Note: I started writing this entry a loooooooong time ago. I never finished it but instead of deleting it I decided to post the fragment anyway…
Ah, at last: a few moments to spare so I can summarize my little adventure travelling down south. I wager that this piece of writing has been anticipated greatly by a numerous audience. Well, I shall not keep you waiting any longer…
The setting: Our collabortion has two meetings a year. One is in the US, since half of the collaborating institutes reside on the new continent, the other is usually in Europe. In April, the destination had been chosen to be Baton Rouge, far down south in the heart of Louisiana. (btw, the next meeting is in October in Berlin).
The mission: Gettin’ there, deliverin’ our talks (I had two), checkin’ out the place, and comin’ back without getting into trouble. However, this seemed to be a good opportunity to get an impression of other parts of the country besides the “Latte East”. So I found a colleague ready to drive the roughly 1250mile trip. It would take us through several States (Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) and require two nights on the road: Piece o’ cake!
The vehicle: A Honda Civic LX. An unspectacular, yet decent car. Surely, we wouldn’t be braking any speed records, but ,hey, you don’t mess around with the highway patrol…
The trip south: We started out on Friday afternoon. Bad idea: The evening traffic was quite a mess, especially the closer one gets to D.C. On the other hand: D.C. is always a traffic mess… So we passed the capital in the early evening and left the I95, driving first the I66 west and then the I81 south . The I81 runs parallel to the Shenandoah State Park, but since it was already dark, we couldn’t really see anything. Towards 10pm, a storm hit us pretty badly, rain was pouring in buckets, keeping the car on the road became quite a challenge (I was driving at that time). So we stopped at Roanoke, VA for our first night.
The next day we jumped on the road and were flying south with 80mp/h. Passed Bristol and stopped in Knoxville, TN, for lunch. That was fun, since Knoxville was celebrating its Rossini festival: opera music and italian food on Gay Street! The last thing I would have expected there! We stayed for two hours or so, watching some students play Romans and browsing through the booths with nice handcrafted things.
Back on the road the I75 took us to Chatanooga and from there to right into Alabama along the I59. The first thing that made unmistakenly clear that we were far away from home was this huge, I mean HUGE cross right next to the expressway. It was at least 10m high and visible from a great distance! The radio reflected this not so subtle change: At least half of the stations we could get in were playing “christian music” or had a preacher on air. Stopping at the visitor center to grap some maps I had my first contact with “south folk”: barely understandable, but I guess that this might have been mutual… Otherwise, all the people we met on our way were very friendly and helpful.
The day passed without much excitement, the roads were more or less stright and flat with low or no traffic at all. Since the speed limit is 70 we were pushing the car a bit above 80 most of the time. We made it to Mississippi in the early night and stayed in Meridian since we both had to work on our talks…
Sunday was our last day on the road. Following the I59 we hit the I12 (welcome to Louisiana!) and followed it west stright into Baton Rouge. People along the way had predicted that we might run into problems so close to New Orleans due to uncleared debris but that turned out to be false information.
During our one week stay we didn’t see much of Baton Rouge or the surroundings. The hotel was located at the highway, being part of a very large traveller haven, including your favourite fast food places and a Starbucks. The latter was actually remarkable since we hadn’t encountered anything that resembled coffee after leaving Maryland. I made a trip to Baton Rouge on my own, downtown turned out to be a strange mixture of brand-new government and business buildings, uninhabitable residential buildings, a architecturally generic art center, and block large churches which seem to double as community centers. It was already late afternoon when I arrived so I was more or less the only person walking around. It got a bit more lively when I passed one of the big gambling steamers at the Mississippi Riverfront.