Thanks for going Greyhound!

While lounging in my Atlanta hotel I decided that I wanted to go to California. San Francisco to be precise. It felt so liberating to be able to decide to travel 3000 miles at 2 days notice. I got my introduction to the American institution of the Greyhound buses. I will be telling the story of this journey in several parts. Here’s a breakdown of the connections:

Atlanta, GA – Nashville, TN – St Louis, MO – Kansas City, MO – Denver, CO – Salt Lake City, UT – San Francisco, CA.

The one constant on my USA adventure.

I didn’t know it but the first time I went Greyhound would affect me more than some of the cities I visited. When you see “2-3 days” written down on a screen or in a book it doesn’t seem like it will be too hard. When you’re actually living it, it’s a different matter. Due to events that I will give details of later, I actually spent 4 days/3 nights on buses.

When I arrived at the terminal in Atlanta, I had no idea what to expect or how it was going to work. The terminal was in a rough part of town and inside it felt a bit dodgy. I had my first experience of the wire seats they provide for customers. I learned that seats on the buses are given on a “first come, first served” basis and this breeds a lot of aggression on the busier, less frequent routes. While waiting in the line, everyones bags were searched. A child was with his mother in front of me and he asked, “Mommy, why is the man doing that?” and the mother replied, “He’s just looking for weapons, baby”. It shocked me how matter-of-fact she was about this detail, and at that moment I felt very British!

A word of advice for prospective Greyhound customers: Greyhound is great, as long as you’re not on a deadline. Don’t be surprised when buses are late for no reason. Also, unless you’re on the east coast, the buses are mostly scabby and I spent many hours fearing the bus would fall apart around me after a small bump in the road.  All this said, I loved my time on the Greyhound. It’s the best way to see the variety of the USA if you can’t afford to drive. It is a unique experience!

We were finally escorted out to our bus to Nashville, TN and I sat in the window seat at the back. I was there wide eyed for the first leg of the journey. This was my first proper experience of the open roads of the USA and I saw so much green in Georgia and Tennessee. In Tennessee I saw the sheer rock cliffs next to the interstates and then noticed the little trickling waterfalls coming out of them. There were mountains covered in trees and wide-open lakes and rivers. I got my first look at the majestic Mississippi River.

The beautiful scenery of Tennessee.

Going to Nashville was a pretty smooth ride and transferring in the Nashville terminal was simple. At this stage, I was mostly ignorant of how stressful and violent it can get at the back of a Greyhound line. Between Nashville and St Louis things started to go a little wrong. The bus had an issue making some slight hill starts. I think we were stuck just off the Tennessee/Kentucky border for about 15 minutes. One man sitting at the back kept shouting, “Oh Hell no!” and the bus driver gave him a row for “cussing”.

It was on this section of the trip that I saw how random some of the Greyhound terminals are. Most of the ones in small towns aren’t even bus stops; they are garages, backs of little shopping malls and even motels. I was thirsty a lot on the journey to St Louis but the only place to buy drinks were vending machines that only accepted dollar bills, which I didn’t have. I saw many amusing things while staring out the window; including a sign outside a lap dance club offering “2-4-1” dances to any war veterans recently returned from fighting. I found western Kentucky very boring, but I only got to see it in the dark. We were let off the bus somewhere in southern Illinois. I wasn’t aware of the geography of this part of the country at this stage and so I spent the entire journey waking up, going to sleep and buying food with no idea where I was. It keeps it exciting and mysterious!

Next – into the tornado warning zone; AKA Missouri and Kansas.

How to be happy? Drink Coca-cola apparently.

World of Coca-Cola

The world’s most famous fizzy beverage was invented in Atlanta by a Mr Pemberton. I’m not going to be listing fun facts in this post though because I can’t remember much more than that! The World of Coca-cola is a fabulous piece corporate propaganda, and a lot of fun too!

I had to walk about 20 blocks in the Georgia heat to get to Pemberton Place but it was worth it. The building itself (as demonstrated above) is very modern, slanty and, of course, has a giant coke bottle on the top, along with those weird big-lipped puff balls featured on the adverts. When I arrived, I sat in the shade with a hotdog and a soda and watched fellow tourists taking photos of them “reaching” up to grab the coke bottle on top of the building. It kept me amused for a while!

Once I had cooled off, I entered the magical land of coke. During the 1996 Atlanta olympics, every country was asked to design a coke bottle to represent their heritage and people. These bottles are scattered around the museum and it was interesting to see the ways that various countries want themselves portrayed. I was unable to find the UK design unfortunately.

So, you hang around in the foyer until a guide comes to get you and then you’re taken into a little room with lots of coke related paraphernalia on display. Just think of any household item and, chances are, they have one with coke emblazoned on it. The guide, who was a woman from New Orleans, then told the story of Coca-Cola, which is filled with family friendly facts. Once story time is over you are shown into a theatre and you watch a film all about how to be happy. It’s narrated by and features those strange creatures from the recent tv adverts – the ads where we’re shown the inner workings of a coke vending machine and all the magic that happens. To be honest, the happiness tips were just general ones that you’ll hear anywhere: exercise, socializing, trying new things etc. However, this being the World of Coca-cola, all the tips related back to drinking coke and so, the ever so subtle message of the film is DRINK COKE = BE HAPPY.

Cheers Pemberton...we thank you for your great invention!

Once you’ve learnt how to be happy, the doors open and you are let loose in the building. There’s some more films, which are aimed at kids but I visited the bottling plant (the smallest one in the USA!), the exhibit about media and the tasting room. The plant is used purely for producing the free bottle of coke for the end of the tour but it’s interesting to watch. Or maybe I’m just a bit nerdy! The media exhibit needs no explanation…posters, merchandise, different types of bottles and adverts, you can even have a photo inside a “room” that’s been decorated exclusively with coke merchandise. After having a wander through this, I was getting a bit fed up of red and white!

Onto the tasting room, and I would say that this bit is worth the price of admission. Even if you hated the rest of the place, you will love the tasting room. Not surprisingly, this is where you can have a taste of coke drinks from all over the world. There are stacks of plastic cups everywhere and you simply go from continent to continent and help your self to as much of each drink as you like. They have a special section dedicated to the basic cokes: Coke, Diet, Zero, Cherry, Vanilla and I think one of the citrus flavours was there too. I had a lovely cup of vanilla because they don’t sell it in Britain anymore. When I asked one of my friends what he would like as a present from America, his answer was “a Vanilla Coke”. If anyone from the Coca-cola company is reading this: Bring back Vanilla to Britain! You’ve got at least two customers!

I should probably explain to any American readers that the selection of flavoured sodas in the UK is very limited. We’ve pretty much got the basics and so I was very excited about the endless artificial colours and flavours of America! The tasting room had lots of Fanta flavours (strawberry, grape, watermelon) and root beer and god knows what else. My favourite one was an orange drink from Japan, which I think was vegetable flavoured. It had a picture of a carrot on the dispenser anyway. It was much nicer than expected, and not particularly veggie tasting.

Once you’ve had the mountains of fun to be had in the tasting room (and then gone to the toilet!) you come to the wonders of the gift shop. Think of an item and they probably had it in that shop. It would be more accurate to call it an emporium really. There were shelves of t-shirts and hoodies, pens, pencils, stickers, magnets, books, signs, postcards and furniture and a lot of people were not being picky about their purchases. I bought myself a magnet and a postcard declaring I had been to Atlanta and the World of Coca-cola but most people were filling their baskets with at least one of each item listed above. It was a crazy sight to see.

When you leave the wonderful World of Coca-cola, you are presented with an exclusive bottle of coke, which states “Bottled at the World of Coca-cola, Atlanta, GA”. I wanted to keep the bottle but I didn’t think it was such a good idea to try to store glass in my suitcase for the next 3 months. I still have the cap for it on top of my freezer though. I was very much looking forward to chilling it and having a refreshing coke later that evening. However, once the bottle was sufficiently chilled I realised that I had no bottle opener. I had to use the windowsill in the hotel room for leverage, which fizzed up the coke and half of it erupted onto the carpet. I guess I was just so desperate to be happy.

Next – From Georgia to California. Greyhound style!

“Tomorrow…is another sequel”

Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.

I love Gone with the Wind. I love the magnitude of the book and the crazy brightness of the Technicolor film. So, I was very excited about seeing the place where Ms Mitchell wrote her one and only novel.

The ticket desk is inside the gift shop and you are taken round the house and exhibits as part of a tour and you wait in the shop until the tour guide appears. There was a small exhibit about the film, which included a video and some props. The door of Tara and the painting of Scarlett (it features in the scene where she gives birth to Bonnie) were impressive to see. At the start of the tour, our guide asked everyone who had seen the film to raise their hands. Everyone’s hands were raised. She then asked who had read the book and only about five people had. It never occurred to me that I would be amongst FILM fans rather than LITERATURE fans in the home of an author! The tour covered Mitchell’s life and I learnt that she wrote Gone with the Wind out of boredom. She was housebound with an injury and so she decided to write a novel to keep herself busy. She originally named Scarlett’s character Pansy.

The gift shop was full of brilliantly tacky products: mint tins, film prints, music boxes, figurines, painted plates and piles of books. They also have two massive cardboard cut-outs of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.The shop stocked the 2 authorized books linked with Gone with the Wind. There is “Rhett Butler’s People”, which is a prequel and “Scarlett”, which is a sequel. Mitchell’s estate is very strict about anything to do with GWTW, so it seems a bit strange that they would have authorised two separate novels.

I read the opening lines of “Scarlett” and, despite glowing reviews plastered across the cover, it’s monumentally trashy! It opens at Melanie’s funeral, with everyone whose left alive standing at her graveside in the rain. I managed to find a copy of it in a San Diego bookstore for $2. I was slightly embarrassed to have to go to the counter to pay for it…I wanted to explain to the bookseller that I was reading it for curiosity and irony! I read about three-quarters of it and then I flicked to the back and read the final paragraph. Everyone knows the tragedy of Scarlett and Rhett and so the only real reason to write this book is to give readers what they want (i.e. for Scarlett and Rhett to end up together) and so you can take an educated guess as to what happens at the end. The idea presented at the end of GWTW is that Scarlett cannot be happy because she doesn’t realise her mistakes until it’s too late. “Scarlett” has her making the same mistakes over and over again and it’s slightly frustrating to read! The writing is so blatant and the signposts for plot development jump off the page; everytime there was a paragraph dedicated to conveying Scarlett’s happiness, I knew that something bad was about to happen. GWTW has the violent and dramatic backdrop of the Civil War and Scarlett’s life is constantly changed by it and so, when Mitchell puts a problem in Scarlett’s path, it’s almost always to do with the war or a reprucussion of it. “Scarlett” doesn’t have an over-arching story or event and it feels like there’s nothing to hold everything together. A lot of the key events in “Scarlett” have an glaring similarity to events in GWTW. There was one point in the book that I did actually gasp with shock but I won’t spoil it for anyone thinking of giving their brains a rest and reading the book! The book is okay as a stand-alone novel but it doesn’t add anything to the world of GWTW and Scarlett herself changes so she’s not the selfish, determined, man-eating, southern belle that we all know and love.

The actual place where Mitchell lived and worked is a small flat. Apparently, Mitchell deliberatly chose a one-bedroom flat so that visitors would be discouraged from staying the night! The rooms are full of period pieces, none of it is Mitchell’s original furniture but I think it gives a good idea about design styles and how Mitchell’s writing environment would have looked. The guide takes you through the parallels between Mitchell’s life and Scarlett’s life and it’s facinating to learn how much of her book was taken from life, almost directly in some cases. One sad example is that Mitchell was unable to see her mother before she died, just like when Scarlett arrives at Tara about a day after the death of Ellen.

I’m not sure you can get anymore “Atlanta” than seeing the place where Gone with the Wind was written.

Next is the World of Coca-Cola.

The Peach State

“No matter how many times I look in the mirror and tell myself how fabulous I am, it means nothing because he doesn’t want me…When I don’t see him for a few days I miss him and the thought of seeing him makes my stomach flip. But, when I do see him, sometimes I end up feeling so hurt, rejected or just plain angry that I hope I never see him again”

Atlanta is the largest city in the southern states and its airport is the busiest in the world. It gets a mention on the Family Guy episode “It’s a Trap!”, and funnily enough TBS showed it while I was there. It’s home to Margaret Mitchell, Coca-Cola and Martin Luther King. It is very hot and humid, which is probably a very obvious thing to say but I will admit being caught a bit off gaurd by the heat. It was heavy…you could feel the air all around you as you walked. I was in awe of the locals…I found the heat unbearble at times despite wearing a cotton dress but they were strolling around comfortably in jeans and shirts. Atlanta is built up but not busy and you don’t have to walk far to find suburbia. A very beautiful suburbia too: wooden houses with porches that are painted every colour you can think of.

Prior to the adventure, my only experiences I had of American courtesy and friendliness were New York and Disney World in Florida. Two opposing ends of the spectrum. Not everyone in New York City is rude but due to the size of the place and how busy it is there is always an angry feel to it. Disney World is such a majorly happy and friendly place that you feel like sitting in a corner reading Edgar Allan Poe. In Georgia I got a proper introduction to the American people, and I especially loved the greetings and compliments in the street from passing strangers. I was so shocked the first few times it happened! A woman walked by me and said, “Wow I love your dress!”. You never really expect that in a city.

I’m not trying to make any negative comparisions between Americans an Britons bacause I love my fellow Brits, but even after a day in Georgia I saw how totally different we are as cultures and people. Often people assume that, because we speak the same language and are part of the western hemisphere, we’re practically the same country. When I told certains friends that I was going to America and that it had been a dream of mine for years, they asked me, “Why would you want to go to America? They have no culture.”. I think it is a widely held belief that, because the USA is such a young country with only a couple of hundred years worth of history, they have no proper art or classics. I was never of this opinion. I don’t know how you can accuse America of being a cultural vacuum when it’s the home of Rock n’Roll, Jazz, Blues etc! But more on that later.

These were my first impressions of the USA: the weather, the people, and the variety. This one city gave the world the most popular film of all time, the most famous drink in the world and the foremost civil rights warrior. If that’s not culture than I don’t know what is!

Next – a closer look at Gone with the Wind.