This trip hung in the balance for a long time. Originally Yvonne and I wanted to drive straight across the country, but after what happened in September 2001 we rethought the whole thing and put together a road trip through the Southeast instead. After weeks of going back and forth about whether we should even get on a plane, we finally set off, up at three in the morning. My nerves in the air were worse than usual, but the moment we set foot on American soil, all of that just fell away.
The thing that makes this trip special: I wrote it all down live, right there on the spot, and posted it online day by day over a dial-up modem, long before there were blogs or smartphones. So what you are reading here came straight out of the moment.
Arrival in Atlanta
The mood I would come to know over the following weeks showed up right away at immigration in Atlanta. The friendly officer just shrugged and said there was a lot of nonsense on the news these days, and you did not have to take all of it to heart. That was exactly how we felt about it too. The hysteria the German media were spreading was nowhere to be found on the ground. If anything, the eleventh of September had only pulled Americans closer together. I had booked a car with GPS, Hertz's Never Lost system, which was still new back then. When it worked, it was hard to beat, but the map I carried in my own head and the system's ideas often had very little in common.
Atlanta and a Reunion
In Atlanta we met up with Doug, my longtime pen pal, and visited the Coca-Cola museum with its free drinks from all over the world, the freshly renovated Martin Luther King Center, and Underground Atlanta. Doug told me that the everyday crime rate had actually gone down after the eleventh of September, and that this was in fact a perfect time for a vacation in the States. The one thing that stood out was all the security people. On some corners there were more of them than there were passersby. Out at Stone Mountain we took a day just for nature.
Charleston and the Great Smoky Mountains
By way of Macon, with its open-air Native American museum, we drove on to Charleston in South Carolina. On a tip, we visited the Boone Hall Plantation with its famous Alley of Oaks, the avenue of live oaks you know from any number of movies. After that we headed up into the Great Smoky Mountains, the national park East Coast Americans love so much, with all its hiking trails. At the visitor center near Cherokee they had set up a small open-air museum about farm life in the eighteenth century.
Nashville and a Jolt on the Radio
On the drive to Nashville, just as we were pulling out of the Walmart parking lot, the radio stations cut into their programming, a plane crash in Queens. I could hardly believe it, and my mind went straight back to September. It later turned out to be an accident, but the moment hit hard. That made me appreciate the quiet backroad drives afterward all the more. I can honestly recommend to anyone that they see the States off the interstates once in a while, because on the highways you barely catch a glimpse of the real country.
Back to Florida
From Montgomery we made our way into my favorite state, Florida, more precisely to Panama City on the Gulf of Mexico. There we took a lazy day, with a stop at the little Zooworld, and in the hotel lobby I tried a genuinely fast public DSL connection for the first time, to upload my live reports. From there we went on to Jacksonville to see our relatives, and finally to Orlando, which the locals themselves sarcastically call the biggest tourist trap in the world.
The Theme Parks of Orlando
In Orlando we spent our last days in the parks. Epcot, MGM Studios, Sea World, and the Magic Kingdom were all on the list, plus Busch Gardens over in Tampa with its roller coasters. One small highlight along the way was the Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which really are excellent, and which I have been recommending to everyone ever since. To wrap it up, we drove back through Orlando to Atlanta and flew home from there.
My Takeaway
As always, it was a fantastic trip, in spite of all the rerouting because of the eleventh of September. The weather was beautiful the whole time, somewhere between the high sixties and the high eighties, and toward the end I was even back in shorts. One thing that stood out was how few Germans we ran into, but plenty of Brits, who clearly were not so easily scared off. In the end it is something everyone has to decide for themselves. As for me, I am glad we did not let anything hold us back.