Editor's note: Gilles Samson and his wife, Suzette, always wanted to travel around the United States. So after retiring from their jobs late last year, the two Canadians decided to combine their wanderlust with their love of golf. The Samsons will be driving their RV across the country and attending every PGA TOUR event in 2006. While on that journey, they'll be writing a diary for PGATOUR.com. This is their 40th installment.

GREENSBORO, N.C.: As we embarked on the home stretch last week -- the last five tournaments -- we had to have preventative maintenance on the two vehicles done prior to this 6,500-mile journey. This includes our Signature Drive -- Greensboro, Las Vegas, Lake Buena Vista, Fla.; Tampa Bay and Atlanta -- marking the country map with a Zorro-style stamp. It was in Jackson, Miss., that the maintenance was done before we got back on the road to get to history-filled Chattanooga, Tenn.; Asheville and Greensboro, N.C. These visits may well have been our last opportunity to get acquainted with some of the most important events in the development of this country, as we’ll now be heading to some of the major entertainment cities in the U.S. -- Las Vegas and Orlando -- and intend to enjoy them to their fullest. Hence, cotton, Tennessee, Civil War battlefields and the weather-plagued Chrysler Classic of Greensboro are the main topics on the menu this week.

The Chrysler Classic of Greensboro – Sunday must have been quite a day for Davis Love III as he won the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro for the second time. Davis had redesigned the course in 2003 and had not done well here since then -- he missed the cut twice and had to withdraw once. It is also his first victory in his last 77 starts. His victory guarantees his participation in THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola in four weeks, moving him from 39th to 15th on the PGA TOUR money list and pushing Mike Weir out of the Top 30 qualifiers for this event for the time being. Moreover, Davis was born in North Carolina and was the favourite of the gallery. He started strong with birdies on the first two holes and had only one bogey at the seventh hole. Birdies on the 13th, 14th and 15th holes gave him the lead for good over Jason Bohn and Eric Axley. Quite a sweet victory after a long drought!

The tournament was played under difficult weather conditions, as it was overcast most of the time and very cold and rainy on Saturday, in particular. Doing well under these conditions requires a lot of concentration and focus and we must take our hats off to the players to still provide us with an entertaining event.

In 2007, the tournament will be held in mid-August and will be the last tournament before the FedExCup Playoffs and will be called the Wyndham Championship. There is no doubt that the defending champion will greatly enhance this event.

Raymond and Jackson, Miss. – With the cotton harvesting drawing to a close, we were very concerned about not being able to walk into a full-bloomed cotton field and were asking everyone where to go. We finally were directed to an area near the town of Raymond. We drove there and found exactly what we were looking for -- a huge field of fluffy white bolls. We parked the car on a nearby small road and walked to the field where we could finally touch and smell the white bolls and take close-ups of this “white gold”. On our way back to the car, with a few cotton branches in our hands, we were met by the estate’s owner and after a few minutes of conversation, we were invited to her home. It was not only a pleasant but a very informative encounter and we have learned how the production of cotton has changed dramatically since the mid-20th century. The cotton gin was invented in 1793, outside Savannah, Ga., by Eli Whitney and allowed cotton farming based on slavery to expand rapidly. However, before a mechanical picker was heard of in early 1950s, picking was still the painful, back-breaking work it had been since the first crop was harvested, although cleaning and transporting had improved tremendously. Once mechanical pickers entered the scene, one-row pickers soon became two-row, then four-row and now six-row pickers. Trailers that would hold three to five bales of cotton were replaced by module builders that now hold an average of 15 to 17 bales. The gins that are used to separate the seed from the lint and that turn the lint into bales are huge, compared to the old gins and they can do a 1955 week’s worth of ginning in one day. We are grateful to Carolyn for her hospitality and for having shared with us the technical changes brought to the production of cotton.

We finally made it to Jackson, the state’s capital, on the following day. We wanted to learn about the impact of the cotton and lumber industries on the state’s economy but the Old Capitol Museum was closed, due to damage from Hurricane Katrina. We wanted to see works by Mississippi natives at the Museum of Art, but there were only a few paintings and photos exposed. Somehow we did not connect with Jackson. Nevertheless, before leaving, we enjoyed a southern specialty -- delicious fillets of catfish served steaming hot with a light, crispy batter of corn meal -- and were told that 85 percent of the nation’s farm-raised catfish is harvested in Mississippi.

Chattanooga, Tenn.: We came to Chattanooga without suspecting how much history happened here. This city located on the banks of the Tennessee River along the Georgia border was born of one of the great injustices of the early U.S. Ross’s Landing, in what is now downtown Chattanooga, was one of the two starting points of the “Trails of Tears” that led to the removal of the Cherokees from the area to the territory they were assigned in 1838, that is now Oklahoma. Chattanooga was also a key strategic point where several battles where fought during the Civil War.

We went up the nearby Lookout Mountain -- a premier vantage point overlooking the Cumberland Mountains -- to observe the whole area and attended a presentation on the Civil War battles fought here during the fall of 1863. Chattanooga was a key rail center and gateway to the heart of the Confederacy. The battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga were decisive in allowing Union armies to take control of the area and establish the base for General Sherman to start his “March to Atlanta and to the sea,” which ended the Civil War. We followed by visiting the battlefields and the Chattanooga Regional History Museum. This puts an end to our visits to four of the main battlefields of the Civil War -- Atlanta, Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga.

Blue Ridge Parkway, Asheville and Greensboro – From Chattanooga we headed to Knoxville, then through the Great Smokey Mountains and North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains before stopping overnight in Asheville. We only had half a day to spend in this charming city and decided to join the historic trolley tour to make sure we would not miss any of the major points of interest. Asheville has a wonderful mix of retired people, artists and university students and is said to be among the “healthiest” city in the country. Everywhere you turn in Asheville there are gorgeous, wooded Blue Ridge Mountains and sparkling blue skies to look at. We were told that it had just been voted the seventh best city to retire out of 50 cites in the country and that it figures among the “America’s Dozen Distinctive Destinations”. We now can understand why and have enjoyed very much the time we spent there and the artists that we have met.

The drive from Asheville to Greensboro by a sunny late afternoon was spectacular. The fall foliage on the mountainsides was at its peak with shades of red, yellow, ochre and orange. We didn’t have much time to discover Greensboro but had the chance to meet charming and interesting residents at a local restaurant Saturday. We have learned that the city was home to the first civil rights sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in 1960 and is noted for its five colleges. We also learned that the area has many universities and research centers and that the grouping of the cities of Winston-Salem and Greensboro is known locally as the Triad and that Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill are referred to as the Research Triangle.

Despite the fact that the coming week will be mostly spent on the road, we’ll back next week with our 41st instalment from the world’s gambling and entertainment mecca, Las Vegas.

Suzette and Gilles Samson