Final days

Joyce and Joanna

Navy Pier

We have reached the final days of our five week-trip. Today we walked around in Chicago for the last time and had lunch with Joanna. She was so kind to show us some nice places and shops in Chicago. (f.e. I bought a new pair of shoes) After that we took a taxi to our last hotel, in the area of the O’Hare airport. It took us almost an hour to get to that hotel and costed much more than our bustrip from New York to Atlantic City. But we’re glad to just sit and relax now. Tomorrow will be a long day. We’ll be at the airport around 12AM and we board around 7pm.

Homecoming

A little inside joke for those who know the song Homecoming by Kanye West and Chris Martin. We watched the fireworks at Lake Michigan and we visited the Magic Bean you can see in the video.

The story of Stevensville

Two rainbows

On our way from Memphis to Chicago, to return our rental car, we drove across a big thunder storm. We even witnessed a slight tornado almost hit the ground. That was kinda scary, but we did also see some beautiful images. Two rainbows next to each other for example. Look carefully at the picture above.

Dinner

Over a week ago we arrived in Stevensville. That’s a small village next to Lake Michigan. There live Pierre and Greet, friends of Nic’s parents, and their son Pieter-Jan and daughters Stephanie and Anne-Sophie and Stephanie’s boyfriend Yves. They all made us feel very welcome! We had lots of fun by the pool, played golf, went for a swim in the Lake Michigan, went to the Venetian Festival, and lots more. We were happy to have some rest after our trip through the US.

Pierre

Nicolas in the pool

Memphis

It’s been a while since we last posted a blog, but that was mostly due to bad internet connection. I’ll first give you an update about Memphis. We first visited Graceland. It was an adventure. I have to say that I’m only a fan of Elvis’ early rock ‘n roll stuff. I’m not crazy about his whole movie/pop-carreer. When we arrived at Graceland you could immediatly see that he still is one of the biggest icons in the entire world. At one side of the Elvis Presley Boulevard there is Graceland, and at the other side there’s six museums about Elvis. It’s madness. We took the whole tour. Starting with Graceland. We liked it a lot. It had everything he wanted, but it was’t ridiculously huge. I also think it’s pretty cool that he’s burried right next to his house, next to his closest family.

Afterwards we checked out the museums. His movie carreer, cars, army life, planes, clothing,… It was just to much. We had enough of Elvis.

When we came to Memphis, the thing I wanted to see the most was the Sun Records Studio. And it wasn’t a deception at all! They kept the recording studio in his original state. For the people who don’t know what happened there over the years: Sun Records was a label by Sam Phillips. He discovered Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. Amazing. We took a tour which was very much fun. Our guide had a lot of interesting stories and facts to share.

Before we left Memphis we also walked around at Beale Street. That’s sort of the main street there with nice bars, shops and musicians. Just like Nashville the interesting center of town was véry small, but cool.

We visited Nashville and just like Joyce said, it’s a small city. But never the less I think it’s one of the cosiest cities I’ve visited. They call it ‘Music City’ but they don’t exploid that reputation. They didn’t have hundreds of stupid gift shops. Downtown there’s a lot of cool music bars. We also went to the ‘Nashville Music Hall of Fame’. There were a lot of interesting pieces contributed by Paul McCartney, BB King, Johnny Cash, Elvis,…

After visiting Nashville, which only took us one day, we started driving to Memphis. We wanted to sleep somewhere in between Nashville and Memphis, so we chose Jackson. We only knew Jackson from a J. Cash/J. Carter song. There wasn’t a lot to see in Jackson except for the beautiful nature. The deal with smaller places in Tennessee is this: when you stay on the main roads it might look trashy or poor. But when you get of those main roads you’ll find a lot of wonderful houses, lakes, forests,…

So we just arrived in Memphis now and we drove by Graceland. Looks like Elvis wasn’t doing so bad in the shadow of Cash…

The ring (house) of fire

Objects are closer than they appear

Car

Today we continued our way to Nashville. Before getting there we stopped in Hendersonville. That’s the town where Johnny Cash used to live. We first visited the house, or at least the remaining pieces of it. It burned down in 2007. There’s not a lot to see now and we couldn’t get on the property. After that we went to the cemetery of Hendersonville. There we couldn’t immediately find the graves of Johnny Cash and June Carter, so Nic asked a lady if she could help us. Turns out that this lady, called Sonja, knew Johnny for a long time. She met him in the sixties when she was in a supermarket with her son. She told us that Johnny got down on his knee in front of the boy and asked him how he is. She guided us to the graves and told us all about the Carter family and the love story of John and June.

Cash Country, the house Johnny bought for his parents, right across the street from his own house

Remainings of Cash's house

Cash-Carter grave

After that we drove to Nashville. Apparantly the City of Music isn’t that big at all. We planned on going to the ‘centre’ tonight, but a thunderstorm kept us inside a hotel with a guitar-shaped pool. Tomorrow we have all the time we need to explore the music stores. I’m planning on buying ‘It’s not me, it’s you’ by Lily Allen. More about that later!

Tennessee

Dollywood

After some slight frustrations over the last days, today we arrived in Tennessee. The difference is big. Everything’s a lot more easy going. People are very friendly, the nature is wonderful and the weather is very nice. The warmth was getting to us so we wanted to spend a day in a waterpark. We found one in a nice place called Pigeon Forge. It’s called Dollywood. Yes, Dolly as in Dolly Parton. Although it was very crowded, it was fun. After a couple of hours we were tired of half an hour lines for 20 second rides so we got out and looked for a motel. We always wanted to spend one night in a sleazy road motel. And we found the perfect one. 55$ for a room with a private Jacuzzi. The bed is horrible, some lights don’t work, the jacuzzi looks nasty and the bathroom is depressing. Perfect!

Dollywood Map

Tomorrow we’re going to start our Johnny Cash tribute tour. First stop: Hendersonville. Then Nashville and in two days Memphis.

A couple of observations during our stay in the US:

• people drinking Stella Artois with a straw
• servants at the East Coast tend to be a lot unfriendlier than their in-country colleagues
• Americans have potato chips as a side dish with their regular food. Belgians only eat chips as a sort of candy on its own.
• you can not watch Fox News for 10 minutes without them bashing the Obama administration. the best item they had was about the comparison between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barack Obama. “Both of them are charismatic and influencial. Schwarzenegger lead California to a financial crisis. Is Barack Obama heading the same way?”
• we’re still not totally into the tipping system. Do you tip when there are no waiters and you have to get your food at the counter?
• the Euro rocks!

21

I’ve decided I’m not coming back to the States before November the 12th of the year 2010.  Now I can only walk around, shop and go to Disney World (probably only with a supervising adult). Although in Belgium I am able to drink legally for already four years, here I even can not get in a bar (thanks to Ryan and Matt for helping me in NY).

Now I discovered I can’t drive either. In the country where people get their drivers license at the age of 16 I have to be 21 to drive! That’s so unfair!

Being an underaged tourist in the States doesn’t give you a lot of freedom.

Since I’m already complaining, I’ll just continue. We have met a lot of unfriendly people in stores, restaurants, transport buildings, etc. 80% of the people who have to be friendly to customers really seem to hate their job and just don’t care at all. Best example was yesterday. I stood in line for the Hertz stand at the Union Station in DC. When it was my turn, I started talking to the woman and she just looked away and started a conversation with some woman in the crowd she seemed to know. She didn’t care at all that I was standing right in front of her.

Good thing we arrived in Tennessee today. People are a lot more relaxed and a lot more friendly. Plus we went to Dollywood’s Splash Country, a water park in Pigeon Forge. Nic will tell you more about that.

Crazy day

Yesterday we left Atlantic City. This was our plan: rent a car in AC, drive to Philadelphia, explore the city, sleep in the car in Philadelphia, continue our way to Washington DC the next morning, get to a hotel in DC, drop our bags, drop the car and walk around in Washington. But that’s not quite how it went..

We did rent a car and drove to Philadelphia. Our car looked like a ‘Fast and the Furious’-reject car. (for the Belgians: nen Johnnybak) But it really went wrong at the exploring part. When we entered Philly we drove around for a little while, until we found South Street. There we parked the car en stepped into a Starbucks to have some WiFi-access. A woman came to us to warn us that we parked the car on a spot where we would get a parking ticket. Lucky us, we thought. We found another spot, put money in the meter and got back to the Starbucks. But when we got back to the car, there was a parking ticket.

We didn’t want to stay there, so started driving around again. Looking for the Belgian Restaurant/Bar called Zot. When we found that, we parked the car again and paid for a ticket this time. After getting a drink in Zot, we returned to the car and oh YES there was another parking ticket! This time we were only two minutes late. OLNY TWO MINUTES! Doesn’t the police have anything better to do? In Belgium we get at least five to ten minutes extra to get to the car. Two parking tickets in one hour. That’s when we decided we had seen enough of Philadelphia and continued to Washington DC.

The highway from Philly to Washington was easy. No difficulties at all. But getting into the city was something else. At first it didn’t seem that bad that we missed the first exit, but after that mistake we drove around for more than an hour. There were a lot of road works and every time we thought we were close-by, we drove away from the center. But we did get into the centre of Washington eventually. We parked the car (it was already after 10 PM, so too late for the police to give us a parking ticket) and walked around for a while. After deciding to sleep in the car in Washington, we drove to a quiet area and prepared to go to sleep. Only five minutes had passed by when Nic started to complain about how he couldn’t sleep because it was too warm, too bright and mostly because tv producers should get a hotel when they are on a holiday. After ten more minutes of complaining I got really tired of him nagging all time and started to look for a hotel. It was 1.45 AM by then.

After passing many crappy motels we arrived at the Fairfield Inn. It was more expensive, but at least it looked as there wouldn’t be any cockroaches. After checking in (at 2.30 AM) we heard we made the best decision so far. We have free WiFi, free breakfast, a pool, a fitness room, and a free shuttle bus to bring us to the Union Station. (center of Washington) So we decided to stay another night.

We have yet no idea how we will continue our trip.

4th of July

little italy

Our last days in NY passed very fast. We visited East Village, a district that has more of a ’street’ and student feeling. Right next to East Village we checked out China Town and Little Italy. It was fun to see, although the venders of all the little t-shirt shops there were a bit more aggresive in their selling.

strawberry fields

Because we’re both big Beatles fans, we definitely had to pay our tribute to John Lennon by visiting The Dakota Hotel and Strawberry Fields in Central Park.

4th of July

For the 4th of July we went to Tad and Maret, friends of Tim and Margaret. Their house is in Peekskill, a place about an hour north of New York. The trip was a lot of fun. Peekskill is the opposite of New York: quiet and green. Tad and Maret also had a couple of other friends and family over. We enjoyed meeting all of them. We played three card poker, took a dive in the swimming pool, drove a small motorcycle, played croquet and layed in the sun. In the evening we went to see the fireworks which had a very nice finale. After that we played singstar for a couple of hours. It’s only fair to say that Tim Bluto was the singstar of the evening. Eventhough Joyce ‘The Voice’ came close. I’m just glad that nobody beat me on the Blink 182 song. (I lost all other battles though…)

greyhound

We got back to New York where Matt took us out for a last drink. He took us to ‘Bar Centrale’ which is a nice old bar owned by Italians. Kevin Spacey and Fran Drescher go there, but we didn’t get to see them. In the morning we said goodbye to the guys and left for Atlantic City. Everybody warned us for the Greyhound busses. But our trip was pretty OK. You see a wide variety of people on the busses what makes it interesting. After more than two hours we arrived in Atlantic City. We booked a room in the Trump Marina Bay hotel.