To complete and continue our May and June 2024 American adventure I have written a couple of posts, this is the first.

From Memphis we drove to Nashville and took an internal flight on Southwest Airlines to Savannah, Georgia. This internal carrier slightly excited me because 40 years ago when I was doing my MBA they were a case study as a low cost airline taking on the established, larger players. Clearly they’ve done well to be still hanging around as some of their competitors have gone such as Pan Am and TWA. One notable part of the experience was being told by the air hostess to sit wherever there was a spare seat on boarding.

From here we went to stay with my niece, Victoria and her husband (Ben) and son (Henry). They have been here for some time as Ben works as an expat for a large UK company that manufactures and sells in the USA. Victoria works in interior design and young Henry, complete with American accent, goes to school in the town. Savannah is lovely as a coastal resort, university  town and the home to the third largest container port in the USA. On this latter point you can see ships coming and going but otherwise the town seems quite separate.

The weather continued to hot and very sunny and we had a grand time with some family neighbours out and about on a pontoon in a sail to Little Tybee island.

Ben and Victoria are keen cyclists, who wouldn’t be on flat pothole free roads in sensational weather? I went out with their club on Saturday morning and as Ben disappeared to ride at 21mph I hung grimly onto Victoria’s wheel for 47 miles. It reminded me of Australia but a lot faster!

After our busy schedule in Nashville and Memphis (and lots of driving) it was nice to chill in luxurious surroundings before leaving to pick up a car and drive toward the Great Smoky Mountains. (Yes, the ‘e’ disappeared sometime ago, very troubling to a grammar pedant like what I am.)

Leaving Victoria we drove north to Spartanburg. This was a couple of hundred miles, it’s here that rain fell, about time (!) although it was still warm. We’d switched between eating out or catering for ourselves in apartments for breakfast or evening salads. After a few days on the road eating out starts to wane. On this night we slouched out to the magnificent Waffle House, a well known nationwide cheap greasy spoon. I do worry that the ingredients are full of all sorts of chemicals but it does the job and I always console myself that I’ll eventually be back to a less toxic diet. When we did shop there was often an ‘ethnic’ aisle in supermarkets mainly humouring the large Latino diaspora and Brits. Frankly the further north we got into the Smokies the ethnic aisle had a further reach around the store as some of the products could have been expanded from Latino and British to Hill Billy and Red Neck!

The next morning we were promptly up to the nearby BMW plant for a tour ($10 each). Here they make the X Series from the X3 upwards. It’s a vast assembly and paint plant where they ship over 400,000 cars a year with 60% exported including back to the UK. They’ve invested $12 billion here since the plant was opened in the 1980s. We were lucky enough to see the fixing of doors, rear hatches and bonnets to the car all by robots. The lifting, placing, alignment and fixing was done by these massive arms that swung around with precision and grace. There were several lasers ensuring the component was a perfect fit. We also had a video, a look at the paint process and then were given a medallion. Sadly this didn’t come fixed to a gold chain for me to wear with an open neck shirt.

From here in North Carolina it was back to Tennessee and the Smokies and maybe a bear or two?