My personal ‘table of classification’ lists the identification markings for the ‘ToTt’ as: the abundant use of the words ‘them’ and ‘they’, with secondary usage of the colour ‘black’, that they will appear early in a conversation with a stranger, and will challenge your received wisdom on political correctness.  As a ‘ToTt’, a ‘Them over There tale’ this was a new one. True, it did contain a pejorative ‘they’, but it also exhibited some degrees of originality. It’s a nice break from the usual dire warnings of impending doom.

Mississippi Mud on one side, Louisiana Gumbo on the other.



But it’s only breakfast time

A timely reminder, because we’re fast running out of Deep South, out of Cajun country, heading for the state line that separates Louisiana Gumbo from Texas Steak. The former, a catch-all name for the Creole patois, the gelatinous okra thickened stew and the glutinous local top soil, the latter the end product from the Longhorns we’ve passed. We’re fast  running out of miles for finding some ethnic cuisine, a bit of genuine good ol’ southern cookery. We’ll have to hope that the authentic appears by the side of the road in the right place, at the right time. Crawfish pie for breakfast just doesn’t do it. 



The verdict? South Louisiana meets West of Scotland.  A thick cladding of batter, a good dripping of lard, an oil spill of grease. But sadly no deep fried confectionery, or salt and sauce; however in their place is an   unadorned white bread roll that’s gone five lengths in a bath of boiling oil. Deep Southern chip buttie. Heavy on the starch, light on the piquant, heaven on cerebrum, hell on the cholesterol. Then I remember that any and every Scots chippie could easily  trump this with his Scottio-Italianate  fusion speciality; the deep fried pizza. Which only  leaves a lingering question: ‘if it’s not haute cuisine, could it be ethnic cookery and can I lubricate my bike’s chain with the wrapper?’.  Maybe and Yes.



It’s true; the supermarket is called  ‘Piggly Wiggly’.  It’s a big company…

All our trips have a certain commonality, forbye the collection of mosquito bites and pedalled miles. It’s a tick-off of iconic fauna, be it the grizzlies in the Rockies, the rheas on the Pampa, the bison by the Great Slave Lake or Nessie in the Loch.  You’ve not completed a visit, gained your credibility tag, until you’ve scored that, sometimes elusive credit.  There’s a procedure to collection, one that has to be completed in the requisite order.  No sightings can be made until: firstly, the valued fauna has been awarded tourist board status, to wit, it must appear at least three times in every piece of visitor propaganda. Mysticism and fabulism are no impediments to inclusion, which is why Nessie should be the Crest on the new Scottish coat-of-arms. Secondly, there must be the indirect confirmations of potential sightings.  They come  in varying forms: diners offering ”gator Po-boys”, gas stations selling Grizzly chewing tobacco, roadside directions to the Official Monster Exhibition.  Finally there’s the evidence that officialdom believes in the icon’s existence: the request that makes you wonder why would you want to feed or harass an alligator, or the more ominous newspaper headline reporting ‘bear attacks jogger’.  This visit being to the Deep South our quested fauna has to be a snake and an alligator.  We’ve carried out all the due diligences, moved through the various stages, scanned the brochures, clocked the menus, looked over every bridge at all the part-submerged logs and trees trying to tick off a crocogator.  All to no avail.  So far the script is running to form.  No serpents, no amphibians.  So if they won’t come to us, we’ll have to go to them.  It’s time to canoe a bayou.

Rob’s a good friend from college days, who, with Sandra, finds himself posted to Houston, and as a Munro-Bashing Aussie-Scot marooned in flattest east Texas where they haven’t even got any Marilyns, has taken to kayaking.  Now as all enthusiasts know, if you leave your kit in a darkened corner, it will mysteriously procreate.  So as good fortune would have it, their collection of craft have miraculously bred and there’s seats and paddles for all of us.  Maybe it’s beginners luck, but that same good fortune will hold all day.  It’s early February, it’s meant to be wintertime when any self respecting ‘gator is dug down, lost in a mud hole and kayakers are pulling on wetsuits, yet this morning we’re in shorts, tee shirts and factor 15 sun screen.

 Having a guide who knows the convoluted bends of  an oxbowing bayou, which are leads and which dead-ends in a chemical plant’s storm drain, is useful.  Better still are a pair of acclimatised eyes. I would never have seen that Moccasin water snake, basking on a log, moments after we launched, nor what I took to be a floating leaf, sliding quietly out from the bank.  In stealth mode we round a bend, close in, there it is, easy to see; it would have take a wall-eyed mole to have missed this ten-footer.  Some alligators, when spooked will leap with a crash and belly flop the water; others will just stare you out, quietly slip furtively down the bank and silently slide below the surface. This first confirmed ‘tick’ never moved.  We drifted on the light breeze, closer and closer.  Now I can see the colour of the gums, count the teeth; yellow, and too many.  Still it stays motionless.  Rob suggests, mischievously, that it’s actually a dummy placed there by the tourist people, and frankly I was beginning to wonder.  Then the head moves; they’ve fitted animatronics – rather neat.  At three boat lengths, it slithers down the mud and settles below the water, barely a ripple disturbs the skin, leaving only a trickle of bubbles popping on the surface.  A trail that’s moving ominously in my way.

Which is as close as you come to a ‘gator story.  Unlike bear stories, there’s no need for food stashes up trees, no steaming heaps of  poop by the side of the road, no adrenalin-infused dark time awakenings.  In short, there’s no opportunity for fabricating a traveller’s credible ‘incredibility story’.  There are the ”fed ‘gator, dead ‘gator” warnings, but the biggest risk is a disturbed beast leaping unexpectedly from the bank and swamping your kayak.  At the next bend I keep to the very middle of the bayou.

With time our eyes start to tune in, we become accustomed to picking out the good ‘gator haul outs, spotting the telltale signs of mud slides, the sheltering part-submerged logs, the tangles of trapped, floating vegetation. These, the perfect bed for a dozing juvenile, whose parent will be close at hand, only I can’t see it, – yet.  Spotting them in the shadows, their eyes and nostrils their only evidence, moments before they sink.

Guesstimating, and overestimating length with a fisherman’s elasticated rule.  They’re big, but it’s not quite warm enough yet.  It will take a bit more sun for the real monsters to emerge.  Unlike the Scots’ monster which only requires the post-pub closing time of a summer’s tourist season to surface.

It’s strange this feeling, this mixing in the same milieu with the last of the dinosaurs.  The slow, silent water, the scream of a disturbed osprey, the deliberate stalk of a hunting heron, the ragged tatters of grey moss dripping from the swamped, naked trees.  A lost, primordial world.  Or it would be, if it wasn’t for the distant hum from the local chemical plant.  This frisson of imagined,  possible danger, a danger that  plays on your subconscious, such that when a giant catfish broaches the surface between your paddle and your hull, it takes several moments for your heart rate and your kayak to stabilise.

It’s a privilege to be moving through this world, in an otherworld that has been consumed by a megacity’s sprawl, devoured but not digested, in a craft that is as close as a person can naturally come to travelling with a relic from a past, a forgotten aeon.  It is I who refutes the idiom, as it is I who’s smiling at the crocodile.

The ever eloquent Irish have a blessing, that has been modified to suit, by many:

It’s to be found on every second Irish Linen tea towel, the others having logos of a black toucan or a golden harp.

A second verse could add to this wish list. To include: no stop lines, no semis, no rumble strip and no rush hour, and if I’m really pushing the patience of our guardian, could I include: where gradients are gentle and the camping is free. Now that I’ve stretched the credulity of any omnipotent deity, I’ve also placed this desired world away from the Emerald Isle and set it on to planet ‘Fantastical Arcadia’. Oddly though, this surrealist world does seem to exist, even in this over-hectic land. It’s called the Natchez Trace.

Created in 1938 as National Scenic Byway to promote scenic, natural and historic interests, it runs for over four hundred miles from Nashville, TN to Natchez, MS. The route follows the ‘Sunken Trace’, the original line of an ancient thoroughfare, a collection of indigenous trails that the early settlers adopted and the nascent national governments used as a post trail. It’s been fought along in the times of the belligerences, been the haunt of rogues and thieves, and is now the tag to which the Federal Government has attached a National Park.

Now I make that several ticks in favour of Fantasia Arcadia, but should you become blasé about this other-worldly existence, just stand on one of the over-bridges and look down on Interstate USA, or take off on an exit ramp back into the 21st century. It’s a glance through a looking glass, a step beyond the pale, that emphasises all the other entities that can’t exist in a National Park.  Of worm bait dispensers and Baptist Churches, of drive through pawn and pay-day loans, of the gastric belt that’s the ‘all you can eat $6 buffet’ – seniors’ rate.  It’s gas station coffee and supermarket foraging, it’s a room in a motel when the snow starts to fly.  It’s a chance to collect those absurdities and oddities of location and situation: The Leakey Oil Company’s tanker that didn’t deliver to the BP gas station; the garden centre that sells ‘Glock ammo and Potted Pansies’, the epistles outside a church, that preach: ‘If your life stinks, we’ve got a pew for you’, or the shop entitled ‘Birds, Butts and Bones’, that then further confuses by offering ‘Butt Rub’.  Enlightenment only coming further around the corner with the words: ‘BBQ’.

The sad irony lies in the fact that the dispossessed of Strath Kildonan were themselves the catalyst for the dispossessions, the cleansing of the ‘five civilised tribes’, out of the south-east. Thus fulfilling the ad-man’s holy mantra of ’go west young man’, and clergyman’s notion of ‘Hell in the here and now’.



We’re in the Deep South, y’all!

Alex must be one very happy bunny. Maybe those ‘Tartan Day’ parades down Fifth Avenue, with First Ministers in dubious kilts, have had more effect than was first realised. For the Official Visitor Guide to the State of Mississippi, under the title of ‘Currency Facilities’, states that the Hancock Bank will change monies from Canada, France, Switzerland, Australia, and Scotland. I’m now rumaging in my sporran for some Groats, to test this proclamation. However, given that Francs and D-Marks still appear to be in circulation maybe I shouldn’t hold my breath. Or does this local bank know somthing that the ECB and the Eurozone have missed?

Those of you who travelled through our Argentina blogs last year may remember us meeting Pauline from Portobello, and cycling with her for a few days.  After we went our separate ways, Pauline went off into Bolivia, then flew to the US to join her friend Graham to cycle across the US from Boston to Seattle.  Graham is a filmmaker, and recorded their journey with a view to making a full-length film of the trip.  Pauline is now in New Zealand, and Graham has returned to Edinburgh with several thousand miles of film (or its digital equivalent!) to edit.  You can have a look at some of the video on the Sleepless til Seattle website.

Graham is now trying to raise some money for the post-production of the film.  He’s set up a website to try to attract some community funding; if you’re interested, please take a look.  You can find the website here.  The bits of film we’ve seen are looking great, and it would be a shame if all this hard work wasn’t able to reach a wider audience.  There are some fun perks for investors, so take a look and help if you can!

Like fish, we are being slowly, inexorably, reeled in.  An inevitability that has a well-scripted conclusion.  We fight it with vigour, diving deep into the weeds and tangles of Luddite stubbornness and cantankerous argument.  It’s ordained in the scriptures of progress that we’ll end up floundering on the riverbank outside a techno-despot, purchasing a crap-nav or one of its too-clever smarmy-smart half-cousins.

Our predicament is in direct response to an all too familiar conundrum.  To see where we’ve been, to find where we are and where we want to be, a map is a neat tool, its use a useful skill, yet both are fast becoming redundant.  The best, the only, that we found is a state-wide sheet, crammed with a spiderweb of numbered roads that bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground.  We’ve been here before, and there’s two ways of tackling the problem.  Either follow convention and end up riding down the edge of busy two lane highways that have a habit of depositing their cargos directly on to a ‘cyclists are banned’ freeway.  Or head for the tracery of backroads that may or may not have a desired destination.  The former offers assurances and gas-station coffee; the latter a frisson of unpredictability, a distinct taint of adventure and no road signs.  To help even out the odds, we try to use local knowledge, which can be of variable quality.  Sometimes it’s an opportunity for a casual chat and chance to sign the visitors’ book, but offers little of consequential information.  Other times, it’s a fistful of glossy visitor guff, or single sheet of printed, explicit instructions.  This last was how we ended up negotiating a series of dirt tracks on to the top of a mountain, in the dark, in the desired place. Ludd drops his first shot, love-15.  A lucky point, as there´s always that soupcon of crap-navity, on this occasion the gremlin suggested that we turn left down Duck’s Nest Motorway. Visions of eight-lane macadam that in reality turns out to be eight feet of muddy logging track.

It’s another dropped point, though I feel it is more a McInroe: ‘you can not be serious’ disputed line call.  For herein lies the difference between cartography and a random collection of letters.  A map is a picture, a construct of a thousand words, full of fascination, information, confirmation, whilst the sparse words on the screen are thin, lacking in assurance, ripe for misinterpretation. Technicolor versus black and white.  It’s a new language, one that requires new interpretation and evaluation.  One instruction requires that we turn left after 3.8 miles; we still refuse to reconfigure into imperial; Napoleon’s measure is much nore gratifying. So mathing in fives and eights we cycle for a little over 6kms.  There is a left turn; how clever of ‘progress’!  Only there are two left turns, one to a cemetery, the other to a locked gate.  We check out both, broaching the gate and riding off into the sunset, or at least down a fast depleting path.  Backtrack, curse technology, to discover that our left turn might be a left bend in the main drag.  It’s a neat learning curve, and we use each new reinterpretation to our advantage.  What the use of a quality map would have shown was that graveyard, the pond, the power line, all the insignificant details that you use, almost subconsciously when mapreading.  We found our way to the park, despite the mandatory ‘gremlin’, which was solved when we flagged down one of the few vehicles to pass us.  An interesting choice as it transpired: forest law enforcement, who wasn’t offended when I accused his Scottish ancestors of being  a bunch of criminals.  Well, they were Johnstones after all.  He even offered us a lift for the last few miles.

Yet, without that initial draft of instructions we would not have ventured away from the blacktop with it’s tame assurances, which would have meant that we would have missed out on another bit of adventure, another smooth red earth road, another tract of majestic woodland.

The fish is not landed, the game is not lost, the ball is still bouncing along, stotting down to the Gulf of Mexico.

‘Cheaha’, from the indigenous first nations, meaning ‘high point’. In a state like Alabama, that I think I know for swamps, mosquitoes and craw fish pie, it comes as surprise to find these highlands of crystalline quartzite extrusions. They’re the coccyx to the Appalachian backbone. The spine that runs north through the eastern states, border crossing and forming the swayback of the Gaspe, then to submerge into the ocean, only to resurface once again with the crennellated vertebrae and multiple pates of Beinn Eighe in Torridon, Scotland.

‘Cheaha: the high place’, to credit one piece of optimistic tourist propaganda, suggests that it has ‘probably’ the best view in the USA. Note ‘probably’ not ‘possibly’. where possibly is a euphemism for ‘only’. ‘Only’, as in ‘only view of Alabama’. It is a good vista, a high overview of the complicated geography of low eroded, mounded, forested hills that mingle and mash together like a lumpy pudding. A topography that leads to a perpetual roller-coaster road that, like a stotting ball will bounce all the way to the great southern rivers. Steep slow climbs, fast near instant descents. No bends, the tarmac stretching long and far into the distance. Roads populated by hunters in day-glo caps, the occasional logging truck and barking dog. A road that progresses through an open, bare deciduous forest of denuded red oak and southern pine. Which in a summer’s full leaf, might become claustrophobic, is in this hibernating season, open and inviting. The elongated shadows thrown by the silver grey trunks seem to trap the cold of the early morning frosts, the slow rising sun, melting the glaze, forming railings of crystals that beat time to the flicker of the strobing light, and give a thin encouragement of impending warmth.

Then it happens quite suddenly. My fingertips that have stubbornly refused to thaw, the frost on the handlebars that glistens but won’t melt, the thermometer that’s been cruising along in the minus zone, all change. The tingling of blessed relief, dry grab-on, and an escalating mercury. From frost nip to mosquito bite in less time than it takes to pluck a banjo. From a clear midwinter morn to a Scottish summer’s Sunday. A hike of over thirty degrees, old money.

‘Cheaha’ the high point’ has one obvious attribute: it’s a mountain in a sea of mole hills. So like any other protruberance that acquires the audacity to reach above the surrounding plane, procures a comms tower of Transylvanian proportions. A stake to skewer a mountain.

‘Cheaha- the high point’, whilst not the physical start to this journey, does make for a good metaphorical beginning. It’s downhill, with lots of re-ascends to further highs, a rolling journey, with a search for the terminating, concluding ‘Cheaha’.

Blogging across time zones is very confusing.  I promise that the last item was posted shortly after 19:30, Central Time, on 31st December, but the blog is determined that it is already January.  It’s all just too hard to understand.

Never mind.  We’d both like to wish you a very happy New Year, and all the best for 2012.  I’m sure it doesn’t really matter when it happened – is happening – will happen.

The Navigator and The Chronicler, in Clanton, AL.

Travel Tip Number 14:  Sit back and relax, treat yourself to a “garra fish spa”. 

So claims the advertisement on a pillar in the departures lounge.  We’re sitting, pending, awaiting the call for our flight, one of only seven that will depart Edinburgh today.  Sitting people-watching, poster-gazing and estimating which south-east Asian terminal we could be marooned in.  For the Lanzarote flight has left, taking with it a cargo of Thomson packaged passengers, creating a dilution of the locally-accented, a melting of the blue-skinned that leaves a concentration of gizmo-afflicted aficionados and jet-black haired orientals.  It’s an apartheid of religion and thrift; for the Buddhists and the Muslims, the Hindus and the skinflint Scots are all happy to accept the offer of a cheaper flight whilst the quasi-Christians are stuffing out on turkey and their annual ingestion of overcooked Brussels Sprouts.

We’re usurping the season of overconsumption and mild, grey winter skies for the season of overindulgent and cold grey Atlanta skies.  Or so the Weather Channel predicts.  The forecasts are similar; the temperatures are identical.  The differences, we hope, lie in the prospects.  The former is an optimist’s climatic high, the latter an aberration.  We hope it will get warmer.

We’ve both squandered our cycling tans, suffocated by long trews and a mediocre Scots summer.  Spread the odd inch, gained the odd pound.  It is time to sit back and relax, time to hit the trail.

Our flight is called: “Women and Children first, then will load by numbers”.  Like the last chopper out of Saigon, there’s the usual, inevitable general ruck and rush at the departure gate, which is odd as we all have boarding passes and there’s no Vietcong down in check-in.  I look back as we descend the skybridge; the lounge is deserted, shops are shuttered.  We are the last flight out.  Yet it is only mid-morning: but it is Christmas Day.

We can relax, our bikes have been spirited from us, no questions asked, no excess baggage paid, hopefully to rematerialise in Atlanta, Georgia.  Ready to start a 6-week sojourn through the North American South.  I have only one worry.  The Navigator, when queried about garra foot spas was able to explain with confidence and knowledge.  It would appear that you put your feet into a bowl of water swarming with some cousin of the pirhana; apparently they like to nibble the dead skin off your nether appendages.  Now I’ve seen the Bond movie and I’ve stood in the Rosa Burn in Brodick bay as baby flounders gnaw at your feet, and I know it’s not de-stressful.  Forget Travel Tip Number 14.  Try my Travel Tip Number 15: escape the winter, hit the trail, ride the Deep South.

Well, hello there!  Been a long while – 6 months in fact – since the last post.  Despite good intentions, blogging from home hasn’t happened.  But we’re off again very soon, on 25th December, on another bicycle adventure, this time to the Deep South.  I’m not going to steal The Chronicler’s material, so you will have to wait to hear about our plans.  No, this is a piece about what we’ve been up to since we spoke last – aside from working, that is.

You  can see the results of our project on Flickr, and the Welcome Cottages booking site.  We can take a few private bookings, so do contact us if you would like to use it.

Watch this space for more updates.

The Navigator