How terribly information age of me:

I'm writing this on Josh's laptop as we roll along I85, just inside Alabama and heading towards Montgomery, where we'll grab something to eat before rejoining the interstate and charging onwards into the tropical storm. This far north of it, it's manifesting itself mainly as a noticeable but not oppressive humidity and a persistent, fine rain.

We've already played Sweet Home Alabama to death, so the radio is silent - we tried local radio and found it wanting, having listened to one middle-aged presenter wax lyrical about Mariah Carey - and the air con is also off for a while, Josh rightly pointing out that he didn't envisage the deep south as having a pleasant ambient temperature of around 19°C.

Yesterday, we picked up Josh the morning after his date (east coast girls are hip, it seems; southern girls haven't knocked us out with the way they talk yet, but we'll get back to you on that, and our desire for them all to be California girls hasn't yet been tested) and headed out of Charlotte. We stopped in Greenville (c.f. enthusiastic waitress* and admittedly cute map store girl, as Josh and Dave have no doubt already recounted) and then made good time to Atlanta, our first nightly stop. We were aiming for Decatur, a college-town suburb of Atlanta, as suggested by Cute Map Store Girl, and here was where things went a bit Pete Tong.

Road signage here is abysmal. We spent an hour and drove for forty miles trying to find the bloody place after getting to within one junction of it on the interstate. Eventually we got there and rented our first motel - a Super 8, chosen more out of desperation than judgement - and wandered into the very studenty centre of town. Josh had long since recovered from his jetlag, but Dave and I were a little sluggish still, and I think we might have made a bigger night of it otherwise. Still, we ate our first burrito (of too fucking many, I can tell you), had a few beers and hit the sack at a respectable hour.

We're seeing a lot of America exactly as the Americans see it, rolling past their car window. North Carolina was fairly brief, with Charlotte lying near the NC/SC state line, but South Carolina was at times very green and pleasant. We're sticking to the interstates to make sure we don't waste too much time in between layovers, and it becomes obvious that most of the US is built to follow the roads, perhaps the other way around from Europe, where the roads were built to connect the already established towns. Alabama is beginning to feel like the deep south, with the road elevated above wetlands, swamps and lazy rivers, and the centre of Mobile (where we now are, after our second night's layover), was deserted even at 6 pm on a Saturday because of tropical storm warnings.

(I'm completing this entry the day after I began it, and in the end the storm was only as bad as an hour or two of heavy rain along the road, dying down by the time we reached Mobile. Today is the first day that's not heavily overcast. I'm going to investigate the motel pool - I may be some time.)

So, today, after we grab some breakfast, we're going to leave for New Orleans. Wish us luck - according to the guidebooks, if we don't stick to the French quarter, we'll be mugged, stabbed/shot and our corpses mugged again. Good times!

* In fact, the waitress in Greenville was a comedy goldmine.

"We're looking for somewhere we can buy a roadmap. Can you think of anywhere around here?"
"Well, there's a mall on 383. Go along Main Street, turn right onto College Road, head along there looking for signs for the 383. When you see one, take a left again and you should see the mall."
"Cool, thanks."
"Or there's a map store round the corner."