As Tam and I came to realize how much we needed mountains, original plans to go through the North Carolina Piedmont and do Lexington, NC barbecue, the North Carolina Zoo near Asheboro, and the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, either coming or going, were scrapped. The Piedmont is nice, but you can reach it in a day from DC, and we needed all the mountains we can get. (I will note as an aside, for those who know bluegrass/old time music, that the museum in Spencer is at the old Spencer Shops railroad center, known from "The Wreck of the Old 97": "you must get her into Spencer on time.")
So we decided to come down by taking Route 29 to Charlottesville and then getting on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Though we didn't take the Parkway the whole way (it's a 45-mile-an-hour limit and very twisty and turny) we did take the mountains all the way. So too on our return. We came back by the route I mentioned in an earlier post, via I-26 from Asheville to Johnson City, then I-81 to Roanoke, violating our boycott of the Interstates but still keeping mountains around us most of the way.
Though it was a long day's drive, some 300 miles (not long when you're 25 with a young bladder, but long when you've got an eight-year-old and you're 60), it was relaxing. Tam, who always disliked the long haul down 81 from Roanoke to Knoxville -- Roanoke is, for northern Virginians, in the southwest of the state, but it's still a couple of hours' drive from Tennssee because of that long southwestern tail that pokes in under Kentucky -- was full of praise for I-26, a pretty road that goes practically straight north from Asheville to Johnson City.
Asheville has always seemed to me the least mountain-y of the North Carolina mountain towns, maybe because of its literary connections and size; I've never read either of Thomas Wolfe's novels, Look Homeward, Angel or You Can't Go Home Again, but they still shape my image of Asheville, as does Carl Sandburg's hanging out in the area. Still, as we were passing through Asheville, we decided to look for someplace to eat, rather than wait for Johnson City. Tam deserves credit for spotting Barbecue Inn, which a) had decent barbecue, and the eastern North Carolina type at that, not the molasses-y sauces and slabs you sometimes find in the mountains; b) had an ice cream bar that came with the meal, which suited Sarah just fine; and c) the kid's meal came free with a paying adult, and Sarah had spaghetti while sampling our food. A satisfying and very down-home place. We saw both NC highway patrolmen and Buncombe County sheriff's officers there, and the sheriff's deputies gave Sarah a Buncombe County sheriff's badge sticker. (Which also gave me the chance to tell the perhaps apocryphal folk etymology that an early western NC Congressman, when making a stemwinder speech on the floor of the House just to please his constituents back home, used to tell his fellow Congressmen to ignore it because, "Boys, this one's for Buncombe." This allegedly gives rise to both "bunkum" and "bunk".)
On over the mountains. Lovely country, great views, a pleasant road even if it was an Interstate. Down through Erwin, Tennessee, famous to all and sundry in those parts as the place where they hanged an elephant. If you are a Yankee or a Westerner and have never met anyone from eastern Tennessee, you may not have heard of the hanging of Murderous Mary the Circus Elephant.
The story can be found here, complete with the famous photograph. But to save clicking I'll post the photo anyway (Caution: Members of PETA or those without an appreciation of weird, baroque, Southern human behavior may be offended.). Mary the elephant had trampled somebody to death in Kingsport, and popular opinion demanded that Mary pay for her crime. By the time the circus reached Erwin, the problem had become obvious: neither shooting nor electrocution would do the job. (Giving Mary the elephant equivalent of the electric chair allegedly just made her dance around a bit, if you believe all the stories that this event has generated.) So they got a railroad crane and hanged her high. It's that kind of place. And the photo is a major piece of southern Americana. Click the link above for more on the story. We didn't go through Erwin proper this time, just by it on the Interstate, though we've been there before and I did stop for a bathroom at the Wal-Mart on the Interstate. That 60 year old bladder I mentioned earlier.Passing through Johnson City brought back memories of our first major trip with Sarah after the adoption. In early summer 2002, Tam and I were missing our usual annual jaunts southward, and after a successful weekend stay at a hotel in the Shenandoah Valley decided Sarah was up for it. (We'd stayed in hotels with her after the adoption in China of course, but she wasn't walking and talking then, and was by the 2002 trip.) This blog didn't exist then but I posted a lengthy description on our family website, which is still there. Sarah has changed so much that the photos of her at two (including the ones in the Davy Crockett hat) don't really invade her privacy. So please visit the link if you want to read about it. Even just passing through Johnson City six years later brought back those memories of Sarah's first American vacation (and I don't think the orphanage took her on any in China). She of course doesn't remember any of it.
We had had really great weather throughout our trip. Lovely sunny but not overly hot days with no humidity and good mountain breezes. Only an occasional droplet or two theatening rain, but never a fully-fledged drizzle. Some churches we passed had prayers for rain on their marquees. But we passed through some showers in southwestern Virginia, and just three miles or so before our exit at Roanoke, an enormous cloudburst that passed quickly but rendered visibility about nil for a few minutes. And that was pretty much all the rain for the entire trip.
That got us to Roanoke Friday night, and we ate once again at the Pizza Inn, where we had eaten on the first night out of the trip. And so to bed. No Santa questions this time.
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