North Carolina, and then Atlanta for Thanksgiving

From Virginia, we headed south, following the general direction of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We knew we would have a Walmart experience at least once on the trip, and this was the night (ran out of campground options).   Aside from our neighboring trucks running their generators all night, it was a welcome spot, with shopping (and toilets) available 24 hours.  And the price was right, so we were content. 

We scheduled a brief stop at the Camping World in Statesville, North Carolina, to have a vital part installed and complete the repair of our precious toilet.  We stayed overnight at a fascinating campground that we just happened to pick out of the rv books.  It was called the Van Hoy Campground, and it occupied at huge site with a lot of forested trails and a big stadium that has been used for an old time fiddler's convention.  It was very late in the season, and many sites were empty except for full-timers. It seemed like there was no one running the place.  But we enjoyed walking the  grounds, in between efforts to organize the RV repair.

Our efforts were successful, and we were able to move on after only one night in Statesville, continuing down the highway to a short stop near Hickory, North Carolina.  Our luck with campgrounds continued, with a lovely spot located in a wooded bowl near a local river, quite far from the highway, quiet, and with excellent birding.  The weather was continuing cold in the morning, but warming during the day to quite acceptable levels.  Hickory itself was largely uninteresting, consisting almost entirely of giant shopping malls, so far as we could see.  But they had a movie theater complex and that was welcome.


Our explorations near the camp focused on a local museum devoted to the history of the Waldensian movement in North Carolina.  The museum was located in the nearby town of Valdese, which was founded by the movement and still holds many of its adherents today.  I was surprised to learn that this is one of the oldest surviving Protestant movements still around, dating from the late twelfth century.  As a result it was one of the most persecuted sects in history, almost wiped out on some occasions, but eventually many of the adherents moved to our shores and settled in North Carolina.  Their adventures here make a fascinating story, as does the history of the European phase.  And there were some wonderful crafts and churches that the group created.  Among the interesting factoids was the startling news that the Sunbeam brand of breads was founded by the Waldensians as a small local bakery and grew enormously until it was purchased by the mega-corp that owns it today.

Next, on to Asheville, an attractive town located quite close to both the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Once again, we were lucky in our choice of campground, locating one on a local creek halfway between Asheville and the park.  Using that as a base of operations, we explored both areas over the next few days.  A nice find was the small and charming community of Waynesville, near the campground.    It's a bit of an arts center, with a very nice main street containing local arts and crafts places along with community watering holes which we took full advantage of.

The next day was spent exploring the National Park.  We drove the Blue Ridge Parkway from our campground to the park, enjoying the views and countryside.  It was late in the fall, heading into Thanksgiving, and the trees were bare and traffic was light.  But the country was magnificent, as advertised.   On the Cherokee reservation we visited the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.  This is one of the best that we've seen.  Native American history and lore have been a strong focus of our travels, and we've learned a whole lot.

That said, the town of Cherokee itself was a bit of a tourist trap.  Endless overpriced knick-knacks and all the trimmings of a town posted at the mouth of a popular national park.  There were hucksters selling Indian dance performances for the few tourists and the stores were mostly empty. Other attractions that looked interesting were closed for the season.   But we enjoyed it anyway.  On to the park itself.  We didn't have time for a full exploration - that's also a theme of this trip -  but we made our way up the highway that leads to the highest peak in the park.  The peak itself was shrouded in clouds, but we had great views in all directions.  We also took a good hike along some of the trails that led across the mountains.  We trod the Appalachian trail for a short distance and went off on a side route as well.

The next day was directed more to the neighborhood of the town of Asheville itself.  Close by, and located on the Blue Ridge Parkway, is the Folk Art Center, the most visited part of the Blue Ridge Parkway and a major national repository of folk art in the region.  The work there is extremely professional, and artists compete to get memberships and show their work.  We were not able to get pictures, alas, but the museum and gift shop were remarkable.

We returned to the Great Smokies the next morning, heading this time to a secluded valley on the eastern side.  The road there was challenging, gravel, narrow, and twisting, with steep dropoffs, and Ivy had a lot of fun driving in.  But it was worth the trip.  Before the area became a national park, there was a small village here and many of the buildings have been preserved.  There is a good-sized elk herd that has been established in the valley, and we spent some time watching these fine animals.  It was late in the season, and there were only a few tourists in the valley.  It was a lovely, peaceful day.

The next day, we headed down the road to Atlanta.  Since the very beginning of the trip,we had been planning to spend the Thannksgiving weekend with Ivy's brother and his family.  It was a rendezvous point over a very long distance, and I was very satisfied to have made it, after all of our various trials and tribulations on the way.  Albert and his wife and children were very welcoming, and we had a great time.  The food was fabulous.  The Thanksgiving dinner included twenty-two people, and we had a chance to meet some of  their good friends.  We also toured the city and visited some local attractions.  On our last evening in town, we went to a see a musical group called Hot Club from Cowtown, in a local spot called Eddie's Attic.  They were spectacular, a trio of very accomplished musicians that projected incredible energy onstage. 

Saying a fond goodbye, we headed east towards the Atlanta coast, and our wintering grounds in Florida.

New Jersey, and then south for the winter

Ivy has a sister who lives in Livingston, New Jersey with her teenage daughter who is heading off to college next year.  So we took a drive in our little red car from Gettysburg to her place to stay for a few days and visit.  On the way, we stopped at my cousin Sheila's house in Rutherford, New Jersey to visit and catch up with her and her husband.  The New Jersey traffic was, quite frankly, horrible, and I was glad we had decided to leave the RV.  It was a lot simpler.  Even so, our GPS got confused and tried to send us on an unnecessary trip through the Holland Tunnel, and there was much anxiety and confusion over how to get where we were going.  But it all worked out.

We went out to lunch with my cousin and her husband.  Sheila is very knowledgeable in family history, so we had lots of discussion about that.  She also gave me a CD recorded in the twenties by my uncle Roger Kahn, who was a bandleader for a number of different jazz bands in the era.  He composed also, and his most famous number was Crazy Rhythm, which is on the CD.  It was a real treat to get it.  We enjoyed a relaxing and pleasant afternoon in Sheila's house with her many cats.

Later in the evening we went to Ivy's sister Susan's house.  She lives in a pleasant suburban neighborhood, and we luxuriated in having an indoor shower larger than a breadbox and a guest bedroom to sleep in.  Over the weekend we had a visit from Ivy's stepmom and sister from Long Island, who braved the traffic to come to New Jersey to visit with us.  And we did some shopping, and had some east coast luxuries, like good bagels and deli.  Then it was back to Gettysburg to continue our trip.

The next day we were back on the road, heading to Virginia.  It was definitely time to start heading south, as nights had been getting down into the low thirties pretty regularly.  We knew we didn't have too much time and we fled south to escape the frost line.  Our first stop was at the town of Luray, Virginia, just west of the Shenandoah National Park.  We happened onto a very nice RV park, run by a Swiss couple, a few miles outside of town.  Using that camp as a base, we toured parts of the National Park with our little car, travelling along the famous Skyline Drive that travels for about a hundred miles down the spine of the mountains.  The park was partly closed this late in the year, but the views off the drive were spectacular as advertised  

Next we toured the Luray Caverns, a cave system that advertises itself as the most visited in the country.  It is indeed a spectacular set of caves, equal to or better than the caves at Great Basin.  These are caves of the "decorated" variety, with huge complex formations made of limestone over centuries.  It's a much larger cave set than others we've seen, and has some huge rooms with dramatic formations.  I took lots of pictures.  And I took a great bike ride the next day, from the RV park into Luray and back, over some beautiful countryside with the Shenandoah National Park in the background.  Stopped for coffee in town and toured around taking pictures.

It was here in Luray that we managed to break our RV toilet.  One of the flushing levers broke and the toilet became unusable.  At our ages, the lack of a toilet is close to a crisis, so we had to work quickly to get it repaired and replaced.  Luray was too small to have the necessary resources, so we headed to our next stop, Roanoke, where we could get some repair facilities.  We camped outside of town at the Smith Mountain Lake State Park, a lovely spot in the hills about thirty miles out of Roanoke. From there, we were able to utilize the the big city resources to get a new one.  Unfortunately, may attempts to install the replacement ran into problems that the local folks couldn't deal with, and we had to push the repair down the road into a Camping World in North Carolina.

We visited Ivy's aunt and cousin while in Roanoke. Ivy's aunt is 95 years old, and still living in her home and taking care of it herself.  Since she no longer drives, her daughter and son in law help her frequently.    We all went to a local restaurant for an excellent lunch and then  took Aunt Annie to see the Roanoke Star, a monument atop a high mountain around Roanoke.  Although she had lived in Salem   for 20 or so years, Annie had never seen this particular sight.  So we had a good time taking her up there.

While we were staying at our campground, we visited the Booker T Washington Monument, which was located nearby.  This is a large scale restoration of the small plantation where Booker T Washington was raised as a slave before the Civil War.  It was small farm, typical of the period, where everyone worked in the fields and the slaves lived in dirt floor huts, cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The buildings were simple and primitive, and gave us a bit of an education about conditions in that era. 


We headed off toward North Carolina, staying just a few miles ahead of the frost line. 

West Virginia, and then Gettysburg

Leaving Kentucky, we headed east through West Virginia, moving up into the Appalachian chain of mountains as we went.  It was fall and the colors were quite lovely up there, a lot more foliage changes than we typically see in the northwest with all our evergreens.  The country grew steeper and more dramatic as we moved east.  Our first stop was in the area of Charleston, WV, where we stopped at a KOA campground in the nearby town of Milton. 

On the way, we stopped very briefly in the town of Morehead, WV, where there was a small museum called the Kentucky Folk Art Center.  Started by some local university professors, the museum houses works by local folk artists primarily.  We enjoyed the museum thoroughly - it had some very original, creative and highly skilled works, most of them not the sort of thing you find in traditional museums.  A little hidden treat, the sort of thing you love to discover when traveling. I also got a great book in their store, about the history of efforts to deal with poverty and environmental problems in Appalachia, written by a U of Kentucky professor who has studied the area extensively. 

Another enjoyable find was in the town of Milton, where the campground was located.  There was a longstanding glass factory there, which had a visitor center and offered tours of the factory in operation.  The Blenko Glass Company was founded in 1893 by an immigrant from Britain who had learned glass techniques over there.  The company has been making glass in the same location for many decades and the plant looked as if it had been there forever.  There were samples of the historical work that they had done, along with current work and, of course, samples for sale in the gift shop.

South Charleston was a charming little enclave, with a fairly large Asian population.  We found a good Asian grocery, which Ivy enjoyed thoroughly, and we had enough confidence in the neighborhood to risk a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch, which was quite good.  We haven't had much Asian food since we left the west coast, and it was great to find a resource in this unexpected place.   We toured the city of Charleston itself, but didn't have time to do much more than zip through.  They have a lovely arts center there with some outside sculptures and some nice architecture.  And I picked up some jigsaw puzzles in the local thrift shop. 


After a short stay, we were off to Morgantown, WV, for a whirlwind visit.  We got a great campground there, up on the top of a mountain right on the Mason-Dixon line.  It was beautiful country, with good stars at night and a park with lookouts over the valley and the town.  The West Virginia University is there, and there was a nice food co-op and some imposing buildings as well as cute murals on local shops.  But the weather was closing in, and we headed off to Pennsylvania for a stay at Gettysburg.   

We found a great campground in Gettysburg called Artillery Ridge, immediately adjacent to the battlefield park, which combined RV and tent camping with what is called a National Riding Stable that supports horseback rides through the Civil war battlefields, to allow people to experience the fields the way the cavalry riders did back in 1863. The campground also allows bicycle access to the park, which has miles of relatively flat and accessible roads suitable for biking.  Ivy and I took advantage of that, and I did a birding walk also through the forests there, which are largely similar to the 1860's, except peppered with monuments.

The park is really well developed, with an extensive museum, film center, and a huge number of monuments scattered around the field.  The staff make a huge effort to help you understand how the battle at Gettysburg went, who was involved, what happened, and how the outcome was influenced by so many chance factors, human errors, heroism, etc.  There is a huge diorama model of Gettysburg at the time, showing where the various armies fought, and something called a Cyclorama, a huge circular painting thirty feet high that protrays the essentials of the three day battle.  Ivy and I both came away with a much better understanding of how that particular part of the Civil War went, along with a feeling for the field itself and the historic power of the place. 

Next we were off by car to New Jersey to visit Ivy's sister and other relatives.  We left the RV in Gettysburg to avoid having to take that huge rig through the New Jersey traffic.  

Kentucky Adventures

Leaving St Louis, we headed out across Illinois, aiming for Kentucky. On the way, we stopped briefly in Chester, Illinois, home of the Popeye museum and memorabilia.  It turns out that the author of the Popeye cartoons lived in this town and the town has taken him to heart and set up a little museum of Popeye dolls and trinkets, as well as painted some murals and put up sculptures.  Apparently, even the fire department and police have Popeye patches on their uniforms.  We had a pleasant lunch in a local cafe, easedropping on an in-depth discussion on 1950's cars and some local exploits with them.  Then on to Kentucky. 

Our first stop was at the John James Audubon State Park near Henderson, Kentucky.  It turns out that Audubon spent many years in this area and did quite a bit of his research here while he tried to run a family business.  Eventually he gave up the business world and devoted all his times studying and painting birds.,  But he couldn't get them published in the U.S., and had to go to London to do it.  The museum in this park was built by the WPA, and has the largest collection of his original works in existence. There's some lovely stuff there, including the huge folio editions that are about three feet tall and beautifully detailed.  There's an extensive history of his life and some sculptures and paintings. 

It's also, incidentally, a good place to do birding.  They have wildlife trails, the campground, and some picnic and museum areas, all of which are good birding sites.  And it's exciting to think that you are in the same woods that Audubon may have walked and to get some sense of the world that he worked in when he was there.  The museum also has a very nice observatory area, where they've encased a large room in glass windows and built some great habitat outside the windows for you to watch the birds.  They even provide binoculars, and have microphones piping the sound of the birds into the room.  The birds love it and there are a lot to see. 

 

The town of Henderson, right on the Ohio River, was built on tobacco money in the old days, and has some stately old homes from the era downtown along the river.  We had a pleasant chat in a local museum about the history of the town and the area, and had a very pleasant lunch in a local barbecue place - excellent food.  

Next we were off to the Green River Lake State Park near Campbellsville.  We just squeaked in here because there were few sites available.  Apparently the Kentucky state parks make it a practice to do a Halloween weekend, in which families bring their RVs and their kids to the park for the weekend and dress up, have little parades and costume events, and then trick or treat the entire park.  We ran right out and bought a pile of treats for the little devils and witches.  We are missing our little grandchildren a lot on this trip, so it was nice to see so many kids having a good time.

A highlight of this stop was a trip to the Shaker Village, just up the road a ways.  This is a large and well-developed spot left over from the Shaker experiment in the 1800's.  They have many of the best old buildings from this communal village, and there are people dressed in period costume who show you the tools and crafts of the era as well as explain the history of the movement.  They have a crafts store where they sell many of the same items that the Shakers used to manufacture in their heyday.  It's a fascinating story of a utopian movement that ultimately failed but did some amazing stuff when it was in its prime.

On the way to the Shaker Village, we had a brief tour of Perryville, a civil war battleground park.  This was the site at which the Confederate invasion of Kentucky was turned back by the local Federal troops.  In this part of the country, the Civil War still leaves a huge shadow, and you see memorials and historical sites everywhere. We wandered the field and had a picnic lunch at the sunny and now-peaceful site.

We also took a quick tour of Kentucky barns, heading south to the village of Tompkinsville in a circular route through the southern part of the state.  Ivy loves the old barns in this part of the country, and there are some spectacular ones still in use here, many still used to dry tobacco just as they were at the peak of that business.  We were very much out in the back country, and even wound up taking the only free car ferry in the state, a tiny little barge that carries three cars across a small river, about 100 feet in five minutes. This is a lovely part of the country.

From that park, we headed off to the piece de resistance of our Kentucky stay, the Kentucky Horse Park near Lexington.  This is a gargantuan and amazing place, 1,000 acres, and totally dedicated to horses.  We arrived there a couple of weeks after the very prestigious World Equestrian Games of 2010 had concluded,  so we were able to get a campsite in the park.  It was good biking there, we toured the park on bikes, and I later took a ride into downtown Lexington on a ten mile trail that connects the park to the city.

The park is a multipurpose place, with a whole lot going on.  It has at least three museums including the International Museum of the Horse, a couple of stadiums, paddocks and barns everywhere, and daily demonstrations of different breeds, along with competitions and events like the World Games.  Kentucky is known as the center for horse breeding and racing, and this park lived up to the reputation of the area.  And we did a bit of shopping for our horse-crazy grandkids.
 

Downtown was just as dedicated to the horse.  They had endless statues of horses decorating the streets, just as they use pigs in Seattle.  Local artists decorate the statues and they put them up everywhere.  But the main attractions for us downtown were the homes of Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, and of Henry Clay, a famous politician from just before the Lincoln era that had a large home there.  Both homes are now museums and we toured both, getting a good picture of the two fascinating historical figures. 
 
Next we are off to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and a short visit to relatives in New Jersey.  Winter is closing in, and we're hoping to get all our visits finished and head south before the real cold weather arrives. 

Traveling through Missouri

Leaving Omaha, we headed off across the northern part of Missouri, for Big Lake Campground. This state park was visited by, drum roll, Lewis and Clark, on their return from the Pacific.  It was created when the Missouri was rerouted by dams, but when Lewis and Clark were there, it was part of the river.  The campground today is quite luxurious, with its own store, a motel, a cafe, and a lot of campsites.  It was badly flooded this spring, but has been reworked extensively by the state and is now quite comfortable.

The purpose of our visit was to do some birding at the nearby Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge.  This is a fabulous refuge, one of the best managed that I've seen, providing huge resources for migrating birds.  It routinely hosts more than a million Snow Geese in migration, and there were tens of thousands of birds there when we toured the refuge.  The creek provides water for an enormous network of marshes and bays to in an intricate system of channels and dikes, to provide habitat for the central flyway.  Local folks that I met are justly proud of the refuge and are active in taking care of it and encouraging its use.

We had a couple of good days of birding on the refuge.  There is an auto loop road about ten miles long that travels all around it, and Ivy and I drove that on the first day.   I went back and bicycled the whole route the next day while Ivy did some painting back at the RV park.  Both days were beautiful and sunny, and we saw thousands of birds.  Many were far away and difficult to identify because the refuge is so extensive, but it was a wonderful trip and a lot of fun even if I couldn't be sure of the identification of all the birds that I saw there.

We left Big Lake Campground in the rain, and headed  across the state  to the town of Hannibal, where Mark Twain spent his boyhood and where many of his most famous stories have their roots.  This is still a pretty small city, right on the Mississippi River.  The whole town is totally devoted to the Twain heritage, with tourist attractions and businesses using the Twain name wherever they could.  There was even a Huck Finn Shopping Center next to the WalMart.  All the hype was a little much, and one has to wonder how the curmudgeonly Twain would view it all if he could see it today.

But Ivy and I just dived into the tourism and had fun with it. We took a ride on the riverboat (The Mark Twain or course), visited the museums and the old houses of characters in his stories. It turns out that there really was a Becky Thatcher character, a Huck Finn character, and so forth - all have been identified as the sources of his childhood stories, much modified of course. There was a real cave, located in the campground where we were staying, and the museum gave you a feel for the Twain childhood and the influences that led him to build the classics that he did. But the best part was all the Mark Twain quotes that were plastered all over the museum and everywhere else.  That man sure could write!

While we were there, we took a bike ride along the river, exploring some of the country, and Ivy did some painting on a bluff overlooking the river.  The country was lovely, weather perfect, and we picnicked and did a bit of birdwatching.  I saw my first cardinal there at the Mississippi, which I took as a sign that we are really reaching the Eastern side at last.  There was a local parade, duel of the high school marching bands, and a good quilt exhibit.  All in all, a thorough mid-western experience. 

Next we were off to the city of St Louis. This is a real city, bigger than Omaha, and got us back into freeway traffic in a big way. But the city was quite congenial, in the little that we saw of it, and we had a good time visiting a sampling of its treasures. We took the Metrolink downtown, to take advantage of the rapid transit options - quite nice - and visited Forest Park, a huge space set aside after the World's Fair of 1904. We went to two large museums, constructed for that event, and explored some of the history of the area. At the history museum there was an exhibit on women's history, some of which originated in Puget Sound, so we had a bit of nostalgia there. There was also a section taken from the World's Fair history, with photographs and samples from the exhibits of that time.

 

The Art Museum was very enjoyable.  The star of their show was an artist of the Depression Era who worked in St Louis and was an activist for workers and the poor.  He did a number of WPA murals around the area, and many of his paintings were on display.  His name is Joe Jones, and I had not heard of him, but his work was quite striking and Ivy and I enjoyed the exhibit greatly.

We toured some of the areas downtown, including a sculpture garden and the old courthouse, which has been made into a national monument, much of it devoted to exhibits built around the Dred Scott decision and the role of the city of St. Louis in the history of race relations.  We toured the Arch area down by the river, and visited a wax museum in an area near the waterfront - rather a disappointment.  But the area itself was jumping - it was the weekend and there were bands playing all around and lots of action. 

The next day we visited a nearby park called the Global Bird Sanctuary. They were having an open house/fundraiser and we were able to tour some of their facilities and talk to some of the staff. They started out as a raptor rescue operation, and still keep a lot of emphasis on raptors, but they had a number of exhibits and captured birds and we got some advice on birding the area and followed up with a picnic in a nearby state park.

While we were in St Louis, we took advantage of the movie options.  I have been missing movies greatly, as our trip takes us mostly to small towns and places where choices are limited.  We had seen The Social Network in Hannibal, but we added on two others in St. Louis, one called Catfish, a documentary about the consequences (intended and unintended) of the Facebook world, and another called Nowhere Boy, a treatment of the young pre-Beatles years of John Lennon.  All were excellent films, and satisfied somewhat my film shortage. 

From here, we're off to Kentucky and further East.