Road trip to the Cape

Tuesday Matt and I went on a little road trip, months ago we'd planned a longer more exciting road trip, but Matt got a job and well you know, life just gets in the way of life from time to time!

(Oh and yes, he has had a haircut - apparently it's on purpose!)

Here we are setting off, the reason my face looks so odd is that I was a tad, erm scared. Take a look in the reflection in my sunglasses and you'll see we're actually on the highway, Matt's going 55 miles an hour and as you can see his eyes ain't exactly on the road!

Anyway, a mini-road trip was in order, so in the car we jumped on Tuesday, nice an early, well 10am anyway, which for us is an early hour on our days off and of course when I say our days off, I do of course mean Matt's day's off as I am on long leave. Having said that, it's been so long since I worked, I think and fear that I have gotten out of the habit when I return to the office around 20th July I wont have a clue what I'm doing, I'll be so out of touch I'll need a spade and forceps to get me back into it. Also adding to that, I've got so used to being off that I could really get used to doing this for the rest of my life, well, maybe a few little changes, like earning pay blogging, doing more writing and the odd voice work (My sweet English tones would go down a treat here in Amerikaaa!) And besides, shaking my Matt from sleep on his day's off is a tricky and thing to do, usually meeting with little success.

OK, so off we went, in the bright red car, heading down the real highway as I head down life's highway, first heading toward, Marion, then Vienna, bypassing his folks home and on to a place called Anna, which happens to have a hotel come motel kinda thing that dates back to the 50's - think Bates Motel and that's kinda what it looks like, sadly other buildings have been built up around it, so isolated it now isn't as it once would have been. But it really had the same feel to it as the one in the film, set out in a very similar way! Spooky to say the least, especially considering the very old, 50's style sign proudly proclaimed in faded, rusty paint that they had 'Color TV'

After Anna we headed on the road to Cape Girardeau in Missouri which was our ultimate destination, but I kept on seeing signs for funny places, and then I had the feeling of travelling very very fast! No Matt wasn't speeding - well not much anyway, I do feel he's had more than enough of me commenting on the MPH he's going, but anyway that wasn't it. Nope I kept on seeing signs making me think that somehow 'Hex' Matt's magical red sporty car had transported us to Egypt - Cairo! But, nope it's a real place over here, although like most things American, they pronounce it differently, it's more Care-oh !

I'm not exactly sure where, but someplace along the way, Matt pointed out what he thought might be his brother's house in the middle of a corn field. His brother makes a living out of being a man of nature, or in other words hunting! I think I'd quite like to live in the middle of nowhere, at least as long as I had cable TV and internet access, mind you, I say that now but put me out there and it may well be a different story!

Could you live in a place like this? Far from the noise and comfort that is the city? Well perhaps like me you think you could, think it would be great, then I urge you to remember in this neck of the woods they have poisonous spiders, snakes, ticks not to mention smelly skunks, garbage hungry raccoons and also more worryingly panthers, oh yeah and the odd bear or two!

Cape Girardeau, or just Cape, as it's know, is a busy town on the banks of the Mississippi, about 200 years old and has evolved from a tiny trading post to a frontier settlement governed by a French-Canadian guy a thriving, culturally mixed community of 37,000 residents, all on the world’s only inland cape. Some 26,000 cars cross the bridge each day going to and from Cape Girardeau - on Tuesday that was 26,001 with me an Matt added to the equitation.

I think I will always be surprised by the width of the river, the bridge at Cape is some 3,955 feet long, compare that to Tower Bridge in London, which is 880 feet. While we were crossing, I could see working barges far off in the distance and for a fleeting second I felt like Mark Twain. Thankfully, that didn't last long and I was very soon thinking of other things, like food!

So anyway, in Cape we had to drive around a bit to find the mall, because according to Matt someone had moved it and it wasn't in the right place! But find it we did and enter via a large Barns & Noble book store. I did look for Paul Burston's latest tome, but apparently it's not out over here yet. I Did see a book by Anne Brook, by not the same Anne Brook as over here, notice the absent E!

I liked the getting to the mall part more than the mall itself, it was reassuring Matt's memory was a little like mine in the fact that it resembles Swiss Cheese - full of holes! He'd told me the mall was huge, but what we found was a mall the size of Marion's, which by US standards is rather small! Anyway, I had a look in B & N which was lovely, I love book stores, everything about them, the feel, the look, the smell - everything is appealing. Indeed, the smell only amplifies with age, time allowed, I'd often browse and loiter in secondhand book shops, there is something about being surrounded by all that literary creativity, maybe I think it might rub off on me, maybe surrounding myself with greatness is hiding my own shortcomings, or maybe I'm just a cheapskate and like old cheap books!

We wandered the mall, checked out the goods and got a couple of pretzels, which is a way into my heart. I din;t know if you've ever had soft pretzels, no not those bags of little hard things, but the big soft doughy things the size of your hands, but they are so lovely. Auntie Anne's are the best I've tasted so far, indeed, when Matt was over in England, we went all the way to Croydon just to go to the nearest Auntie Annes! Cape doesn't have an AA, but does have a Soft Pretzel company, which whilst inferior, was still enjoyable. The member of staff on duty was as one might expect from a fast food place, completely thick, I mean if he'd have a brain cell it would die of loneliness. Geez I'm sure this guy would have trouble remembering his own name had it not been on a badge on his shirt!

Matt didn't want to drive around to the historic fort or the downtown area as he'd never been there and his sense of adventure is, shall we say, lacking. So apart from taking a couple of wrong turns to and from the mall we didn't really see much of Cape. But we did stop at a secondhand and new game and entertainment store on a strip mall (that's like a normal parade of shops to us English folk!) The greatest thing here was that Matt managed to find a power supply for his Wii. The reason he needed a new one was that he managed to fry the last one over in England, not thinking the difference in our power supply would make any difference. I'll always remember the look on his face when I got home from work that day, when he had tripped the electrics in the old apartment back in Brighton. He thought he'd burnt the whole electrics out and I'd need to have the place re-wired, haha, he'd only tripped a breaker/fuse so damage there was none, except to his Wii, which he has bemoaned about since that day.

We started the drive back, the same way we had come, over the bridge, along the roads, into the countryside and perhaps a taste of real America.

It's picturesque to say the least, but it changes rapidly, one moment you're in a town and then next it's wide open fields as far as the eye can see. I can honestly say that the distance thing is something I'll not ever get really used to. I mean, OK our mini road trip was only just over 100 miles each way, which is like driving from London to Birmingham and back just for fun. To Matt our little road trip was nothing out of the ordinary, he'd done the route a few times before!

The drive back through American countryside was enjoyable, enabling me to see different towns, locations, homesteads and the like, which was also educational. I tried to snap a few pictures as we travelled around on what was a lovely clear and sunny day. Passing by Anna, we checked out Matt's grandmothers house, which looks so much like the typical home architecture in this part of the country, which is so charming,

Oh and wonder of wonders, I travel nearly 4000 miles to come to the Heartland of America, the gateway to the mid-west, the central part of the states and guess what I find? No seriously have a guess? Plonked straight in the middle of the town square in Anna, a red British phone box, which apparently still works ! Surprised, to say the least I was, managed to get a little photo of it, although Matt couldn't stop - something about being in the middle of the street. But, hey it did bring back memories and thoughts of home, of traditional and reassuring sights that are totally and traditionally British, renown the world over. I can't even remember the last time I used a public phone box, we've all got mobiles / cell phones these days that public boxes are pretty much redundant, however, if they completely disappear, I know I'll miss them. Isn't it strange, we may never use them, but want them to stay and remind us of what it is to be us, English.

On the way back we had to stop off at Matt's parents home in Vienna. Matt's only reason to swing by was not to have cuddles from his mom, shoot the breeze with his pa, play with the big kitty cats, nope, he had to test the new power supply for his Wii !

We had pizza there from just down the road in downtown Vienna, which has a historic and jaded feel about it, it has a traditional town square, with the town hall occupying the middle part of it and buildings that look like that haven't changed in decades. It was nice to sit down, have pizza and breaded mushrooms and natter to Betty and Steve and play on the Wii, which put a smile on Matt's face the size of which, I don't think I've ever seen before.

Does he look like an all American farm boy next door? And yes, this is historic Vienna, Illinois main square! Is it just me or does the old town hall look much like the one out of the Back to the Future films?

Conan O'Brien has taken over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno, which is an amazingly big thing over here, the nearest thing to it I guess would be to imagine Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross combined as one person to host a nightly version of the weekly chat/entertainment show. Just like all these chat shows on American TV, they have a long opening monologue, indeed sometimes it's very long, longer indeed than they ever chat to the guests they have on. Conan's first one was pretty long and to an outsider like me, wasn't really all that funny, it didn't inspire confidence in the future of him hosting the show. The only think I did find enjoyable in the whole show was when Conan took a camera crew on one of those Universal Studio Tram Tours that tourists do, yes it was contrived, yes it was meticulously planned in minute detail, to look as if it wasn't, but it was kinda fun and the best of the show if you ask me!