Other impressions:
- Ignoring the Delta charm for a moment, Mississippi has real issues, rural flight is taking real toll on the (mostly all-black) communities there. We saw towns along the river and old highways where basically every second home was bolted shut (and had been for a long time by the looks of it), that can hardly be a good thing. And even those communities that by the looks of it were (still) doing well, once you hit Main Street a third of the shops had been regularly given up, blame it on the mall-o-itis everywhere, but that doesn't beckon well for the future of these small towns either.
- Baton Rouge is incredibly boring, a charmless administrative hub, nothing more. Montgomery, otoh, was real nice. New Orleans gets on your nerves after a while if you live in the French Quarter. And when we were in Pigeon Forge, I momentarily believed that we had lost our way and ended up in Las Vegas!
Lots of vintage cars there though.
- People - black or white - were incredibly friendly in the South, we were asked so many times where we came from when people overheard Leon and me talking German with another. The owner of an all-black smokehouse and B-B-Q in an all-black community (one of the better off ones by the looks of it) in Mississippi demanded to have a picture taken with us and there was this touching moment in northern Alabama when the (white) waitress at some lake lodge sighed (after having quizzed us about Germany): "I've never been anywhere, not even to Nashville ...". And after a while my son and I learned that you can tell many black neighborhoods by the fact that the cars parked before the houses are newer and/or in better shape/well-kept than the houses there. In white neighborhoods it tends to be the other way around. To each his own status symbol I guess.
- We both fell a little in love with Alabama, which came as a surprise, I had expected it a lot dryer, flatter and more agricultural, but it seems like the whole state is one huge forest (unlike Mississippi where the paddle steamers ate up everything) with gently sloping hills (or "buffs" as they are called there) and lakes and rivers. And when it doesn't rain there (the rain followed us around a little), the sky is indeed "so blue" as Lynyrd Skynyrd have always claimed.
- Compared to the East and West Coast, lodging is cheap in the South. We generally stayed in good places, but except in New Orleans in the French Quarter (where we paid 230 Dollars a night in a posh hotel that would have easily cost twice as much in California or New England), we never broke the 150 Dollar barrier for a room with two twin beds (question: "King size bed or twins?" answer: "Twins please, we're father and son which means we're close, but not THAT close!") prices were regularly more around a 100 Dollars ore less.
- The trip confirmed: There really isn't a region in the US that is not worthwhile exploring. You guys have a nice country, take care of it.
- Oh, and my favorite TV evangelist is him now:
I just love his Texan aaaaaaaaa-ccent and the way he maaaaaaaaa-sticates every word plus the slightly unsettling similarity with Jerry Lee Lewis. And where a lot of TV evangelists are either trite (with endless quotes from preferably the Old Testament, you sometimes get the feeling with them like the New Testament was never even written) or blackmail-thuggish with sin, the devil, homosexuality and what have you, he has that David Copperfield type charm and everything is hunky-dory "juuuuuust aaaaaaas looooong aaaaaaaas you let Jeeeeeesus into your liiiiiiiiiiife". That is at least a positive message (and his joke at the start of the youtube vid ain't bad either). Whenever he came on the motel TVs, I was stuck/mesmerized. If they ever do a biopic on him, Matthew McConaughey dyed darkhaired should be perfect for the job.
- I hate to say it, but grits are an acquired taste.
