Charlotte, North Carolina.

The plan was simple, hit the states and enjoy the hospitality of Gary and Katrina. They were, and still are the best hosts I’ve ever experienced. We set off for Charlotte, North Carolina on the 29th July from a rainy English summer and arrived to a sunny and sticky afternoon.
Gary and Katrina were family friends who lived in Colden Common about 8 years ago, Katrina is from Alabama and Gary from Swindon (someone has to be). It had been a long time since I’d seen either of them and it was heartening to see that neither of them had changed; Katrina was as gregarious as ever and Gary was still a big kid. The big difference between now and when I was 12 was that he could drink beer with me, which seemed to set the tone for the rest of the trip. Upon arrival, we were taken out to the local bar, which was about 20 minutes drive away. Gary explained, as he took on Charlotte’s rush-hour traffic, that people in America rarely walk anywhere and that most places are catered so much for drivers but not walkers. It seemed surreal being on a stretch of highway, yellow traffic lights suspended from wires, people driving on the right...little did I know just how strange things were going to become.
We ate out that evening, went back to the house where Rhiannon and Dad were clearly flagging. Mum and I stayed up until 12 midnight, in the interest of beating jetlag, and beating Gary at Wii Sports. I retired to bed a happy man.
We bumbled about for a few days, went to many bars and restaurants and ate and drank in U.S sized portions. It wasn’t so much the size of the main-meals that had you undoing yet another notch in your belt (I ran out of holes), as it was the free sides you got with them. We went to ‘Mert’s Soul Food’ one evening, lots of fried chicken, sticky rice, barbeque ribs and chilli. I honestly felt like asking for a bankers draft to afford to stay out here for the next year at least. The ribs were falling off the bone, extraordinarily tasty.
It was later in the week that we opted to go to Cherokee for an overnight stay. The main attraction there was the Native American reservation and re-enactment site, something I’ve longed to see since I was little. On the museum tour I found myself reading the plaques detailing the infamous ‘Trail of Tears’ in which numerous Cherokee tribe’s people, not having had to deal with foreign diseases before, perished on their slaves journey out west. Causes of death were typically smallpox, exhaustion and, some might say, despondency. Within me it stirred feelings of anger to the injustice this peace-loving tribe endured again and again. It appeared to be so undeserved too, it wasn’t as if the Cherokee were chasing Custer’s scalp; while the Sioux and the Plains Indians were fighting the settlers, the Cherokee would extend hospitality to anyone in need and were rewarded by the greed of a cruel, new age of globalisation. It reminded me of the Cree Prophecy:
‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught we will realise that we cannot eat money.’
The reservation was much more uplifting, the tour leader was dressed in traditional tribal gear which belied his Carolina drawl. What became apparent after a while however was that his trousers stopped just short of his upper thighs. This was compensated for by a loincloth that flapped dangerously when he walked, I found my eyesight involuntarily and morbidly drawn towards it as the tour progressed. The finale of the day was a Native American dance, which naturally had me imagining the swirling feathers and fire that you might see in films such as ‘Dances With Wolves’. If anything, the dances were much more Polynesian in their style than I expected. The men mostly had bald heads save a pony-tail, very much a Maori or South American look and the dance was very economical and not grand or showy . It was certainly interesting, though a few of the participants looked like they’d been roped into it...
Stay tuned in for Part Two....