Blue Ridge Parkway trip: Asheville, Staunton, home again… (posted from home)

This post covers the period 7 June through 11 June.

11 June-
After breakfast with our friends we drove Mocha Joe to a local park to while away some time until this afternoon’s party. Labashi spent the time reading and I spent it blogging. It’s very comfortable to sit in the front passenger seat in Mocha Joe and blog away on the laptop. I use an inverter plugged into the cigar lighter receptacle and that gives me both a fully-bright screen on the laptop and also brings the laptop battery up to a full charge.
That afternoon we attended a backyard party in celebration of my nephew’s graduation from high school. While the morning had been quite cool and windy, the afternoon was very pleasant with temps in the mid-Seventies. The party was a great success and we wish him well. Besides the obvious fun of eating picnic goodies I had fun thumb-wrestling with a five-year old son of the neighbor. We thumb-wrestled right-handed, left-handed and, in a fit of thumb-wrestle-mania, cross-handed (with both hands at the same time). The five-year-old, Jacob, eeked out a narrow victory (his thumb was small but VERY quick) but I think I can take him next time.
With the sun was setting we headed Mocha Joe toward home. As we drove along I-81 we started noticing a few oddly-parked vehicles parked along the roads alongside I-81. It took us a little while to figure out that there must have been a big race or celebrity event or something in the area and they were gathered to watch for their trucks or buses. We soon saw a Petty Engineering truck go by so figured it must have been a NASCAR event. And just before we turned off the interstate we saw a gaudily-painted truck with Reese’s and Mr. Goodwrench logos. A quick search via Google suggests that must have been Kevin Harvick. His myspace page is at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=46540808
We arrived home just before 2200 and did the quick run-through to check that everything looked ok and to flip on the circuit breakers and water valves that I turn off when we go away. It’s good to be home!

10 June-
For us the point of stopping at Staunton was to see the Frontier Culture Museum. While the name is suggestive of Dan’l Boone and Kentucky rifles and Davy’s coonskin cap, the museum has a very interesting premise. To explain early life in America, we look at what life was like in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s in Europe, specifically in Germany, Ireland, and England. So what the museum did was to bring complete early homes and farm buildings from those countries and reconstruct them on the Museum grounds and make it a ‘living museum’ with costumed interpreters to explain it to visitors. Because my male line is of German heritage and I know where they were from and when they came to America, we were very interested in the German farm. The buildings were from 1710 in the Palatinate, which fits exactly. We spent several hours learning all we could about the timbered-with-wattle-and-daub construction of the house and barn and their clay-tile roofs. We learned how the people lived and the reasons for wanting to leave their homelands and how they lived in America.
The Irish farm was also very interesting and we had another great interpreter. She was making a cabbage-and-potatoes dish and frying up some delicious-smelling sausage (but alas, they can’t serve visitors!). We also had excellent interpreters at the Irish forge and the English farm and a so-so interpreter at the Virginia farm. But the interpreter’s lack of knowledge there was more than made up for by the realism and the level of detail of the farm. It looked like the original 1700’s inhabitants had just walked away and left everything there--- all the tools, all the supplies, the meat smoking in the smokehouse, the barrels of flour and cornmeal, everything. What a great place job the museum has done in their re-creation.
We spent the day there until about 1500 and then headed north on I-81. We called ahead to friends in the Chambersburg area and by 1830 were at their house and starting a very enjoyable visit and then we spent the night in their driveway.

9 June-
We left the Asheville area to turn homeward this morning. As we were preparing to leave the campground we stopped to take our pictures at a Smokey-the-Bear statue and backdrop. We laughed to see a golf cart approaching with two tiny little chihuahua’s out front pulling at their leashes for all they were worth. The driver yelled ‘Mush there, you dogs!’ when he came abreast of us and gave us a big smile.
We took Interstate 26 north for an hour or so toward Johnson City and Tennessee but we turned off at SR321 to follow the dotted road. That took us on a very scenic route through the mountains and we decided to stay on the back roads to Damascus, VA. Damascus is well-known as an Appalachian Trail town and also for having seven trail systems in the area and the Mount Rogers Recreation area. I checked out the Mt Rogers Outfitters store in Damascus and we saw a dozen or so thru-hikers in the area. We left via SR58 and took a very twisty road up along the Virginia Creeper Trail (a well-known rail-trail) for awhile and then up Mount Rogers. We stopped briefly at the ‘Worlds’ Shortest Tunnel’, where the road punches through Backbone Mountain in a spot where the mountain is only about 20-feet thick; it’s quite a startling sight. We saw two rangers working there in the parking lot nearby and talked with them about their job for the day of putting out gypsy moth traps. They tell us the gypsy moths are traveling down the I-81 corridor and last year a gypsy moth was captured in one of the traps (but it was unclear to us how big a problem that is—we saw no gypsy moth damage anywhere in our travels).
That night we stayed at the Staunton, VA Wal-mart and had Labashi’s favorite takeout—Chili’s fajitas.
Staying at Wal-mart turned out to be a big mistake. This Wal-mart is a 24-hour one and on this Friday night it was a meeting place for all the buzz-bomb rice-rockets, unmuffled pickups, and loud motorcycles in the area. The noise from the shoppers died down shortly before dark but between 2200 and 0100 the next morning there was a steady stream of loud vehicle noise. And then from 0100 until daylight there was a steady stream of vehicles coming into the parking lot, doors slamming, and then vehicles racing off. One idiot motorcyclist would on an hourly basis start up his very loud bike and rev it up for a minute, then shut it down. Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep until dawn but then we slept very deeply for a couple of hours. No more weekends nights for us at 24-hour Wal-marts.

8 June-
In the morning we went shopping again, hoping to find some unique items for the garden and lawn. Labashi fell in love with a French bird decoy from Fireside Antiques and we spent the rest of the morning browsing through a very large warehouse of antiques called The Tobacco Warehouse. We were there for two hours or so and only got halfway through before we had to leave to make our Segway tour appointment.
That afternoon we enjoyed the highlight of our entire trip—the Segway tour. Our group of six consisted of three couples and our instructor, Wes. We spent the first hour getting us all familiar and comfortable with the Segways in a large loading-dock driveway area behind the visitor’s center. Wes led each person one at a time through the basics of stepping aboard, controlling, then stepping down off the Segway. Once you had your lesson, you could ride out into the wide driveway area where Wes had set up some cones and practice maneuvering. Then we went off following Wes around the grounds on the tour. Our Segways were the XT model and have off-road tires. These Segways have three keys. The black key is the basic one and allows you to go up to six miles per hour. The yellow key allows up to eight miles per hour. I didn’t catch how fast the red key allows you to go but did see that the red key also allows the Segway to turn much more quickly. So Wes would zoom out ahead of us on his red-key Segway and stop somewhere and turn around as we approached to indicate that as a stop on the tour.
The black key speed was just fine for us—we didn’t need to go any faster, particularly when we got off the paved road and onto the bumpier gravel backroads and wood-chipped trails. The tour length was perfect and we were tired by the time we got back. We had one stop along the way to get off the Segway and stretch and it was greatly appreciated since the leg muscles are worked quite a lot by balancing on the Segway.
One odd thing about the Segway is how it stands up as you climb a hill. The gyroscope is always keeping the wheels under you so it makes sense that the Segway control yoke stands up straighter going uphill but it’s a bit surprising in practice.
Anyway, we both had a GREAT time on the Segways and will now actively seek out more opportunities to ride them. I don’t think they are practical enough to buy for yourself even if the $4900 price (for the XT model, $3000 for the base model) isn’t a problem. You need someplace like the Arboretum or a large park or college campus with lots of roads or sidewalks with little traffic for it to be useful. But they sure are fun!!!
After our ride we went to the nearby Lake Powatan campground for the night. Later in the evening our legs had stretched out from the Segway ride and we walk the Lakeside trail for a mile or so. We were surprised to see how many mountain bikers there were in this area; we saw many parking pulloffs in the area and the larger ones tended to be parked almost full of vehicles with bike racks. Our campground was nice and quiet, though, and for a change it was a campground with showers!


7 June-
We were interested in seeing the Asheville area and started with the North Carolina Arboretum. We were particularly interested in seeing their bonsai garden after having seen a world-class bonsai garden in the San Francisco area several years ago. The Arboretum was very nice and the bonsai garden well done but they also allowed us to go into the greenhouse area. I saw my first bird-of-paradise tree and its bloom was amazing. We also saw pitcher plants, venus fly-traps and sundews under an oddly-attractive corkscrew bush. We had hiked the .6 trail to the greenhouse and took it back to the visitor’s center where we saw a small group of people in bicycle helmets getting ready to take a Segway tour. This is a new program at the Arboretum where you and five other people learn how to operate Segways and then take them on a two-hour tour of the more remote portions of the Arboretum. We eagerly sought out the signup desk and managed to buy tickets for a tour the next day at 1400. Ticket cost was $45 per person for the three-hour session of training and touring.
Then Labashi wanted to go shopping for garden sculptures. We went to the New Morning Gallery where she found two wonderful Japanese-style sculptures by Tom Torrens and we thought through the implications of getting a large sculpture home---- we’d probably have to rent a u-haul trailer--- but in the end Labashi decided that such a strongly-Japanese style sculpture would lock her into making our patio area into a Japanese garden. And perhaps it was a little too showy for us; she likes a more understated look.
Later we went to a large antiques store called The Screen Door which had some unique architectural salvage items and then to the Grovewood Gallery, which was a very expensive shop on the grounds of the ultra-exclusive (but ugly!) Grovewood Park Inn (their claim to fame is that seven presidents have stayed there).
That evening we ate at the Flat Rock Grill, an upscale seafood restaurant. Labashi had the Carolina crabcakes appetizer and a baked potato and I had the filet-mignon ‘entrée salad’ and we shared those for a good variety of tastes.
We again stayed overnight at the Wal-mart parking lot.