Day One - John Denver

Day One – John Denver – Leaving on a Jet Plane

Welcome back to my travelogue blog.  This time I am going on a musical tour of the American South where I hope to enjoy both kinds of music.  I am travelling with my mum and sister or Jean and Emma as those who are not their child / sibling know them.  The week starts in New Orleans then arcs North East to Nashville via Memphis.  It is a trip we have discussed for a long time but have only just managed to find the time for, Emma adding a new focus by pointing out that mum isn’t getting any younger.

As per the beginning of many of my travels I started the day with breakfast in Green’s coffee shop, which is conveniently located underneath my flat.  Things didn’t get off to a great start when they informed me the coffee machine was broken, then again prior to a week in the land of coffee perhaps a pot of tea wasn’t such a bad thing.

Due to not really being terribly organised, and perhaps not hinting strongly enough to friends that one of them could give me a lift I had not had the foresight to book a taxi to Heathrow.  I did exchange a few emails with a local taxi company at 1:00AM this morning but it seems they were only able to fit me in based on timings that would have had airport staff worried I was trying to remake the Tom Hank’s classic The Terminal (I haven’t seen the film in question but am given to understand it is about my mate Ritchie’s 2009 trip to South Africa.)

Having investigated and priced up getting the train I thought about it for a few minutes then decided to drive.  Mainly because I remembered that I had still not been in the pod parking at Terminal 5.  Contrary to its name it is not a place to park one’s pods but a car park where you are transported to the terminal in your own personal self-driving shuttle bus. 

parking space close to the pod dock

 my pod waiting to go

in the pod

The pod journey exceeded my every expectation, it was brilliant from reversing out of the collection bay to bombing along the road to the terminal.  If the rest of my holiday is even half as good then I am in for a fantastic week.

As a lazy writer might say I breezed through security and onward to meet my companions for the week, who were ensconced in the Gordon Ramsey restaurant tucking into some prosecco.  I suggested we moved on to ‘spoons but was over ruled and we ended up somewhere nice instead, I think it is going to be one of those weeks.

Yeats' family plelfie

After posing for a quick plelfie (a portmanteau of plane and selfie) we took our seats for the 8.5 hour flight to New Orleans Lois Armstrong International Airport,  named for the cousin of famous cyclist Mark Cavendish.   The flight seemed to pass fairly quickly thanks to two episodes of Curb and a documentary about Bros.

US immigration was as speedy and the staff as cheerful as usual, which is to say they were respectively dog slow and miserable.   Next step was to retrieve our hire car, a GMC Yukon, which as far as I can tell is modelled on the Canyonero from the Simpsons.  Car hire companies are remarkable organisations in that they know exactly what you want, roughly when you are arriving and how you will pay for it, yet every time you turn up they i) seem surprised to see you and ii) have prepared nothing in advance.  Avis at Nola airport were no exception to this rule.

an identical model to our rental car

That said Avis were paragons of efficiency compared to the Intercontinental Hotel New Orleans who took indifferent service to a new level.  Again they had already been paid, knew what we wanted and when, yet having some rooms available was too much to ask.  After half an hour of hanging around we finally had both rooms so could get mother to bed and head out on the town.  As usual Alan Partridge has identified the best way to deal with situation like this, suggesting you "rinse them on TripAdvisor."

Emma and I concluded the day with a few beers in ‘back space’ an achingly hipster bar which had quite a good range of beer and an even better range of carefully sculpted beards.

It has dawned on me that the last few US road trips I have done were with my soul mate so there was barely any need to even discuss what we were doing each day, we just knew.  I suspect this may not be the case this week, Emma was talking about going to some kind of museum that wasn’t cars or planes.

Apologies if today's blog makes less sense than ever, I have been up almost 24 hours and am losing my patience with the hotel's shitty WiFi.

Watch this space……..