In which Doris looks out of the window while Sid drives through the Appalachian countryside.
Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. And very quickly I am reminded just how different America is from the UK. 
Turning resolutely away from the non-stop roadside advertising of Personal Injury Lawyers – No Win No Fee!! – my eyes are drawn to concrete trucks which are the Wrong Way Round. This gives the impression every time I see one that it is about to pour concrete onto the truck driver’s head. I include a picture of a UK one so that my overseas reader(s) can see how they should be organised.
Onwards, and through the countryside, largely avoiding the interstates due to the power mismatch between the JGG and every other vehicle. 
Another major difference between here and right-minded-people everywhere else is in the definition of countryside, and particularly National Parks. In the UK we think that a nice piece of countryside has cute little fields, or moorland, or rolling grass downland, dotted with woolly sheep. New Zealanders call that a sheep ranch, but we correctly call it Unspoiled Countryside.
The rule here is that a National Park should be the way that nature originally intended it, in some mysterious window of time between the dominance of wild grazing animals and the arrival of fire-wielding monkeymen, which is to say, 100% trees. This policy is also extended to the non-Interstate long distance roads called Parkways. Because we are doing a circular(ish) journey round the south-eastern quarter of the USA, we will be spared all those complex views of deserts, mountains, farmlands and seasides which plagued our previous trip, and instead we just have restful views of… trees. And more trees. Well, I guess it simplifies the game of I Spy.
Although I now realise that this is not always the case, because actually people seem to be addicted to lawns. There are acres and acres and acres of mown grass, unused as livestock fodder, consuming countless hours of time and power for the ride-on mowers, separating the widely-spaced houses from each other and from the Parkway. Just a-mowin’ and a-leavin’. One day people will look at those and say, as they have done with the little red stand-by light on the TV, “my God that is a pointless waste of energy”. But what instead? Concrete it over? Buy a goat? (or sheep, or llama, or bison, either way you will have to fence the whole thing, and that will be a lotta fences). Call it a wildlife meadow? Re-plant the trees?
And don’t get me started on the subject of parking lots. I wonder what the ratio of parking spaces to cars is here. I have a lot of time to wonder about this, but in the meantime I will take more photos of lawns.
PS Some clicky clicky with Mr Google when I had phone signal tells me that the population density in the USA is 94 people per square mile. This compares to the UK’s 727, so the USA has eight times the amount of space per person. This may help to explain a policy of land use which sometimes looks rather like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party after the milk-jug incident.