A road trip in a time of COVID-19

My husband Allan arrived for a holiday in North Carolina, the Monday before President Trump announced a ban on UK nationals coming to the USA. By then we had already hired a car, booked lots of hotels and had a holiday planned. It was the early days of coronavirus, so the guidance was mixed – should we stay or should we go? In the end we chose to go – we decided that travelling by car was less risky than any form of public transport; we decided that we would keep our distance from people as much as possible, we would take hand sanitiser with us and wash our hands as frequently as we could.

We began by heading towards the Appalachians, driving some of the famous and very beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone and visiting Blowing Rock. I’ve included our itinerary below of the places we visited. We had to be flexible with hotels closing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and in Charlottesville, Virginia, but we had an amazing time, even though many museums, galleries, shops and restaurants were closed. It was fantastic to see the landscape of 11 states and to drive the Parkways, and in most places everywhere was deserted, making it easier for us to social distance from others – we’re already plotting a return road trip when things are back to some sort of normality, we hope, in the future. I’ve included some pictures below with labels at the bottom of the page.

Day 1  Elon, North Carolina to Asheville, North Carolina (Blue Ridge Parkway; Blowing Rock)

Day 2 Asheville North Carolina to Nashville, Tennessee (Smithville; Watertown)

Day 3 Nashville, Tennessee (Ernest Tubb record shop; explored downtown)

Day 4 Nashville Tennessee to Oxford Mississippi (Tennessee River; Muscle Shoals Alabama – Fame Studios; Natchez Trace Parkway; Tupelo – Elvis’s birthplace)

Day 5 Oxford Mississippi to Memphis Tennessee (Clarksdale – crossroads; explored the Mississippi delta ‘shining like a national guitar‘ Paul Simon; Gates of Graceland)

Day 6 Memphis (Lorraine Motel – site where Martin Luther King Jr was shot; Sun studios; Stax Museum of American Soul Music; Walk by the Mississippi; Memphis National Cemetery)

Day 7 Memphis, Tennessee to Paducah, Kentucky (Dyess Arkansas – Johnny Cash’s birthplace; New Madrid, Missouri; Cairo, Illinois – visited by Charles Dickens; Ohio River)

Day 8 Paducah, Kentucky to Versailles, West Virginia (Land between the Lakes; Jefferson Davis, Confederate President memorial)

Day 9 Versailles, West Virginia to Lewisburg, Virginia (Glasgow West Virginia; Kanawha River; Confederate Cemetery, Lewisburg)

Day 10 Lewisburg Virginia to Elon North Carolina (Blue Ridge Parkway; National D-Day Memorial Bedford Virginia)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures (from the top of the page)

Blue ridge parkway, North Carolina; Blue ridge parkway, North Carolina; Rural Tennessee; straight roads of Rural Tennessee; Cathy & Dolly Tennessee; Allan at Ernest Tubb record shop Nashville, Tennessee; Elvis Presley’s birthplace, Tupelo Mississippi; Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee; Graceland Memphis, Tennessee; Mississippi state line arriving from Alabama; Natchez Trace Parkway, Alabama; Mississippi delta, Mississippi; Johnny Cash’s birthplace, Dyess Arkansas; Kanawha River, West Virginia; Kanawha River, West Virginia; Glasgow, West Virginia; A lonesome pine in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

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