Bible Belt

TJ and I left the home of:

"I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend." George W. Bush, on visiting Denmark, Washington D.C., June 29, 2005

over a week ago headed for the south. We've been to Winston Salem in Nth Carolina, Atlanta, Helen and Augusta in Georgia and many hours of freeway in between. The weather's been great, sometimes as good as a Wellington summers day. Although we've only scratched the surface on the Southern States - here's what I think so far:

• The further south you go the more annoying the accent
• There are more speed limits here on the freeway than I've had bad coffees in America. 55, 60, 65, 70mph to name a few. And the thing is no one seems to take notice most of the time anyway. Driving from Augusta to Atlanta yesterday, I was in the slow lane doing 80 with trucks passing me in a 65mph zone! One thing about driving on the open road here is it's so easy compared to NZ. It's all straight and quick. We're going to do 12hrs tomorrow back to DC.
• The vehicle of choice is a pick-up truck on steroids. Pick-ups are big enough to begin with, but here they have two extra wheels at the back, gigantic tool chests and suspension to carry a bobcat. The strange thing is you never see them with anything on the deck, hmm. Maybe they're on their way to pick up their mommas for church.
• Cars all have Jesus fish stickers on them.

Ok, I really only noticed stuff about driving - But we did do a lot!!

In between driving we also saw the worlds largest aquarium that just opened in Atlanta last November. It was pretty impressive with Whale Sharks being the best part. We also got to touch some of theexhibitss including a small hammerhead shark, anenomes, horseshoe crabs and rays. Unfortunately the starfish were on a 10min break!! Tough life.

We checked out the World of Coca Cola as Atlanta is the home of Coke. I don't know what we were expecting, but we basically paid $10 to be exposed to Coke's complete advertising history to be rewarded at the end with free samples of Coke products - along with 150 middle school children! Not my best purchase yet...

More to come soon.