Day 10 – Greenville Alabama

Mark awoke yesterday morning and announced that not a drop of alcohol would pass his lips today, his body was a temple (presumably in the classical sense of a semi-ruinous ancient structure that has seen better days), and he was confident that he was going to feel better for it. We checked out of our hotel at 11am and took a taxi to the airport where the car hire place was located. The taxi driver couldn’t seem to decide which lane he wanted to be in on the highway and spent much of his time looking at his phone as he swerved in and out. However a sign in the cab warned us that if we chose to kill him we would be liable to be executed, so we thought it best just to let him get on with it.

As usual nothing was as simple as we’d expected and we couldn’t find the car hire office when we got to the airport. Eventually we came upon it rather by accident and spent a happy half hour filling out forms and finding out we hadn’t ordered what we thought we’d ordered.  It seems that we have booked a medium-sized SUV but the make and model is left to chance, so we stood in the parking garage wondering what was about to appear. Fortunately, although it wasn’t a Jeep, it turned out to be a Nissan Pathfinder rather than a Toyota Yaris. Anyway it was big enough to comfortably accommodate us, our luggage and probably the Band of the Coldstream Guards had they chosen to join us again. 

Mark took first shift on the driving and after a fierce hand to hand struggle with the satnav, which for some reason, as yet unexplained, insists on greeting us with “Good morning Andrew Hagleshaw”, we found our way onto our old friend the I-10. It was nice for me to be able to just sit back and enjoy the view and take a few photos as we drove along over Lake Pontchartrain and the bayous. The Pathfinder is quite fast and comfortable although it struggles to manage more than 25 miles per gallon, however with gas at just over $2 dollars a gallon that’s not a major issue. We trundled happily along listening to Country music  on the radio (mostly involving songs about people whose trucks won’t start and whose best friends are bar stools) from station K99 FM in Biloxi. 

We crossed from Louisiana to Mississippi and then into Alabama (where a sign greeted us with “Welcome to Sweet Home Alabama”) on the I-10 and we then picked up the I-65 just before Mobile. Just inside Alabama we stopped at Grand Bay (which appears to consist solely of a branch of McDonalds) to swap over the driving. Leaving there we swiftly spotted our squashed-armadillo-of-the-day by the side of the highway before passing by places with exotic names like Chickasaw and Satsuma. We kept up a steady pace and arrived in Greenville just before 5. On checking into the hotel we learned that with it being just a small town (pop. approx 8000) it didn’t possess a taxi service and it was 4 miles from the hotel to the centre of town. Fortunately it turned out that there was a place called Wintzell’s Oyster House just a couple of hundred yards away, so we took a stroll down there. You may be surprised to hear that oysters featured on the menu. For a roadside place in the middle of a retail park it was surprisingly pleasant.  After a certain amount of confusion in the ordering “You say tom-ay-to, I say tom-ar-to”; “you say oak-ra, I say ock-ra”, we settled down to fried green tomatoes for me, half a dozen oysters for Mark and a rather delicious platter of seafood each to follow. It’s probably one of the best meals we’ve had so far. In case you are wondering about the beer on the table, it appears I had misunderstood Mark this morning, he was in fact referring to not drinking tomorrow (or maybe the next day)! On the positive side however our alcohol consumption was limited to two American pints (which are 3/4 of a British pint) with the meal. We did buy a six-pack of beer from the local Walmart to take back for a nightcap but as I was just opening the second can of it I happened to notice we’d managed to get the non-alcoholic version! 

The advantage of using the car rather than the bikes is that we can cover a lot more ground and we arrive in much better shape at the end of the journey so have more time to get out and, errr, explore – and today was an excellent example of that!

We are now planning to get to Milledgeville in Georgia which is roughly 260 miles east of here. There’s a place by the same name in New Brunswick, Canada which is 39 hours away according to the satnav. If you don’t hear from us for a day or two we may have gone there by mistake……..