Flyin' Shoes

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be boarding the Amtrak in Seattle to spend 45 hours crawling to Chicago, hopefully involving some sleep and conversation with random travelers along the way. Having grown up in a country with a substantial train system, it’s been on my mind to attempt the same method of travel across states I’ve flown many times, and to see if the posters of yesteryear can still bully the senses with thunderous feelings of power, as iron and steel behemoths slice their way through never-ending landscapes.

I started my US travels in Chicago, on the 25th May 2007. It’s taken 3 years to cover the lower 48 states, after planning to do them all in a year. Things have changed a lot since those first days, especially when it comes to decisiveness and taking ownership. Even the downsides have been positively influential; the long path across this land becoming an incubator to thoughts and experiences that should have been realised 20 years ago. Getting a strong foothold and announcing your presence to the world doesn’t happen overnight. No matter how long it takes, once you’ve decided to make that announcement, you’re on your way – better late than never.

The final day of my current trip and I afforded myself the luxury of sleeping in and left at 8:30. With the liberal estimates for my driving and opting to skip breakfast in Orlando, I knew I had plenty of extra time to get to the airport.

This was by far the longest single and uneventful stretch of freeway that I’ve covered, upon which I only stopped a couple of times for fuel and food. Signs for boiled peanuts were again appearing but this time accompanied with ‘Gator heads’ and ‘Oranges’. Funny that I associate oranges with Florida, yet only see freeway stalls and signs for them, in Georgia. This stretch, took a total of eight hours to get to the outskirts of Atlanta from the motel and unfortunately, landed me in the area at the start of afternoon traffic. Summising that trying to exit the freeway for downtown to visit the Martin Luthor King memorial, was commuting suicide, I took the alternate route around Atlanta and headed for my other itinerary location, of Stone Mountain.

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Well, I was thankfully up in time, knowing it would be a long haul but not quite aware of what hand my driving fate would be playing me later. It was a wonderfully smooth three hours to end up at Key West around 9:15am, which was fifteen minutes earlier than expected (despite leaving the motel later).

I fell in love with the streets almost instantly, with the wonderful architecture reminiscent, of some of the buildings I saw in New Orleans. After getting my bearings, I was delighted to have completely accidentally, parked a couple of streets from my first stop at the 5 Brothers, Cuban store. Paralleling the old corner shops in England (and yes, it was also on a corner) it was compact, with the air of something older, yet still clean and organised, without suffering a clinical look. I ordered up a Cuban coffee (café con leche) and the signature sandwich. I didn’t want to insult with attempts, at my couple of words of Spanish and stuck with the not-so-broken English. The sandwich is made in the back amidst their own form of feng shui; the serving hatch is at chest height and so I was listening to conversation in Spanish, from a very full pair of breasts (not that I’m complaining in the slightest, you understand). While waiting to pay, I gleefully watched a couple of leather-skinned old Americans, strolling and swapping the day’s news about fishing, while they too, awaited some coffee; I’m just loving how stereotypical movie scenes are presented before me.

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