Shortly after waffle house and after encountering another encouraging sign of American political involvement in the form of a bumper sticker on a black SUV(?) </sarcasm>...

Erm, anyway - shortly thereafter we gave up and caught some sleep parked in a gravel side road. It was just too darn hot, and we were too darn tired. So. We slept.

It must have been sometime in the mid-afternoon. We are woken from sticky sleep by a mobile phone ringing. Patrick is asking us where we are. We are in the middle of nowhere, far far away from Atlanta. We tell him we'll be there by tonight.

We have hardly started driving along the freeway when our first mishap happens. A bust tire.

Thank goodness Dann is a trusty Texan and knows how to fix such minor problems. Not that it's much fun being stranded on the emergency lane of a highway with a bust tire. But I assume it's a lot more fun than being stranded on the emergency lane of a highway with a bust tire and no-one knows how to fix it. (Also, let's not forget about the heat... Heat will play an essential role in the further proceedings of our adventure...)

After putting on the spare tire we slowly make our way to the next bigger place where they can put on a proper new tire. This is when we notice the little "engine is a bit too hot" sign for the first time. Well, that's a lie. We'd noticed it before, but only when going slow. When going fast the wind was cooling the engine enough to, well, to keep it cool. Now, however, it keeps lighting up time and again. We, erm, ignore it.

In this quaint little garage in an unknown Southern town in the middle of Mississippi, a nice mechanic with an incomprehensibly thick Southern accent changes our tire while we go shopping for drinks and fight off the mosquitos.

While Dann pays the bill for the service in the main part of the building, I watch the mechanic and we talk for a bit. He asks me where I'm from, if I have children, or at least am married. He asks if Dann is my boyfriend and I say "no." Thereupon the guy just wiggles his head and goes: "Well, maybe, who knows..."

Dann returns and we return to the road. It is lateish afternoon by now - about 6pm and we're still far away from Atlanta. We estimate our time of arrival to about midnight. Little do we know. We won't make it there tonight.

17 miles before the scenic town of Meridian, MI, the little "engine too hot" sign is still glowing and this time we hear the cooling fluid boil over. Little later the driving cabin is filled with white smoke that's emerging from underneath our hood.

To improve things the skies decide to open up to rain and thunder and within an hour the engine seems to have cooled down. We fill the radiator with cooling liquid and precious precious human water, then we give it another go.

This time we keep going for another minute and then the engine overheats again and everything is filled with white smoke.

To cut a long story short: at 9pm-ish we are towed to Meridian by a nice towing service man, and I get as close to riding in the cabon of an 18-wheeler as I ever got this trip when riding in the towing truck, with no safety belts. It's still raining, but the guy is a good man and after dropping off the car at the BMW-Mercedes dealership he drops us off at a motel.