lunch but he was ill so we just headed on to North Carolina.

The time was around 1pm and we were beginning to feel the hunger bug so we decided that we should drive until we see a proper truck stop, not one with major brands like Subway or Burger King. It wasn’t until about 2pm before we managed to find one en-route that looked like a genuine homegrown place.

We went in and it was quiet except for a few locals, it was a wooded cabin style building and all the locals in there were all massive, easily 3 or 4 times the size of me, and they were all like that! We took to looking at the menu keeping our eye’s down, we didn’t want to get eaten. Paolo had a turkey and bacon Panini while I had a country fried steak swimming in gravy. Paolo’s was a typical Panini but mine was a deep fried steak drowning in a thick pasty sickly looking liquid they call gravy, it wasn’t great, I felt like I deserved a heart attack after eating it.

We made our way across the Virginia/North Carolina border and just after we got pulled over again! Paolo speeding again! Luckily we managed to talk our way out of this ticket as well but so far Paolo has a 2-0 lead over me in terms of getting pulled over, he can keep that lead. This cop wouldn’t let us take a picture of his car though; he said we might put it onto Youtube.

We got to Winston Salem at about 4:30 but struggled to find Wake Forest University for about an hour, the city doesn’t make much sense and the university isn’t on their maps and nobody seemed to know where it was. We got there at 5:30 and Lauren was waiting for us to take us to the Demon Deacons American football came, their college team was playing. Lauren is my good friend whom I met at GYLC 4 years ago, and then she has visited me twice in London since then, also spending a whole semester there last year, so we have had a bunch of good times back home, now it was her chance to show off America to me!

She said we had to wear a shirt to the game though, so we had to quickly get changed, apparently over here people wear shirts and ties to the football games. We went for the full American experience, we went ‘tailgating’ which is something that they do before the game, everybody pulls up in their pick up trucks and blasts music and drinks from kegs in the parking lot of the football stadium. It was brilliant! We had red cups and standing around with a massive group of students, all the different frats were out representing themselves and people were playing drinking games and socialising. British universities should be like this.

The game was going to start so we headed into the 30,000-seater stadium, it was an incredible atmosphere, and practically the entire college was out! Cheerleaders, mascots and chants! It was brilliant, everybody seemed to know each other and everybody knew the chants. The Daemon Deacons (Deacs) were playing the Presbyterians; they are in the top division of the North Carolina league. Deacs were expecting an easy win. The Deacs went ahead by 21 in the first quarter then by half time it was 28-7, suddenly half the people left, its apparently normal behaviour to leave at half time, especially if your team is winning because it’s boring, we stayed to watch the half time performance by the marching band then also left after the 3^rd quarter, we grabbed a dominoes pizza from inside the stadium for dinner.

As for the actual game of American football, it’s extremely boring! They stop every other minute and change the teams, so many technicalities and faults and stops, its not what I would call entertaining, It’s the first game of American football I’ve ever watched and I’m very surprised that there was ever even an argument as to which type of football is best, apart from the quarterback I cant see where there is any skill requirement, unless you count catching as a skill.

We headed back to Lauren’s sorority apartments; Lauren was very tired so we were taking this night off, which was good enough for Paolo and me because we got to watch Knocked Up!

September 3^rd, College Campus, Frat party, beer pong!

Lauren gave us the full campus tour, it’s a beautiful campus with huge buildings, the majority of the students live on campus, and it’s even bigger when you consider that it only has about 4500 students! The tour reminded Paolo of Tom Green’s tour in the film Road Trip. The idea for breakfast was to hit up their cafeteria called ‘The Pit’ full American college style, it was an incredible canteen compared to what I had on offer back at Kings, there were several different section you could go to for meal and it was all you can eat yet everything was made for you in front of you, so you could get a bagel, a sub, pizza, kebabs, traditional breakfast’s and huge selections of salads and desserts! We just went for standard breakfast stuff, eggs and bacon.

Lauren had to get some stuff from Wal-Mart and we jumped at the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart! It was huge and had everything you could possible want, but I prefer Tesco’s, Wal-Mart did sell guns though.

For Lunch we hit up a local hot spot for college students, it was called Putter’s, a golf themed restaurant, famous for their chicken tenders, which were brilliant!

We headed back to the apartment and spent the rest of the afternoon planning and organising the rest of our trip, and catching up on correspondents.

For dinner we went to a Japanese restaurant that Lauren used to work at called Sakura with Lauren’s roommate Diane and her boyfriend Chris.

After dinner Chris told us that we need to try this drink called Four Loco, it was this hugely hyped up drink, it came in a litre sized can and in multiple flavours, it’s a combination of some kind of spirit with energy drink although it only cost $2.44 and was 12%, everybody was hyping about this drink and how it gets people messed up, but it just tasted like the Mojito’s you get in Oceana, it tasted fine and once again I think its something which came down to the fact that we are more used to drinking coming from England. We had the drinks around Lauren’s friends place, there people were getting ready to go to one of two frat parties, one of them was called Tour De Franzia, Franzia being a cheap wine in a bag. The second one was a Eurotrash party, which is why people were dressing up with European themes.

We played a game of Kings and then made our way over to our first frat party. The Tour De Franzia! It was like being dropped into a movie set, there was an insane amount of people in a small house, people walking around with massive bags of wine getting people to drink it, there was a keg in one corner that people were drinking from. We settled around the beer pong table, once a game was over a lad called Alex asked me if I wanted to join him in a game so I accepted. We played the people who won the previous game. Now let me tell you, when I say that this was an epic game, you have no idea! If it were in a film you would never believe it, but it was tense! I managed to sink a double redemption, that’s where they sunk our last cup and I had to sink all of their last cups in a row, they only had two left and I sunk both of them with sick style! We both had to rerack because I had redeemed us, we reracked to 3 cups and it went down to the final cup 3 times and all 3 times I managed to redeem us, although eventually we did loose, but it was incredible!

We had managed to build quite a group of people watching. Paolo and Lauren had left the party before my beer pong game had finished so I was there by myself but I was working the crowd well after my epic game of beer pong and I was having a blast! Suddenly I heard someone shout my name, I turned around and it was my friend Emily whom I had met 4 years ago also at GYLC, I couldn’t believe it! I had no idea she was at this university! Well I was quite lost and didn’t know where I was at this party so she looked after me and we moved onto the next frat party, Eurotrash at Sigma Nu! The Frat’s here have designated driver to take you to all to and from the parties, which was a brilliant idea. Although in order to not draw attention from the police they don’t let you leave until you get your ride so it was a crazy mass of confusion trying to get out of the first frat party, people were getting angry at the guys on the door, luckily Emily seem to know them and they let us straight out.

Now this second frat party was messy, the floors were sticky; it was hot and humid in there, so many people! But once again, so much fun! I met a couple German and French guys whom I had met earlier and seeing as it was a Eurotrash party it was appropriate that we were all European so people were loving the fact. Everybody you meet at these frat parties, if they didn’t recognise you then they would introduce themselves, it was incredibly social and I met a ton of new people, pretty much all of whom I’d forgotten their names.

September 4^th Frisbee house party! Dan’s Birthday!

We got up relatively early, around 10pm (considering I didn’t get home till about 4am) and Lauren, Paolo, Diane, Chris and I made our way to the local hangover food restaurant. It was a good casual meal that definitely helped in recovery, I had one of the best chicken soups I’ve ever had.

The original plan was to then make our way to the river to go floating and drinking on tubes, but none of us were feeling up to it. So we headed back to the apartment, it was hot! These past few days had been above 100 Fahrenheit, which is above the 30c’s. So I spent the afternoon sleeping, I needed it, I was so tired, I’m a beer pong athlete and I need my rest!

We went for dinner at the restaurant they have on campus called Shorty’s, we had dinner with Lauren and 4 of her guy friends. They were a hilarious bunch, we fitted right in, quotes left and right and we all shared the same sense of humour and had the same taste in movies and comedy, it was brilliant. Although dinner took 3 hours! We had a terrible waiter and the food just took ages to come out, even our check took 30 minutes to arrive! So we asked if we still had to tip and they said that they wouldn’t because service was so bad, but it was the first time they had not tipped. It was so bad that we all got free meals for our next visit, although me and Paolo would not be using them so we gave them to Lauren.

The next stop was another party! It was at the Frisbee house, it was a house where people who used to play Frisbee lived! I couldn’t believe there was a house for something so specific, but there was. It was a guy called Dan’s birthday and once again, it’s hard to put into words how much fun it was! But it was brilliant! The lads from dinner were there and they had made an ice statue/ice drinks luge for Dan to drink from; it was in the shape of a woman’s body, so much effort! But that’s America for you; they love to go all out!

There once again we drank from a keg and played beer pong, this time however we played a huge game of 21-cup beer pong which was insane! So much going on and it was constant firing of beer pong balls.

The night was a long night filled with socialising and different events. At one point I was in a room with a guy called JP playing guitar then at another time I was dancing to Michael Jackson with some people on the porch! At around midnight something ridiculous happened, the waiter we had at dinner turned up at the party! He wasn’t even a student and nobody could believe he was here, apparently he had been talking to some people at the restaurant and they had invited him to the party after work! The lads we had dinner with flipped out; they couldn’t believe that the one time they didn’t tip, the guy turns up at their party! It was very awkward! We tried to avoid him at all costs just because it was so embarrassing, firstly that we didn’t want to get into a conversation about how bad he was at his job and also to avoid the whole tipping thing.

By about 4am there was about 12 of us sitting in a room listening to a couple of the people playing guitar and drums, it was a good chilled out end to the night, (Paolo somewhere else by now and I was once again on my own) however in the room next door as I was leaving there was some heavy dub step being played and people dancing like raving loony’s! So much fun! I walked home with a couple of the girls from Laurens frat because they lived in the same building. I then crashed out around 5am.

QOTD:

Chris, when talking about hooters,

“Ye the food sucks but the concept’s great!”

Richmond sucks!

1^st of September.

We woke up tired! Jessica’s room faces the rising sun and her cuitains don’t work so its hard to sleep in. We were tired from the late night before. We packed our stuff up and moved on to the car and looked out for somewhere to have brunch at a place called Booeymongers, it’s a sandwhich and wrap place. We opted for something healthy, I got a grilled chicken salad wrap and Paolo got a bacon, turkey and salami grilled cheese baguette.

While driving on our way back we saw a Safeway’s and decided to stop for a bit of nostalgia (Safeway’s closed down ages ago back in England) and also for some travel supplies.

It was around 12 now and we took Jessica back to American U and had an emotional goodbye before getting back on the road. I was driving this section to Richmond. We stopped around Fredriksberg at a rest area that gave us maps and coupons for motels to stay at. We drove through Richmond, nothing much of interest there. We literally just drove through and I hadn’t heard from my friend Tyler who lives there so we drove past and into Chester where we stopped and checked into a Quality Inn for the night. It was only about 5pm but thought we would give it a rest because Thursday was going to be a big drive day and we didn’t need to get there early. The Motel had a gym and a swimming pool so we worked out for an hour and a half at one of the worst gyms I’ve ever been to.

The Quality Inn was located across the road from a Hooters, so we made the hard decision to go there for dinner. We had high expectations, and as always with high expectations, you build yourself up to be disappointed. It wasn’t as good as they make it out in the movies, its actually quite sad and tacky. A load of old lonely men perving on young girls is essentially the gist of it, they had good hot wings though. We had their essentials platter which was shrimp, boneless chicken wings and chicken wings, we then had another platter of just boneless chicken wings then another platter of their hottest 911 chicken wings. This Hooters really was in the middle of nowhere along the side of the highway so we will probably try it in a more popular place, it might be better. We crossed the road and went to bed, watched the travel channel for a few hours which was having a Man vs Food marathon (ofcourse) before falling asleep. An pretty uneventful day but still having fun in the big ole USofA!

Miles so far: 800 miles.

Quote of the Day:

Paolo: ‘Wow, Richmond sucks!’

A hell of a season man

31st Aug:

Our last day of August, we have already taken in a number of world famous locations in just a matter of a week, and we are loving every moment of it!
Today was quite a chilled out day, we woke up early as Jessica had to go to class at 8:30am, so we left American U and headed out in our car today instead of using the Metro.
We were on the search for Jessie’s Crab shack (or as I call it ‘Jessie got crabs!’) it was featured on Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Food Porn’ TV show. It was just south of the Franklin D Roosevelt memorial, right on the river. The time was around 10am and it was a bit quite, it turns out that in the morning it is a fish market and only after lunch does the food really get going, Paolo decided that it was a bit early to get messy with crab and I agreed it was a good point so we decided to give it a miss. I called my friend Nancy (who I won the Lottery with in Hong Kong) and arranged to meet up.
Nancy and her boyfriend Alex (who Im also friends with from Hong Kong, he almost killed me by driving on the wrong side of the road last time we met) both attend Georgetown Univeristy, its slightly west of the Capitol Mall. We met up with them at their Uni and we got the full tour, its an old university steeped in history, if anything happens to congress then it is the location for emergency congress which I think is quite a cool fact. Georgetown is big on their basketball but have only won one American football game in the past 2 years.

We then asked them if they wanted to join us for dinner, we wanted to visit a place that was featured on Anthony Bordain’s TV show and also on Man vs Food, its called Ben’s Chilli Bowl. Everybody we talked to in Washington D.C. told us we should check it out. Its in an old part of town, and its one the flashiest coloured buildings, we walked in and it looked very much like an old time diner, on the wall was a sign saying the only people allowed to eat for free there was Bill Cosby and the Obama family, this a place that Obama came to eat just after taking office. We ordered ‘Ben’s Half Smoked’ their famous dish, we didn’t realise that it was a hotdog covered in chilli and also a bowl of chips covered in cheese and chilli, these were our first hotdogs in America! Check them out.

We dropped Nancy and Alex back at Georgetown, it was brilliant to see them again. We then headed over to the Pentagon City mall, over near the Pentagon, I semi remembered the route from when I went there 4 years ago. It was quite a disappointment, I’m not sure why people keep raving about malls in America, so far we haven’t seen any real reason to spend much time there, the shops are generic. So after only an hour wandering around we headed back to American U.
We met up with Jessica and caught up about our day but she had to go to an residence assistant meeting for an hour so left us in the common room where we met a group of the freshman who just started from high school. There was a bit of drama at the halls, police cars and an ambulance turned up and there was commotion downstairs and it turned out that somebody on the floor below had attempted suicide. Reminds me of Van Wilder: Party Liason where he talks someone out of jumping off the building.

Jessica came back and we headed off to ‘pre-game’ at her friends house, there we met Bodal and Tomas and we played NBA 2010 on Xbox for drinks (similar to how we play Pro or Fifa for drinks), these lads were hilarious, we did the whole ‘drinking from red solo cups‘ experience before making our way into central D.C.
While there we had more to drink and we taught everybody how to dance.
I met some English lads there and had a cool chat about living in America, they studied at Kings like me and had been living in D.C. for 7 years.
The clubbing still hasn’t been able to measure up to British standards, I think its because they aren’t as used to it as we are in Europe.

Quote of the day: (on our way to Ben;s)
Alex: “Ben’s Chilli Bowl will take a year off your life, buts its totally worth it”