America's dustpan?

A depressing feature in today's New York Times about Treece, Kansas and Picher, Oklahoma: two towns about to be wiped off the map because of an environmental calamity. A century after decades of rampant mining first began in the area, the residents have been bought out, the town hall boarded up and the water tower sold at auction for scrap metal. A church sold at auction for $50, its pews destined to become firewood.

One irritating aspect of the article is that despite the local people expressing their affection for their hometown and their deep regret for having to move, all their articulate words are nearly lost amid patronising descriptions of their K-mart clothes, their physical features picked over for any defects. It seems as far as the writer is concerned, these are rubes and rednecks.

The writer also trots out the usual tired descriptions of Kansas being flat and featureless. He says it's literally flat as a pancake, citing 'researchers' who compared the state's topography to something off IHOP's breakfast menu. I was reminded of the surveyors who determined in 1918 that the geographical centre of the lower 48 was located near Lebanon, Kansas after balancing a cardboard cutout map of the US atop a tack.

I was also perturbed to hear an area 60 miles east of where I had grown up be described as a 'dustbowl' and a 'dustpan'? Really? A desert like the Bonneville Flats? I beg to differ. The area sees 40 inches of rain a year (more than many parts of England) and Treece is less than 10 miles from the western fringes of the Ozark mountain plateau. Had the writer not driven the same road from Kansas City as I have many a time, one that goes through thick forests, past numerous lakes and verdant wildlife refuges, not to mention the lovely Victorian town of Fort Scott?

So here is some proof that Kansas is not as flat, featureless, dry or despondent as the big city journalists like to portray.

Beat the fees and cut the red tape for your US trip...but be quick!

For years, most tourists from Europe arriving in the USA have been welcomed with a minimum of fuss and paperwork. Under a 'visa waiver' programme, the only document to complete has been a green slip of paper which was done midflight.

These days, on arriving at the airport for your American flight, you'll be asked for your ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorisation) reference number. All air travellers are expected to register online well before their trip.

If you have any inclination of 'crossing the pond' in the next year or two, register immediately because starting on 8 September the form will cost you $14.

Although the form asks for details of your travel plans and a US contact address (your first night's accommodation), you can leave this section blank and complete it once you have a concrete itinerary.

For more information about how the system works and how to avoid the scam merchants lurking out there, I found a concise guide here.

So take my tip, fill it out now even if you're not sure you'll be making the trip!

Philadelphia - more than cream cheese!

I was shocked, nay, shaken to the very core of my being, on finding out that Philadelphia is NOT the home of that famous cream cheese. Even the Spaniards call it Queso Filadelfia, but the name was chosen because the people of Philadelphia were apparently known at the time for their love of fine food. Next you'll be telling me Betsy Ross never touched a thread and needle in her life.

Once I recovered from the news, we enjoyed a long layover in the city en route to Manchester at the end of our Dixie road trip. Philadelphia was as sunny as Atlanta, but the temperature was closer to 45 degrees than 65.

We met up with our good friend Matt who kindly took the afternoon off to schlep us around downtown. In only a few hours we managed to see plenty and I was pleased with my photos.

We went past the Liberty Bell, which is housed inside this building...

...saw Independence Hall and other historic buildings...

...walked through Benjamin Franklin's house...

...or at least the steel girders which marked its outline...

...and saw what I think is the country's oldest post office.

Warming up with a pint in an old tavern (the Society Hill Hotel), we felt like we were back home in jollie olde England already.

We'll have to go back for a closer look because Philadelphia felt like our kind of town - colourful, quirky and full of character.

And characters - I've never seen such an assortment of pinch-nosed folks, with long faces and screwed-up mouths like the townspeople of Sleepy Hollow. Our pal Matt excluded, of course!

So...which way to the aiport, we've got a flight to catch!

Atlanta - not that peachy

As a son of Kansas, I have endured many a jibe about that cursed brat Dorothy and her little dog too.

Kansans will forever be linked in the public imagination with a medicated Judy Garland, her pigtails and a picnic basket in The Wizard of Oz. In the film, Kansas is presented as an unhappy, dusty place plagued by tornadoes. After years of repeats on television, this notion that Kansas is brown and boring has become entrenched in the world’s collective psyche.

It's a bit like thinking that Atlanta is still smouldering after being razed to the ground in Gone With the Wind. It turned out Atlanta was indeed suffering damage during our visit in March 2008 - from a twister, of all things!

The night before, while we were tucked up in an Interstate motel a few miles down the road, an F2 tornado tore right through Atlanta's downtown. Driving into the city the next afternoon we noticed several skyscrapers had windows blown out and entire streets were roped off. Yes, it had been the night the lights went out in Georgia.

Only in Atlanta would a tornado cause $100 million of civic improvements. I've rarely seen a city so devoid of character. It's a new city built entirely for driving on a vast scale (the average resident drives 35 miles a day, the longest distance of any American). Four million people live in largely segregated enclaves, linked only by a dense network of roads invariably with the word 'Peachtree' in their name.

Its best-known sites are the headquarters of Coca-Cola and CNN, which gives you an idea of the entrenched commercialism and blandness you can expect on a vist. Just today, The Independent remarked that one reason Chicago may have been unsuccessful in its 2016 Olympics bid is because of the 'catastrophic' choice of picking Atlanta as the 1996 host. In the centenary year of the modern Olympics, Atlanta hosted 'a garish commercial bazaar'.

Unsurprisingly we left Atlanta for the tail end of our Dixie roadtrip, giving it only one full day before flying back home. Luckily, we found a quirky hotel in a unique neighbourhood, The Highland Inn in 'the Poncey Highlands' (Ponce de Leon and Highland being the intersecting streets).

After staying in so many soulless motels near Interstate exits, it was quite a change to find this old stone building in a funky neighbourhood. For the first time in a long while we left the car behind in order walk to the shops and nightlife spots. Around us was a fun neighbourhood with a mix of independent shops, interesting eateries, great taverns and even an all night 1920s diner.

A word of warning: the hotel's own description as 'the only European-style boutique hotel in Atlanta' is off the mark. Boutique in Europe means opulent style and trendy design. The Highland is more like an old-fashioned European guesthouse: a bit tired, but in a wonderful location and terrific value.

After getting a coffee and browsing a huge used bookstore we headed back to the hotel as it began spitting rain. A police car drove past, its siren screeching. The rain started to come down in buckets and when I turned on the TV the local stations were abuzz with storm warnings.

The radar indicated rotation and baseball-sized hail inside the storm clouds. Outside the hotel the rain was coming down in sheets. The TV cameras showed a fierce black cloud scraping the ground, bearing on downtown again...and us. Now, one tornado is bad luck, but to have two in a row sounds like Kansas!

Right as we were ready to drag the mattress into the bathroom to make ourselves a bunker, the rain stopped as if a switch had been thrown. Was this the calm before the storm? No, because according to an eyewitness on the TV the cloud had lifted up and dissipated.

Anyone else hungry after all this drama? Literally next door to the hotel was a great restaurant, Cafe di Sol. The food was Mediterranean style - to start we shared hummus which came strips of toasted pita bread and a small salad of cold green beans, peeled cucumber and olives in a chili dressing. Next, Christian had crab cakes on linguine with green beans which he struggled to finish, while I had mushroom ravioli with grilled asparagus. This wasn't quite as filling as Christian's main, so I followed up with vanilla pannacotta topped with fruit. With another beer and some water it came to $70 including the tip. One of the best meals of the trip!

The other highlight of our visit was the High Museum of Art (named after the High family, who had nothing to do with drugs as far as I know). A huge complex with new extensions built by Renzo Piano, I'd to ask Mr Piano why he thought all-white buildings surrounded by white pavements would be a good idea in the American South. I felt snowblind by the time we walked in.

At $18 a pop, the museum is expensive (practically all of Britain's museums are free) and as the admission granted us access to everything, so we saw everything. Thanks to its links with the Louvre, this included some of Empress Josephine's personal art collection plus some of the oldest pottery and tablets I have ever seen (we're talking Sumerian writing around 7000 years old). They also had a nice line going in Egyptian jewellery, Greek pots, Roman statues and ancient bronze figurines. A small but potent assortment.

The painting collection wasn't as impressive: a few Italian nativities (fat babies and serene Mother Marys), one English portrait by Lely and lots of French rubbish. The Renoirs were poor, the Monets only OK and the rest of their countrymen couldn't paint for toffees. There were hardly any German or Dutch paintings, aside from a low-rent Cranach, and we were disappointed there seemed to be no Spanish artists on view.

Moving on to the American art of the 1700s and 1800s, everything was either a dull potrait, a sentimental landscape or a sickly genre scene. Furniture of the period bulked out the galleries, trying to hide how few paintings they had.

I enjoyed the Art Deco design section with clocks, radios, chairs and even an clothes iron that gleamed with sophistication.

The 'outsider' folk art by contrast was colourful, eccentric, even a bit rude. Similar to what the big city art dealer was looking for in Junebug (great film).

Next, the contemporary crap. This amounted to huge rooms filled with wooden blocks and rubbish photos on a giant scale (apparently a snapshot of your child's bedroom becomes art when the print is 8-feet tall).

Far more interesting were the 'street' photos from the 1960s and 1970s - tattooed bikers, 'womens lib' equal rights marchers and carnival midway strippers. I was reminded of Weegee and his candid shots of sordid city life.

It seems a seedy note to end the holiday on, but it was time to fly back home. After all the miles we had put on the car, our abiding memories were of beautiful places, lovely towns, gorgeous beaches, historic landmarks and green scenery dappled in spring sunshine. And barbecue!

Stay tuned for some photos from our long layover in Philadelpia, though I may not have time before we jet off to Greece tomorrow!

Backwoods Georgia 2

It's nearing time for me to wrap up the Dixie roadtrip, especially since our next big holiday is only a few days away (sunny Greece, here we come).

The cherry blossom capital of the world beckoned to us from our Interstate exit motel...Macon! The city has planted 350,000 Japanese cherry trees which bloom around late March each year. That's over NINETY times more trees than America's more famous cherry tree blossom festival city, Washington DC.

Macon sits at the junction of two Interstates and judging by the billboards advertising the handiwork of Asian ladies, it must be a truckers' paradise. Massage parlour capital of the world, more like! We, er, pulled off at the downtown exit and were amazed at the panorama: a tall hill, its slopes covered with the monuments of a vast cemetery and its heights crowned with grand houses, while the stately buildings of a university campus and numerous church steeples also caught our eye.

Downtown Macon promised so much from a distance, but at street level was in a sad state. Walking around the boarded-up shopfronts, derelict buildings and empty streets was like stepping onto the set of I Am Legend.

The only places open were this florist...

...plus a cafe, an army surplus store (which was going out of business) and a barbershop. Every so often we spotted a tramp keeled over on a bench, otherwise the streets were devoid of human life.

What was most shocking was to realise that despite the desolation, at one point this was a beautiful city. Nothing has changed except that the shoppers and residents have fled to the suburbs. All it would take to bring life back to the downtown would be some apartments, a nightlife district and several shops to attract Interstate travellers and jaded Atlanta socialites wanting a change in scenery.

Ignorning the devastation, we were bowled over by the lovely old buildings.

Since it appears many buildings have been left to rot since the 1950s and 60s, there were vintage signs at every turn as well.

But hey, how about those famous cherry blossoms??

Hmmm, not quite what we expected...

Now this is more like it!

To be fair, we were a week or two early for the cherry blossom festival and had to content ourselves with this small preview.

On our way out of Macon, we passed acres of parking lots and miles of strip miles all packed bumper to bumper with shoppers.

We headed back north a few miles to the village of Juliette, a one-horse town that draws busloads of tourists wanting to dine at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Years ago they filmed Fried Green Tomatoes here and it's still packing in visitors.

The tour operators have got it made. The cafe can only seat 40 or so people which means it fills up with a single busload of tourists. That leaves the other busloads ample time to browse the shops. The town's old bank, old general store and many of its former homes are now gift shops - a crass reversal of what we had just seen in Macon.

I wasn't expecting much from the food, which took an age to reach the table, but it turned out to be worth the wait. Christian had a fried green tomato sandwich and I had the shredded barbecue pork with a side of what turned out to be the best onion rings of the trip.

It tooks us 10 minutes to browse the shops. You'd have to be desperate to spin it out a whole hour, though I suppose that is exactly what the owners are counting on. After 15 minutes you realise that if you don't start spending money to pass the time you will collapse into a bored, hungry heap.

Next stop...back to Atlanta, for the last couple days of the trip. Check back next time and find out why (despite the two tornados and Empress Josephine's art collection) we left thinking it's America's most boring big city.

Backwoods Alabama & Georgia

The first thing that struck me about the country roads of Alabama and Georgia is that there are very few straight lines or direct routes. It's not as though the terrain is difficult, so perhaps the highways are following old trading routes. Whatever the reason, it means a slower pace and a better chance to appreciate the countryside.

Pulling off Interstate 10 just after crossing the river delta, we headed north on one of these meandering country roads. Near the shores of the Alabama River we found the reconstruction of old Fort Mims, site of an infamous massacre.

With the US invaded by British troops during the War of 1812 and Native Americans being armed by the Spaniards based in Pensacola, settlers in what was then called the Mississippi Territory were nervous. A plantation owner named Samuel Mims built a stockade on his property here, the walls of which have been rebuilt to enclose the 1-acre site.

At least 550 white settlers, territorial army volunteers, slaves and friendly Native Americans (many of them mixed race) were camped here when 700 Red Stick Creeks attacked on 30 August 1813. Nearly everyone sheltering inside was slaughtered. The Americans responded ruthlessly and the ensuing Creek War saw most of the local tribes subjugated; within a generation they were deported to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.

Leaving behind Fort Mims, we drove through tiny villages with names like Chrysler, Uriah and Mergargel before reaching the courthouse square of Monroeville. A prosperous town and the county seat, Monroeville was the childhood home of Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Monroeville is the 'Maycomb' of To Kill A Mockingbird and its courthouse served as the setting for Tom Robinson's trial.

The courthouse has a small museum for visitors, but it was closed for the day by the time we arrived. Apparently many of the houses where Harper Lee based the book are long gone and there didn't seem to be the opportunity to stroll the streets as Scout and Dill would have done.

Still, it's a beautiful small town and also has the distinction of being the birthplace of the Fruitcake Lady! The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering down more back roads, taking junctions almost at random, which took us through pine forests and past numerous shacks and countryside churches.

At last we pitched up at our motel for the night on Interstate 65 just south of the Alabama state capital, Montgomery, and made the mistake of attempting a night out there.

First, we had to endure several miles of horrific construction along the Interstate highway (narrow lanes, rough roads, thousands of traffic cones, etc). After pulling off into downtown Montgomery, we were aghast. The entire heart of the city was lifeless. Although the roads were ablaze with streetlamps, the tower blocks were dark and silent. The streets were empty of traffic and there wasn't a single eatery, tavern or even a convenience store. We drove blocks and blocks down what is probably a busy commuter route by day, but at night the streetlamps were wasting their electricity.

It was miles before we found somewhere open to eat, a placed literally called Country Bumpkin BBQ or something similar. We got a slightly funny look from the hostess, who perhaps wasn't used to people who could look down and see their own shoes. The meal was not something we'd want to repeat anytime soon. The sauces on offer were watery and tangy, the potatoes tasted like they came out of a tin and the pork was tough, like Class D circus meat.

The next morning we vowed to give Montgomery a wide berth and in circling the city passed through an interesting town called Wetumpka. Sitting in a scooped-out bowl on a hillside above the Coosa River, the town is inside an 80-milion-year-old meteor crater. It is so eroded though it would take a geologist to detect this, which didn't happen until 2002. All the same, it's a lovely town with a quirky street pattern and many old buildings, although little of it can be appreciated in the movie Big Fish which was filmed here.

By now it was raining, so no photos unfortunately of either Wetumpka or our next stop, Auburn. Famous for its university, we circled the campus a couple of times looking in vain for its art gallery. Unlike my alma mater, the University of Kansas, there was no sign of a visitors centre, gateway or campus map. After checking the address in the phone book, it turns out the university gallery was miles away on the main highway.

During our visit they had on display many sumptuous Audubon prints, books and original etched tin plates from his Birds of America, samples of Alabama pottery, a number of African masks and photos taken of iron grillwork in Mobile cemeteries.

The core of the collection is an assortment of American paintings sponsored by public tax dollars just after World War II. Nicknamed 'the cultural Marshall Plan' the State Department's idea was to champion contemporary American artists and for the collection to tour the world, promoting the country's cultural achievements.

But when certain politicians complained that some of the work was 'un-American' for being too abstract and that some of the artists were 'left-wing', the public outcry saw the art collection condemned and put up for sale. The arts faculty at Auburn University dug into their own pockets and bought three dozen of the canvasses for just over $1000. Today it must be worth millions, with Georgia O'Keefe being one of the most famous names. Unfortunately, the gallery does not seem to have the space or inclination to display the entire collection at once, but the museum was worth seeking out and admission was free.

Time now to cross over into Georgia. It was getting near the time to head back to Atlanta, but first we wanted to see Macon which is why we were going to stay the night in the middle, in a podunk town called Forsyth.

The sun was back out and it was a pleasant drive through more pine forests, past even more shacks...

...and churches...

...through county seats with their courthouses...

...and along more red dirt roads. Check in again soon for the cherry blossom capital of the world, some fried green tomatoes and the most boring big city in America (I know that doesn't sound too exciting, but I'm sure you're at least curious to know).