Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas

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After picking up the rental car that was going to be home for the next seven weeks, the first priority was to replace the majority of our clothes that had either shrank, stretched or disintegrated during the past year. We spent a full day in the Sawgrass Mills mall just outside Fort Lauderdale before making our way up the I-95 to Jacksonville where we had a reservation at an Airbnb for the night. Melissa had contacted the host to let her know that we would be arriving late which she informed us wouldn’t be a problem as our room had a separate entrance with a security access code. However, when we arrived at the address, the code didn’t work, and the host was uncontactable, leaving us stood in the back garden of a house in the middle of the night somewhere in the Florida suburbs. Having decided that getting a room at one of the local murder motels that we’d just passed wasn’t appealing, we decided to embark on a midnight drive to Georgia. It was 3.45am when we finally found the one hotel on the outskirts of Savannah willing to rent us a room.

From Savannah, we continued north to Charleston where we stayed with Mike and Rachel, the couple we met in Puerto Escondido. They live in a suburb close to downtown and went out of their way to show us Charleston from a locals’ point of view. They mentioned that the city’s most famous resident, Bill Murray, can often be seen drinking in one of the many bars downtown but sadly, he didn’t make an appearance during our visit.

Rachel took a day off work to show us the city including the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church which was the scene of a mass shooting in 2015. We also visited the southern tip of the peninsula where antebellum mansions ring the battery which looks out into the bay at Fort Sumter National Monument – the location where the first shots of the civil war were fired. Charleston attracts 4.8 million visitors per year, the most popular tourist destination in the south, and is famous for its southern hospitality; although it was once a key port during the slavery trade and the old slave mart museum charts the region’s gory past. On our final day, we took a tour of the Charleston Tea Plantation - the only commercial tea plantation in North America

When we left Charleston, our next stop was Montgomery, Alabama, a city that played a central role in the American Civil rights movement. Our first sightseeing activity was the Rosa Parks Museum, an active memorial to the life of civil rights icon Rosa Parks. On 1st December 1955, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery; this single act of nonviolent resistance sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, an eleven-month struggle to desegregate the city's buses, a movement that helped bring international attention to the civil rights struggle.

We went straight across town to the ‘Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration’ on the site where black people were once imprisoned before being sold at auction. Researchers discovered evidence of 4400 cases where black people were lynched or died in racial motivated killings between 1877 and 1950. One of the accounts described the lynching of a young woman and her unborn child who were executed for complaining about her husband’s lynching weeks earlier. Nearby is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that features 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place.

The Equal Justice Initiative is a non-profit organisation that raised $20 million in funding for the site; they also offer legal aid to people who may be wrongly convicted, and there were numerous letters from death row inmates on display on the walls of one section of the exhibition. The timeline then moved forward to the present day prison conditions where the information boards stated that America has less than 5% of the world’s population but around 22% of all the incarcerated people in the world – there are over 2 million Americans currently in jail in the US.

On our way out of town, we visited Dexter Parsonage Museum – the former home of Martin Luther King where a bomb was detonated on the porch of the property at the height of the bus boycott. Just around the corner is the State Senate building where the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march concluded on the steps of Capitol Hill. The first White House of the Confederacy is located in the same district, and we stopped at the home of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald where the writers lived from 1931-32.

From Montgomery, we took a detour to Monroeville; home town of Harper Lee, Truman Capote and the real-life Maycomb from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. The Old Monroe County Courthouse includes an exhibit to both authors, and the upstairs balcony is the spot where a young Harper Lee used to watch her father practice law; experiences which inspired the character of Atticus Finch in the novel.

After we left Monroeville, we headed straight for New Orleans in time for a Saturday night out in the ‘Big Easy.’ New Orleans is seen as the most European City in the states and the influences of Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, Spain and America itself are evident in the eclectic music and cuisine that is synonymous with the city.

Bourbon St is one of the most famous thoroughfares in the city for tourists, but we headed for the alternative area of Frenchmen Street, a couple of blocks away as we had heard that it wasn’t as frenetic as Bourbon. Over the weekend, we spent most of our time in bars watching live music - the venues here obviously have an incredible talent pool from which to pick their acts. Every band or singer was brilliant: from blues and soul, to rock and jazz, to reggae and rap. When it came to food, we were spoilt for choice, and we tried our best to get through as much of Po’ boys, Beignets, Gumbo, Jambalaya and Cajun as possible.

Whilst walking through Jackson Square, we saw a street performer who looked familiar, so I approached him after he’d finished to ask whether he was in Key West six years ago. He replied that he was and although it was weird that we remembered him from so long ago, a bloke juggling knives atop a ten-foot unicycle does tend to be memorable.

Congo Square is located inside Louis Armstrong Park in the Treme district of the city and in the early 19th century, a city ordinance decreed that this space was the one location where it was legal for Africans to gather in public. It was here that they congregated on Sundays to dance sing and play music from their homeland, a tradition that continues to this day; we happened to be in the park on Sunday to join a large crowd witnessing the event.

The 2005 Hurricane Katrina decimated large parts of the city and claimed the lives of 1800 residents. Ultimately, the storm caused $160 billion worth of damage, and the population of New Orleans fell by 29% between the years 2005-2011. Due to the elevated location of the French and Garden Quarters, those neighbourhoods emerged relatively unscathed, whereas other parts of the city weren’t so lucky. Once the levee system was overwhelmed, 80% of the city found itself underwater.

We joined a walking tour of the city that included a visit to the Lafayette Cemetery thought to house Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo queen of New Orleans and the Madame La laurie mansion - supposedly the most haunted building in the French Quarter. The Garden Quarter is known as the American sector of the borough as it was created after the Louisiana purchase and the district is filled with opulent mansions built from coffee and cotton money. The neighbourhood is home to Hollywood stars such as Sandra Bullock, John Goodman and also the childhood residence of Anne Rice.

On the way out of town, we called in at the Whitney Plantation - the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of the enslaved people. In 2008, the future mayor of New Orleans described the site as ‘America’s Auschwitz.’ The 286-year-old property was originally owned by German settlers and was known as the Habitation Haydel during its early incarnation as an indigo plantation before its transition to sugar and cotton cultivation. The workload on sugar plantations was notoriously brutal, and the life expectancy of a slave was between 21 and 22 years. The practice of slaves being traded from the slightly better conditions of a northern cotton plantation to the barbaric environment of the sugar fields down south became known as being ‘sold down the river’- a reference to the Mississippi river which flowed in that direction.

The French-Creole style ‘Big House’ has been carefully restored and the plantation retains the original slave cabins, a church, kitchen and outbuildings - scenes from Django: Unchained were filmed here. The most sombre area of all is the Field of Angels, a memorial to the 2200 slave children who died under the age of three in the local parish. Four million men, women and children were enslaved at the outbreak of the civil war - 107,000 of whom worked the fields of Louisiana.

Moving up through Louisiana, we took a break in Baton Rouge, the State capitol. We had a look at the state capitol building, a grand Art deco structure built by Governor Huey P. Long at the cost of $5million - in 1935, it became the site of his assassination when he was murdered in one of the hallways by the relative of one of his political enemies. We were permitted to visit the house of representatives and the senate chamber where in 1970 a bomb was detonated - there is still a splinter of wood embedded in the roof from a table that exploded in the blast.

The host of our Airbnb in Lafayette was a character; his check-in comprised of an induction in which he described the history of his house, local area, culture and food before picking up an accordion and treating us to a song. Then another. Five songs later - it was dark by this point - and he had moved on to a small stage in the corner of the lounge and showed no signs of calling it a day. Luckily there was another couple from Brighton there to share the awkwardness, and we collectively managed to escape to a bar downtown.

Since leaving Alabama, the weather had been atrocious; locals said it is a freak cold snap and it was 10 degrees colder than usual at this time of year. We woke up in Lafayette to find the car frozen over; a situation we haven’t encountered for a long time, and after clearing the ice, we hit the road again, with Houston being the destination.

NASA’s Space Centre sits on an enormous plot of land with over two hundred buildings on the seventeen-hundred-acre site. Outside the main entrance sits a replica of the shuttle Independence, piggybacked onto a Boeing747 aircraft in a recreation of how NASA used to ferry shuttles from the landing facility in California back across the country to Florida.

During the 30-year period that the space shuttle program was in operation, 135 missions were trained, planned and managed at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston at an estimated cost of $209 billion. There were six orbiters constructed for flight: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour which completed over 20,000 orbits of the earth – each one took 90 minutes meaning the astronauts witnessed a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes. Large sections of the museum were memorials dedicated to the fourteen crewmembers that lost their lives aboard the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters.

In addition to these voyages, NASA’s shuttles also carried communications, weather and tracking satellites in its cargo including; the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Since the end of the space shuttle project, NASA has changed focus and is now channelling all of its efforts on future programmes with the objective to put humans on Mars over the next few decades and also to continue providing personnel for the International Space Station.

After spending all day at the Space Centre, we left just as the museum was closing which meant we were faced with a drive across Houston at rush-hour to reach our motel. That particular three-hour journey isn’t one that I’d recommend to anyone - the population of the city is 2.3 million, the fourth highest in the country, and it felt like every single one of the city’s inhabitants was on the roads that night.

Heading west, we arrived at the city of San Antonio, home of the Alamo, one of the most iconic attractions in the country - as it is classed as a monument of national importance, entry is free for everyone. The former Franciscan mission that became a military outpost is a symbol of the Texas Revolution; it was here that a heavily outnumbered band of rebels held off thousands of troops from the Mexican army for 13 days. When Mexico governed the land now known as Texas, they invited colonists from the United States to settle there in attempt to populate the territory and make it more productive. Due to the generous opportunities to purchase land, 30,000 migrants from the US settled in Mexico. The Mexican government fearing that its institutions would be overwhelmed by the new settlers tried to prohibit further immigration – a complete role reversal of the present situation. The Texas Revolution in which the battle of the Alamo was a part resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1836, and in 1845, Texas became the 28th state of the Union.

Also in the downtown area is the Riverwalk - a 15-mile network of canals and footpaths running under the surface roads of San Antonio, and it is possible to traverse the city from the subterranean walkways. We took one of the sunset riverboat tours before heading over to the San Fernando cathedral for the light and sound show. ‘The Saga’ is an award winning 24-minute art/video event depicting the history of Texas that is projected onto the façade of the church and attracts huge crowds in the main plaza each weekend. It was from the roof of this building that the Mexican General Santa Anna flew the red flag that signalled that ‘no quarter’ would be given to the rebels - heralding the beginning of the siege on the Alamo.

After becoming tired of the monotony of hour after hour of farmland, we headed out of San Antonio and headed for the Texas Hill Country. We stopped off in Fredericksburg, a former German settlement before heading to the Grape Creek winery for a tasting - Texas is the second biggest wine production region in the nation, behind the Napa Valley.

Built on the banks of the Colorado river, Austin is the self-proclaimed ‘Live Music capital of the world’, and there was some impressive talent on display in the bars we visited on the popular 6th street area. It seems like most of Texas descends on Austin at the weekend - college football is huge here and the local team, the Longhorns, were playing at home, a game which drew a crowd of 102,000. I was talking to a bloke who had travelled from Iowa for the game - a mere 14-hour drive. The capital of Texas is famous for its festivals: South by Southwest and Austin City Limits. We toured the famous Austin City Limits at the Moody Theatre, the longest running music series in American television history. Luckily, they were still operating a tour of the venue that day as Willie Nelson was taping a recording in the evening and we were given access to the preparation for the event. Next up was the Texas Capitol building and as with the state capitol building in Louisiana, we were allowed into both the senate and House of representative rooms. As ‘everything is bigger in Texas’ it stands to reason that they would have the biggest state capital building in the U.S; the Statue of Liberty would fit inside the central rotunda.

Our final stop of the day was at the Bullock Texas State History Museum which showcased exhibits from a wide range of Texan culture such as Rodeo, native American Art, music, oil discovery, politics, inventions and sports – there was even the La Belle shipwreck that sank off the Gulf Coast in the 1680’s, altering the course of Texan history.

Near the exit was a story about the New London school disaster when in 1937, a gas explosion destroyed the building, killing 300 students and teachers. The subsequent investigation revealed that the odourless natural gas leak under the school had been ignited by a spark in the school’s industrial arts shop. In the aftermath, the Texas Railroad Commission ordered that all natural gas intended for domestic or industrial use had to be odorised in the future; the strong sulphur smell would from that day on alert users to a gas leak.

Just around the corner from the museum is the University of Texas where in 1966, Charles Whitman carried out one of the first mass shootings in US history. After killing his mother and wife, he climbed to the observation deck of the campus clock tower and, over the next ninety minutes indiscriminately shot members of the public – killing 14 and wounding 31 others. It was one of the worst mass murders in a public place in the history of the United States.

So far, we have been entertained by the billboards lining the side of the freeways advertising everything from Medical Practitioners to ambulance-chasing attorneys. There has been plenty of inventive slogans but our favourite has to be the advert seeking personal injury victims to come forward with the question: ‘Hurt? Call Bert.’

We thought it would be good to make a departure from the interstate and experience the rural landscape of Texas on our way up north to Fort Worth - also I had found out the location of the Hewitt House from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, hidden away on an isolated, unpaved road deep among the cornfields of a town called Granger. We stayed on the backroads and ventured through small farming communities until we reached Waco. About twelve miles from town is the location of the Waco siege where, in 1993, the FBI and ATF stormed the Mount Carmel compound which was the headquarters of the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh. Eighty-eight people died in the resulting confrontation, and nowadays none of the settlement remains, just a small memorial on the land. The wording on the stone seems to suggest that the FBI and ATF are still held responsible for the loss of life that day; the failure of the authorities led to a change in the way the AFT approached similar siege situations in the future.

Finally, we arrived in Fort Worth – renowned as the cowboy town ‘where the west begins’. We headed to the historic Stockyards, a district of old west era buildings to watch the cattle drive, a twice daily spectacle where a herd of longhorns are paraded down Exchange Avenue. We also visited the Cowtown Coliseum rodeo arena which includes the cowboy hall of fame but at this time of year, the show is only performed at the weekend, so we missed out. We moved onto downtown Fort Worth which is the modern section of the city, although history still pervades the streets; there were information boards highlighting points of interest regarding infamous figures such as Bonnie and Clyde, the Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. The Fort Worth Hilton is located south of the main square, and on the opposite side of the street is a tribute to JFK, close to the site of where he gave his final public address – the Hotel is where the President slept the night before his fateful trip to Dallas on 22nd November 1963.

The following day, on the eve of the 55th anniversary of the JFK assassination, we drove to Dallas to visit Dealey Plaza and the sixth floor museum which is housed in the former Texas School Book Depository building. The official plaque commemorating the event outside reads – ‘…Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F Kennedy from a sixth floor window as the presidential motorcade passed the site’. The use of the word ‘allegedly’ has been underlined by visitors, and seems to contradict the official conclusions of the Warren commission. The displays, exhibits and archive footage were a mine of information and also dealt with the aftermath, the impact on the country and even conspiracy theories. I think we took more photographs than the FBI did during their investigation, before strolling around the plaza, the grassy knoll where the fatal shot likely came from, and the road where a couple of X’s are placed to mark the spot where the killing took place. On our way out of Dallas, we took the exact route of the motorcade before exiting under the famous triple underpass. On our return to the accommodation in Arlington, we passed the Southfork ranch from the TV show ‘Dallas’ and visited the small town of McKinney - the quintessential image of small town America.

Our last night in Texas happened to be thanksgiving, and we had managed to land two tickets for the Dallas Cowboys v Washington Redskins NFL game at the AT&T stadium. In addition to a full house inside, there were thousands outside setting up camp for a tailgate party - a phenomenon that I can’t see catching on in England – somehow I just don’t see people wanting to brave the elements in Trafford Park in November to see United play Crystal Palace. The Cowboys won 31-23 in front of a packed house, and it was a really enjoyable day, although our standing tickets meant we couldn’t see the big screens for the replays which wasn’t ideal. We made an early start the next day as we had a long journey to Roswell ahead of us - after nineteen days, six states and 2512 miles we still haven’t killed each other which is a minor miracle in itself - so far so good….

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