After two long days of driving from Indiana to North Carolina, then two busy days playing tourist around Mount Airy, followed by the drive to Kinston, Miss Terry and I needed a day to just relax and recharge our batteries. So yesterday we slept in, and then spent most of the morning just cuddling in bed and talking. I cherish these quiet times with the love of my life, and I believe they are one of the reasons why, after being together twelve years, we still feel like we’re on our first date. 

When we finally got up and in gear, we didn’t go very far for most of the day. Instead, we stayed inside catching up on e-mail, cruising the internet, and catching up on some of the RV blogs we read on a regular basis.

I see on our friends Jan and Greg White’s Our RV Adventures blog that they are hanging out in southern Indiana visiting family, though I secretly suspect that Greg is just hiding out in case I need anything else fixed. Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour have been kayaking and diving in Florida, and are getting ready to visit Google’s headquarters in California.

According to their Gypsy and the Mariner’s RV Adventures, our pals Don and Sharon Del Rosario are back on their lot in Benson, Arizona; and also in Benson, Jerry and Suzi LeRoy report in their Our Life On Wheels blog that they are having computer woes.

In Texas, Mike McFall wrote in his Mike and Pat’s Travels blog that his lovely wife Pat had a surprise birthday this week. I love reading blogs, because they help us keep up with our RVing friends.

If you’re not a fulltimer, you can get a good insight into the lifestyle by reading some of these and the many other RV blogs out there. As you can see, sometimes we have days filled with adventure, and other days are pretty routine, just like folks living in sticks and bricks homes.

Eventually I wandered outside, where I took a few pictures of the campground at Neuseway Nature Park. Our RV site backs up to some trees, and I wasn’t sure our rooftop automatic television dish would be able to pick up a signal, but after a couple of false starts, it managed to lock onto a weak signal. If we were parked across the road, facing our present site, we’d have had no problem, but since those sites back up to the Neuseway River, they are in demand and were all taken when we arrived.

One thing that mystified me was why the campground electrical hookups were mounted on tall poles that my stubby little legs barely allowed me to reach. When our friend Patti Ivey came by to visit, I mentioned the strange electrical hookups, and she explained that they are that way to keep them above the high water level when the river floods. I made a mental note to myself not to be anywhere near here if the water starts rising!

We spent the evening with Patti and her two sons, having a fun dinner at Pizza Hut, and then going back to her townhouse to visit for a couple of hours before we returned to the campground.

Not a very busy or exciting day, but one that will give us pleasant memories of a quiet day in the life we enjoy so much.

Thought For The Day – A true friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out

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We really enjoyed our time in Mount Airy, and we know it’s an area we’ll return to again. The people are friendly, the scenery is beautiful, and there is a lot to see and do.

Mayberry Campground is one of the nicest places we have stayed, and if you are passing through the region, put it on your list of places to stop. The park is laid out in a terraced design, with roomy full hookup pull through and back-in RV sites, and the Passport America rate of $12.50 a night is a heck of a deal.

The only drawback to the campground was that our Verizon air card was on National Access, instead of the high speed EVDO signal, so our internet connection was pretty slow. The campground has free WiFi, so most people wouldn’t have a problem, but I don’t have a WiFi adapter on the desktop computer I use, so I had to put up with sluggish service.

As much as we enjoyed our stay, we had places to go and people to see, so yesterday we hit the road and took U.S. Highway 52 to Winston-Salem, where we hooked up with Interstate 40 eastbound. For the next 120 miles or so, as we passed Winston-Salem, then Greensboro, and on past Raleigh, we were in moderate to heavy traffic most of the way.

From Raleigh we took U.S. Highway 70 east to Kinston. Except for all of the traffic, it was an easy driving day. We covered 220 miles, and according to the Silverleaf engine monitoring system, we averaged 7.9 miles per gallon. Except for a few short climbs, most of it was downhill. The elevation at Mayberry Campground was 1175 feet, and the elevation in Kinston is only 37 feet. 

We arrived in Kinston about 4:30 p.m. and took a site at Neuseway Nature Park. Situated on the Neuseway River, the park includes a 52 seat planetarium, museum, nature trails, fishing ponds, and a campground with full hookup 50/30 amp electric back-in RV sites. At $12 a night, it’s a real bargain. 

Soon after we get settled in, Patti Ivey came by to visit. We met Patti and her husband Mickey soon after they became fulltime RVers. Mickey developed the excellent RVer’s Notebook computer program, which is great for keeping track of all of your RV travels, equipment maintenance schedule, the people you meet along the way, and a ton of other information and memories. If you don’t have the RVer’s Notebook, check it out. It’s an excellent resource.

Unfortunately, we lost Mickey suddenly three years ago, and Patti is no longer traveling. She returned to her hometown of Kinston, and continues to market the RVer’s Notebook. We have not seen her since she got off the road, so a visit was very high on our agenda for our trip to North Carolina.

After giving Patti a tour of our Winnebago motorhome, we went to dinner at King’s Restaurant, a North Carolina legend when it comes to barbecue. The food was delicious, and we enjoyed talking with Patti about life on and off the road, and the curveballs life sometimes throws at us.

Meanwhile, Bad Nick was back at the motorhome, writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled It’s Called Humor. Check it out and leave a comment.

We’ll be here a few days, visiting our friend and getting to know this new area we have never explored before. 

Thought For The Day – Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down.

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Interstate highways are great for RV travel if you are just going from Point A to Point B. They are usually the quickest way to get where you’re going, but they lack any charm or character, so whenever possible, we love to travel the back roads, those two lane highways that take you through the small towns where you can see the real America.

Of course, some of the best adventures are found on back roads where an RV isn’t the most practical form of transportation. When we find a nice place to park for a few days, we leave the motorhome and go exploring in our van.

Mayberry Campground here in Mount Airy makes an excellent base for doing just that. The campground is very clean, has roomy full hookup pull-through and back-in sites with cable TV and WiFi, and the folks who run it are very friendly.

The campground’s owner, Benny East, is a great great grandson of Eng Bunker, one of the famous Siamese Twins, who settled in this area after a career touring in vaudeville. The twins died in 1874 and are buried a mile away, and yesterday we paid a visit to their gravesite.

Since we had played tourist in town on Tuesday, we wanted a change of pace yesterday. We set off down some narrow back roads where I’d never take an RV larger than a Class B van.

At the tiny village of Rockford, we stopped to check out the Rockford General Store, which has been serving the community since 1890. What a neat place! This cigar store Indian greeted us at the front door, and inside the owner welcomed us like long lost family members.

We loved looking at all of the things on display, from bulk candy to gourds, and after poking around in every corner of the store we had worked up an appetite. The store serves up delicious sandwiches that you’ll never find at McDonald’s or Burger King. I had the fried country ham and egg, and Miss Terry tried the thick cut pan fried bologna and cheese. Both were wonderful! We sat on rocking chairs on the front porch and passed the time of day with a local gentleman as we ate our lunches.

When we left Rockford, we meandered down a series of roads that crossed the Yadkin River several times, and eventually brought us to the Horne Creek Living Historical Farm, which was farmed by the Hauser family for nearly 200 years.

Since we visited in the off season, there were no costumed interpreters working on the farm, as there are other times of year, depicting farm life in rural North Carolina circa 1900.

We still had a good time wandering around the farm and the handsome two story house where several generations of Hausers lived and died. Terry and I always say that if we did not have to work, we’d love to spend some time volunteering as costumed interpreters at historic sites. Even adults like to play dress up!
Pilot Mountain, rising 1,400 feet above the surrounding countryside, is a major landmark in this region, and long before we had highways and GPS systems, explorers and settlers used it to navigate their way through the wilderness.

We have had a fantastic time exploring the upper Piedmont plateau of North Carolina, and we could easily spend a couple more weeks here. But we have lots more to see and do, and today we’ll be on the road again, heading for new territory in search of new adventures.

Thought For The Day – If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?

We had to work yesterday. Of course, when your job is playing tourist, that’s not exactly a bad thing!

As I said in yesterday’s blog, Mount Airy, North Carolina is the hometown of television star Andy Griffith, and was the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in the old Andy Griffith show. No longer a small town, Mount Airy still retains a lot of charm, and has made a business out of its connection with Mayberry.

We started our day with a visit to the Andy Griffith Playhouse, the center of music and the arts in Mount Airy. The museum isn’t officially open to the public yet, but a very nice young lady gave us a tour of the brand new Andy Griffith Museum. Outside, a statue of Sheriff Taylor and Opie heading out for a day of fishing is a favorite photo opportunity for tourists.

Our next stop was the Visitor Center downtown, and the ladies there were very friendly and gave us several tips on places to see and things to do. From there we strolled a couple of blocks down Main Street, poking our heads into several shops and soaking up the atmosphere.

Main Street is a lot busier than when Andy and Barney patrolled the town, but Russell Hiatt is still cutting hair at Floyd’s City Barber Shop, as he has for the past 62 years. The walls of the shop are lined with over 20,000 pictures of regular folks and celebrities who have sat in the old barber chair where Andy Griffith himself once got his haircuts, including Lou Ferrigno of Incredible Hulk fame, George Lindsey who played Goober on the Andy Griffith Show, and talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Now my picture is on the Wall of Fame too, and here is one of me and my new friend Mr. Hiatt.  

Next door to the barber shop, you can have a delicious pork chop sandwich next door at the Snappy Diner, which Andy Taylor referred to in the television show. But go early, because they close in mid-afternoon!

We wanted to tour the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, which is supposed to have some excellent exhibits, but when we stopped in, the three people at the counter couldn’t seem to figure out how to allow us to do that, since the director was at a Rotary meeting, and they were sure he would want to talk to us first. Maybe they were afraid we were spies there to steal valuable information so we could go across the street and open our own museum, I don’t know. We finally gave up and went off in search of other things to write about.

At Wally’s Service Station, you can book a tour of the town in a police car that looks like the one Sheriff Andy Taylor drove.

Next door, at the Mayberry Courthouse, they have a replica of Sheriff Taylor’s office, and Miss Terry took a picture of me in the jail cell where town drunk Otis slept off his binges. I’m always worried when she puts me in a cage, because I never know when she might snap a lock on the door and just leave me there! Could you blame her?

A few blocks away, the small house where Andy Griffith lived as a boy is now a bed and breakfast, decorated with antiques from the 1930s and 1940s, including some original Andy Griffith memorabilia.

We had a great day “working,” and we look forward to putting our noses to the grindstone again today. It’s a fun job, and somebody has to do it!

While we were hard at work, Bad Nick was working too, posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled Health Care, Canadian Style. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Right now is a perfect time to be happy.

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After a chilly night in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Gallipolis, Ohio, we were up bright and early yesterday morning. There were several things we wanted to see locally, so I went inside the store and obtained permission to leave our motorhome there for a couple of hours while we went exploring in the van.

Gallipolis was settled in the late 1700s by French aristocrats who fled the old country to escape the guillotine. It is the hometown of Bob Evans, founder of the Bob Evans Restaurant chain, and the family farm is now a tourist attraction that includes an RV park offering water and electric hookups and a dump station for $15/night.

While exploring the friendly community, we noticed several back in RV sites with water and electric hookups at a Public Access boat launch on the bank of the Ohio River downtown. I stopped at City Hall to ask about the sites, and learned that RVers passing through the area can stay either for free, for $10 a night, or for $25 a night, depending on which secretary you want to believe. For free or $10 a night, I’d stay a while just to watch the riverboats going by, but for $25 a night, I’d pass.

This trip it didn’t matter, because we had a lot of miles to cover yet. We crossed the river on the Silver Memorial Bridge, and I think I may be getting over my bridge phobia, because I didn’t snivel once. The original Silver Bridge here collapsed in 1967, throwing 70 cars into the river below and claiming 46 lives. Maybe I’m not over my phobia after all, and I just figured lighting wouldn’t strike twice in the same place.

On the West Virginia side of the river, Point Pleasant is a charming little town with enough to see and do to keep visitors busy for several days. In 1774, a force of Virginia militia was ambushed here by Shawnee and Mingo Indians and the fierce battle lasted for hours. In the end, 75 militiamen were killed, along with an estimated 33 Indians. Many consider this to be the first battle of the American Revolution. Today a small park on the riverfront where the battle took place includes an 84 foot high granite obelisk honoring the men who fought and died here.

Point Pleasant also has a place in paranormal history. Here, in 1966, a strange winged man-like creature that became known as Mothman was reportedly sighted. Since then there have been several reported sightings of the creature, usually before disasters. Several people claimed to see Mothman perched high in the girders of the original Silver Bridge before it collapsed. Since then, Mothman has become a worldwide phenomenon, with mention in documentary films, movies and television specials.

Sure, it’s probably just the figment of imaginations gone wild, but the folks in Point Pleasant took it serious enough to erect a state of Mothman on Main Street downtown, and there is a Mothman Museum just across the street.

With our sightseeing over, we returned to Gallipolis, picked up the motorhome, and crossed the river again. On the Ohio side of the river, U.S. Highway 35 had been a very nice divided four lane, but  a couple of miles into West Virginia, it dropped down to a two lane road with no shoulders, and lots of curves for maybe 25 miles, and then it became divided four lane again.

Before long we joined Interstate 64 and followed it east a few miles into Charleston, where we picked up Interstate 77 south past the gold domed State Capitol building. Traffic was pretty heavy in Charleston, but before long we put the city behind us, and Interstate 77 became the West Virginia Turnpike.

For the next hundred miles we climbed up and around one mountain after another, the Winnebago doing just fine. I can’t believe the power this thing has! The constant climbing did affect our fuel mileage, though. The day before, we averaged 8.1 miles per gallon across relatively flat Indiana and Ohio, according to the Silverleaf, and yesterday our average was right at 7 miles per gallon.

It cost $10.50 in tolls to travel from Charleston to the state line, but I don’t think they spend much of that money on highway improvements, because that was one rough road in many places!

We crossed into Virginia, stopped for fuel at the T/A truck stop in Wytheville, and in less than an hour we arrived at Mayberry Campground in Mount Airy, North Carolina.  

Mount Airy is the hometown of television star Andy Griffith, and the picturesque town was the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in the old Andy Griffith show.

Andy and his trusty deputy Barney Fife probably wouldn’t recognize the old town these days. It has a Wal-Mart Super Center, Staples Office Supply, Golden Corral Buffet, Lowes, and other major stores and restaurants.  Unfortunately, crime has come to Mayberry. The day before we arrived, a gunman killed four men in a shooting a few blocks from Main Street.

This is a beautiful area, with a lot to see and do, and we’ll be here a few days before we head on down the road. I’ll have a lot to share with you in tomorrow’s blog, so stay tuned. 

Thought For The Day – Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic.

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