I remember vividly our arrival, it was late at night and we stumbled off the coach sleepy and cramped. My hips felt dislocated and my mouth tasted like floors. The journey from New York had begun by train, but after 16 hours flash flooding in Georgia had meant swapping the relative comfort and emptiness of the train for a smelly coach full of fat snoring men and rustling crisp packets. We travelled by coach fourteen hours through the most spectacular lightning storms I have ever witnessed, driving over the lake while the water around us lit up and the sky cracked open. We walked through the doors of New Orleans station and the air hit me like syrup, so thick and heavy, full of rain and jazz.
Dear United States of America, you are huge. On the train (double decker, as if it wasn't already twice the size of the one I'd take from home to London) I remember gazing out the (huge) window at a very large river spanned by a colossal bridge and vast fields full of grass as tall as me, giant billboards beside giant roads carrying giant trucks to (presumably) giant places. I remember how almost overwhelming it is to be confronted by that much impossible space. I also remember the sounds of the guy two seats behind me hawking up great strings of snot. The two jolly train conductors and the one little mean one. My involuntary sniggering at a building called 'Wackoff Steel Ltd' and the worrying that my brain was turning to jelly after only a couple of hours of a 30 something hour journey. I got very excited in an I-recently-overdosed-on-The-Wire sort of way about the train stopping in Baltimore, all I really got to see of Omar and McNulty's stomping ground was the sides of two other trains and a sign that read 'Baltimore'. I loved the slow trundling of the train through open fields and small villages, past homes so close I could spy on people's day to day lives. There was an old woman in her dressing gown sitting on white plastic lawn furniture cleaning her microwave with a hosepipe. Americans are crazy.
USA! USA!