American Roadtrip Tauranga residents Kay and Mike Travelling America on a Harley Davidson

After leaving Chicago we headed to the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee to meet up with our good friends Keith and Deb Travis from the Tauranga Tree Company in Te Puna, they also bought their Harley over here and had been riding the East Coast.

Before we met up we stayed in a town called Pigeon Forge it was the most interesting place, riding into town was like riding into a fantasy world with all these weird and wonderful attractions, a child's dream.

They had a place called Dollywood named after Dolly Parton where they had shows.

The next day after riding through the quaint town of Gantlinburg and over the Smokey Mountains we meet Keith and Deb at the beginning of the Tail of the Dragon - a scenic ride through the mountains with 318 bends in 11 miles.

At the base of this ride there is a tree filled with pieces off motorbikes and riders that have crashed on the Tail, most of which were faster bikes than Harley's.

We saw one guy picking his bike up where he took a corner beyond his capabilities, of course for our guys, this ride was easy compared to our roads back home.

In Nashville, the country and western music city of Tennessee where you wear cowboy hats and boots, we visited a famous bar called Tootsies, which had great music.

Rumour was Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash used to play there before they became famous. We visited the Music Hall of Fame, which we enjoyed but did not recognise a lot of the early singers.

For midweek this town was rocking, bands in every bar.

After two nights of dancing to country and western it was on to Memphis for a more blues/rock flavour.

The town was alive with neon lights, music everywhere and these amazing athletic looking young black American guys in long shorts and bare chests somersaulting backwards on a cobble street before passing their bucket around to collect tips - well worth it.

Gracelands was the highlight to see the home Elvis Presley and his family lived in and his grave with his parents was surreal and very moving.

New Orleans was our next stop, where we spent two nights in the French Quarter staying at the stunning boutique hotel called Le Richelieu one of five identical houses built in 1845 for Dominique Lanata's family.

The second floor obtains three suites, which for two and a half months were once home to Paul McCartney and his family.

We did a guided tour of the city to see parts of where Hurricane Katrina had flooded, understandable how with the city being 12ft below sea level.

The Spanish and French influenced architecture in the French Quarter was gorgeous and a community of its own with great restaurants, bars, houses, apartments and shops.

We were told Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are new residents in town and were shown one house for sale for $12million in Garden Central in the middle of town.

A real party town, where Bourbon Street was once famous for all the old Blues singers like Louis Armstrong, BB King is now pumping mostly to the beat of all the latest modern music.

The food, the best so far, well known for their Creole and seafood cuisine, a few dozen oysters were consumed in two days.

On our last day we were watching the weather on the news closely as Hurricane Issac was heading our way, we left early in the morning and rode and rode putting a good 812kms between us and New Orleans, not a good idea in 40 degrees heat in one day, until next week.