We're here.

I've decided to chronicle the journey over in terms of the caffeine it took to get me here. Also planes, trains and automobiles were necessarily involved, but they were secondary to staying awake for 26 hours or whatever.

• cup of tea with breakfast. Still a bit groggy from dragging myself out of bed at 6.15.
  
• cup of coffee (medium latte from Costa) in the train station. Meet up with Dave and go through the wrong ticket barrier. Good start.
  
• can of coke on the plane. In other news, we're on the plane! Managed to get here without too much drama, although it appears I've chosen the worst seats (near the back, where we get the air pre-breathed for us by all the other passengers) on a venerable old 767 with no individual video screens.
  
• 2 x cups of coffee with meals on the plane. Not sure what the terminology for lunchtime is when you're in an indeterminate time zone and the clock is more or less ticking backwards.
  
• iced coffee (uh, tall mocha frappuccino from the evil empire. When in Rome...) at Chicago, where our internal flight is delayed for forty minutes.
  
• cup of coffee on said internal flight, which circles Charlotte airport for an extra hour before we're allowed to land. Once we do land, we sit on the apron for an hour because there isn't enough manpower to unload the plane. At this point I'm ready to unload it myself. Local time when we disembark is about 8.30; UK time is 1:30 am and my internal body clock is in a limbo akin to the hallucinogenic hyperspace sequence at the end of 2001.
  

Our hire car isn't a Pontiac Grand Prix, but instead a Chevy Impala. In reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it steers like a cow but without the associated benefit of moving like a fish. Good for highway crusing, though. We seem to have adapted to driving on the right without too much hassle ("Right, Dave. Right. Right!") and we're making reasonable time, with three states (NC, SC, and GA) under our belts.

Some amusing incidents so far:

• Checking into our hotel in Charlotte:
  "Which city are you from?"
  "Edinburgh."
  "Is that North or South Carolina?"
  
• We've planned to head for Mobile, AL on the way to New Orleans, arriving on Saturday. Watching CNN in the hotel room: "And tropical storm Arlene is predicted to hit Mobile Bay on Saturday". Damn the torpedoes: we're going anyway.
  
• Looking for a bar in Charlotte, it strikes me that the US is the polar opposite of Scandinavia: here, it's cool in the buildings, and the sauna is instead outside.
  
• Eating lunch in the marginally sleepy city of Greenville, blethering to the waitress.
  "Greenville's a fun place, I guess," she says.
  "Greenville is unlikely to make its way onto many itineraries," retorts the Rough Guide to the USA.
  

There's too much to write about in detail, so I'll leave it here. More later, probably once we hit New Orleans!