We drove 2500 miles in ten days I know this is an obvious thing to say but it was much much further than I imagined. The road was relentless, the land is big. We took turns, doing 150 miles each, and playing 20 questions in order to avoid falling asleep at the wheel. The air conditioner froze our feet and gave us pimples. We'd open the windows to let the hot breeze in. It took us two whole days of driving across Virginia, across Tennessee, to get to Memphis, after which all we could do was flop into a motel bed, starey-eyed and exhausted.

We stopped off at the Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams Rest Area on Music Highway, the I-40 between Memphis and Nashville
The vending machines were jammed and broken.

Roadside attractions
A building shaped like a guitar; a giant paint tin; a giant ice cream tub; a sign that says: "Pain and disappointment are part of life."

Virginia Creeper Parkway
We are stunned to realise that Virginia Creeper comes from Virginia. The forests are smothered with it. Trees look like blobby monsters reaching out to catch you.

Lightning storms
The sky was dark as we drove towards Memphis, cracking for lightning flashes and thunderbolts. It was frightening. Weather is so much bigger and more threatening over there. We saw rivers that had turned to steam in the hot air, and mist rolling off the hills, or maybe the mountaintops, it was hard to tell how high up we were. I will never forget the smell of the land, dampness, greenness.

The Mason-Dixon Line
I insisted we pull over after we crossed the line into Dixie so that I could get into my dungarees and my ol' straw hat. I jammed my old clay pipe between my teeth, struck up my home made banjo and we were away. This is all lies, by the way.

Trucks
The further south we went, the more intimidating the trucks became. Covenant Transport is a christian trucking company from Chattanooga. They have a fleet of trucks with god-fearing messages on the back:
• It is not a choice it is a child
• Pray for our troops
• A picture of the US flag with the caption: serve God. Go to a church of your choice this week.

The crash
After half an hour of tailbacks in the searing noonday heat, we trundled past the wreckage of a truck crash. The truck had scraped the road's crash barriers into shards of metal, then it must have taken a dive dead first into the edge of a bridge. The ground around the truck was scorched, it must have blown up. The driver's cab was mashed into nothing, the driver could not have survived. The truck's side panels had been burned away, exposing its cargo: meat. The flames had half-cooked the truckload of burger patties, which oozed grease, pink, stinking, gooey, as the firefighters fought on.

Two places inspired annoying earworms
The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and Shenandoah River.

Jelly ladies
I thought I was being clever by bringing car snacks that would not melt in the heat. I was wrong. By the end of the trip, my bag of Norwegian jelly ladies had formed a single pink viscous blob in the glove compartment.

Cracker Barrel
The ubiquitous roadside shop-slash-restaurant has been selling the myth of the american past to hungry consumers since, oh, er, 1969. Because they're one of the principle Opry sponsors, I wanted to have a look. Cracker Barrels are built in the same hangar-like prefabs as McDonalds, Wendy's and all those other strip mall hellholes, only they're supposed to make you feel as though you're stepping back into a simpler, better, more honest time. I can't think of a collective noun for rocking chairs, but there were a lot of them outside, on the faux porch. Inside was a shop selling nostalgic gift wares that were Made in China. We ate some food. The vegetarian things that we wanted on the menu had been cooked with meat, so we ended up with a Vegetable Plate, a strange assortment of things: macaroni cheese, hot apple slices in sweet gloop, mushy carrots, sweetcorn. As the waitress placed Kay's food in front of her, my girlfriend said: "Wow, my dinner is entirely yellow."

Support Our Troops
At least one in ten cars had a yellow ribbon Support Our Troops sticker on it, many had two or more. If you hire a car from Avis at Newark Airport, your can will also come adorned with such a sticker, albeit a smaller more discreet one in the window. This sticker made us feel disgusted. We do not support American troops, we despise what they are doing in the world and we believe that the way that the way in which desperate poor, young and black people are pressure to join up is a tragedy. The sticker comes down. We devised a competition to spot the Most Patriotic Car. In the car park of the Wal-Mart in Bristol, Virginia, Kay saw the winner and wrote this in her notebook: