We had two weeks in Bluemont, Virginia. Where, apart from a day trip into Washington DC, we did little more than sit and watch the trees slowly turn to the colours of Autumn. We were ready to move on and here we are, three days later, in Memphis.
It took us two days to cross Virginia, taking in the Luray Caverns, a flea market and a settlers museum along the way. Doesn’t sound very exciting, but long roadtrips by their nature often involve just travelling and rumination. With those colours of Autumn fully developed now and the vastness of the landscape there was not a hint of drudgery.
We did manage to avoid the Interstate highways a fair bit, hence the stumbling on a flea market. It was a culture shock for us to see stall holder displays of rifles, handguns and ammunition. We’ve heard plenty about how easy it is to buy a gun in America. But at a car boot sale?
It was impossible to prevent much of our ruminations from wandering onto the subject of the elections here. Gardens by the roadsides all along our route are decked out with ‘Trump/Vance’ and ‘Harris/Waltz’ posters and bunting. We’d always end up wondering how near to half of this nation would appoint someone like Donald Trump to be their leader. A question we could never dare to pose in public. We started to sound like a stuck record, so we’ve banned those ruminations and pledged to fix our gaze on the middle distance and be amazed by the scenery. We haven’t much to crow about anyway - our nation displayed equally aberrant behaviour when most of our fellow citizens voted for Mr Johnson. I’m not even sure it couldn’t happen again!
Currently I am waiting in the Graceland car park in Memphis, planning the next part of our trip which takes us to Oklahoma City. Few of the places that we’ve used to break the trip into manageable chunks have been chosen for any other reason than the need to split the route up for planning. This leg is around 550 miles That’s about six and a half hours driving on the Interstate, or over ten avoiding it. All of our legs have extra days built into them, some of which we will use for explorations along the way and we also hope to save some to have plenty of time when we come to the National Parks.
