Last morning

A poster in our Bagel Express amuses us every time we see it; it’s about treating victims of choking and suggests the following ways of recognising the condition:

• The victim collapses
• The victim cannot move or speak
• The victim turns blues

“Well, ah woke up this morning…”  Quick, slap him on the back!  (Or, depending on musical taste, strangle him.)

Well, we really did wake up this morning; this room has a much quieter aircon unit than the old one, so apart from the 3.30am NYPD city-wide siren test, we had a good sleep… and went down to Bagel Express for breakfast… and sat on the wall outside on our pedestrianised street… and watched the circle of (Buddhist?) students gather at the tables for their morning meditation… and watched down the vistas of 25th St the yellow cabs whizzing by –  Bah, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Checking out now, off to Calvary & St George again (W looking forward to communion), then a couple of hours to kill before subway to JFK, using our mysteriously high-in-credit Metro Card (our theory is that we ought to have been running it through the ticket barrier once for each of us, rather than both squeezing through together.)

See you all at home.  Thanks for following.

D& W x

Back here

That is to say, here:

Yes, ye good oldë Carlton Armës in Manhattan, this time in a room more trippy than titty (sorry, best I could do).  We phoned them from Wilmington this morning after handing back our faithful car, and they welcomed us back at a special rate of $80, I think simply because they liked William so much.

So, this morning started in the splendour of Annapolis and a very odd (but presumably authentic American) breakfast: fresh orange juice, fruit salad, muesli, omelette, tomato (and sausage for William), finished off with a waffle smothered in cream and jam.  All served up by a lovely lady from El Salvador with whom I only had one word in common in any language: caliente (sadly, I think, not so much a description of me as of the crockery).  Then 3 hours to cover the hundred or so miles to Wilmington which, once we had crossed another tremendous bridge:

the Chesapeake Bay one this time, began to look like a forlorn hope as we sat in endless stationary traffic.  Fortunately, they were all going to the beach, so once our route had divided from theirs, we whizzed along the usual empty freeways.  We still didn’t have too many minutes to spare at Wilmington.

Then we were dumped, carless and weighed down by the luggage of the world, at Wilmington bus station:

from where one of us had the bright idea of phoning the Carlton Arms, after which we hopped on the Greyhound and three hours later were here.  It felt so much like home, it amazed even us.  So we had a walk uptown to Toys Я Us at Times Square and admired the Lego:

 

followed by dinner in our favourite Irish brewhouse.  And so to bed.

Annapolis

Where we are currently enjoying a bit of post-Colonial luxury in the Annapolitan Bed & Breakfast:

Annapolis is a bit of a joke – the US equivalent of Chipping Norton or Bourton-on-the-Water, stuffed with trendy shops and people and overrated eating-places.  We drove round and round it looking for a budget hotel, with which most US cities are well-supplied, usually on the way in from the Interstate – but not Annapolis.  You might as well look for a budget hotel in, well, Chipping Norton or Bourton-on-the-Water.  We were on our way out of town, having given up and heading for the bridge over to the Eastern Shore, when we passed this place and were welcomed into its luxurious embrace.  After a bit of a smarten-up, we wandered downtown and hopped onto one of the free trolleys (actually modern buses done up to look like old trams) for a tour that took us through the downtown harbour quarter and past the famous historical buildings (oldest State Capitol in the US, etc.).  No photographs as it was getting dark – much earlier here in the east than down in North Carolina, where the distance south was more than compensated for by the distance west, and night didn’t really fall until 9.30.

Before that, the day had been one of more driving, from Charlottesville through a region riddled with famous Civil War sites – Spotsylvania, Chancellorsville – to Fredericksburg and a visit to the battleground and visitor centre.  For Civil War enthusiasts (hello?…. hello?) here are a few of the key sites in this terrible encounter:

The Sunken Road – Union attack from the right, Confeds in the shelter of the wall shooting them like fish in a barrel

Marye’s Heights, the Confederate position, with Fredericksburg in the distance

The National Cemetery

The rest of the journey was through flat eastern Virginian countryside and over the Potomac Bridge into Maryland.  For whatever good reason, this one lets shipping through not by dipping into a tunnel but by the up-and-over route:

This part of Maryland, 30 miles or so from Washington, is fairly unattractive and also very busy – the heaviest traffic we’d driven through.  And why is fuel so expensive here? (OK, you poor Brits, that’s relative.)  It seems perverse that in rural western Virginia we paid $3.25 a gallon, while within a few miles of the national capital it’s $3.60 or so.

Must put in a word, though, about the courtesy of American drivers – not once have I had a horn blown at me; of course I’m a supremely excellent driver, but it’s taken me a little while to get used to some key differences from our rules of the road, such as that you are allowed unless expressly forbidden to turn right through a red light if there’s nothing coming from the left.

And speaking of driving, our old faithful car will be leaving us tomorrow 😦 – not one I would choose for everyday motoring at home, but it’s been very comfortable and easy to drive.

Thursday 18th July

After a stormy night, a beautiful morning began a long day’s drive to the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  It wouldn’t appear at first that a winding road with a maximum speed limit of 45mph would be a good way of getting anywhere fast, but in fact it’s a bit like a slowed-down version of motorway driving, since there are no stops and no route-finding problems (and unlike British motorway driving, almost no other traffic).  Somewhere along the way we passed unheralded from North Carolina into Virginia.  The day’s only real highlight was a stop at Mabry’s Mill at Meadows of Dan, VA,

View showing two water channels (“flumes”) drawing water from different streams & leading to the mill-wheel

for a look around and some lunch.  After a bit of shopping in Waynesboro at the northern end of the Parkway, we carried on down to Charlottesville and our favourite Sleep Inn again.

 

Wednesday 17th July

Both slept well after yesterday’s exertions. All the wood very damp this morning, and after a couple of hours of struggling and swearing we managed to get some moderately hot water for coffee. Then a gentle meander north up the Blue Ridge Parkway, after saying goodbye to the two boys from the US Army who had befriended us on the hill yesterday and who had made a great fuss of William, giving him a chocolate bar and talking knowledgeably about Harry Potter.

First stop was the North Carolina Museum of Minerals – very well done, with lots of interactive displays to build your own atom, measure radioactivity, move continents around by cranking a handle etc. An elderly guide told us “This hayuh ahun ore is wuhn billion and thirty-six years old.” When asked how he could possibly date it so precisely, he replied, “Well, ah’ve worked hayuh for thirty-six years and it was just wuhn billion years old when ah started.”

To begin with we stopped at every viewpoint (“overlook” in US English) to marvel at the views,

but eventually pushed on a bit more quickly. Next stop was Linville Falls, where an insuperable force (the Linville River) meets an immovable object (the Linville Fault) and goes over it in two falls, one quite small and one tremendous.

Linville Upper Fall

Linville Lower Fall

Then into Linville itself looking for food, of both the lunch and supermarket varieties. The latter was not to be had – Linville is the perfect one-horse town – but we did find a shop called “Everything Scottish”, behind which was The Tartan Restaurant. We lunched on traditional Scottish delicacies – stuffed jalapeños with salsa, pinto beans, macaroni cheese and slaw with cornbread for me, cajun chicken fries and hotdog for William, all washed down with root beer. Since it also has its Highland Games coming up next week, Linville would seem to be the heart of expat North Carolina Caledonia.

While we were eating, some traditional Scottish weather kicked off outside,

so we had to run for the car in torrents of rain. The Blue Ridge Parkway then proved to be rather elusive, mainly because it was nearly impossible to read signs in the rain, but we managed to rejoin it at a town called Blowing Rock. By now we had decided to make for the campground at Doughton (pronounced Dawton) Park, which according to the map offered fuel and restaurant facilities in addition to camping, so the supplies problem seemed to be solved. When we arrived, there was nothing – restaurant, gas and supplies long gone, campsite utterly deserted apart from a couple in their converted Ford Transit, who must have overheard us planning a meal of dry bagels and bananas, since they came over and gave us enough food for a good meal cooked over a fire of beautifully dry wood and fir-cones.

As I write, the rain has returned and we are both sheltering in the car while the thunder bangs and grumbles around the hills.

Some Mount Mitchell flora

Please skip this one if not interested.  A good way to send a British flower-spotter slightly mad is to take him to somewhere like the US – the baffling thing is not that everything is different but that so many things are roughly, but not quite, the same.

First some identifiable ones:

Thickets of wild raspberry – fruit sadly not ripe

Fraser fir

Mountain laurel

Mountain St John’s wort

Michaux’s saxifrage

Chicken-of-the-woods

and some mysteries:

Strange, probably parasitic, plant – bit like a broomrape?

The same, flowering

Pretty pink fungus

More fungi

 

Looks like navelwort, but isn’t – the leaves are stiff and shiny

 

 

 

Mount Mitchell

The first thing we noticed at the Black Mountain campground was how cool it was, and we spent a lovely cool night, both of us huddled up in our sleeping-bags instead of using them as pillows and lying uncovered and sweltering. Even a bit cold in mine in the middle of the night, since it is only a fleece liner. In the morning we scavenged for dead wood and made a fire, so had hot tea and coffee with toasted bagels for breakfast – all American campgrounds seem to come with, as well as the quarter-acre for each pitch, a picnic table and fireplace.

The Mount Mitchell trail takes off directly from the campground and winds about across the north-west side of the mountain, gaining height very gradually and taking 6 miles to cover about 2 in a straight line. The lower levels are probably the least interesting, since the trail passes through mature spruce forest with little vegetation on the forest floor, but as the trees get smaller so the flora gets more varied and interesting – see next entry. But this is not, to be honest, the best ever mountain ascent, since it nearly all happens in dense forestry and only breaks out of the trees in the last few hundred yards.

Then at the top you meet the crowds who have driven up the motor road and who are hanging out in the gift shop, the museum and at the refreshment stall. The museum is actually very informative on all aspects of the geology and wildlife of the Mount Mitchell Park, and has a very entertaining exhibit where a life-size sculpture of Big Tom Wilson, a famous mountain guide, tells you stories about various aspects of his life, including finding the body of Dr Elisha Mitchell, the geographer who first measured the height of the mountain, who died on it and is buried at the summit.

But the views are worth all the slog of the ascent and the touristy crowds. This is after all the highest peak for over 1000 miles in any direction, and the views go on over mile after mile of wild Appalachian scenery.

Mount Mitchell – views south, north, east & west

The whole walk, up and down, is a good day’s jaunt: we left the campground about 9.15, took 4 hours to the top, started back down at 2.45 and were back down shortly after 6.

Back from the wilderness

and a few days to catch up on:

Monday 15th July

A long, long driving day today, with a few surprises thrown in:

since I had thought we would pass from Virginia into North Carolina. Yesterday’s drive west of Richmond had been through rolling countryside, always slightly more up than down, but today the Interstate west of Charlottesville immediately started to climb and some big hills appeared ahead.  One section looked incongruously like the A449 between the Coldra and Usk, with the big wooded slope of the Wentwood on your right, but on a huge scale, the road climbing for about 10 miles.  Then over the top and down into the Shenandoah valley and south on Interstate 81 to the far south-western limit of Virginia.

This was all part of Plan B for the holiday, since some things have had to be changed or abandoned (the Outer Banks of North Carolina fall under the latter heading) since we only have 2 weeks here, not 2 months. The idea now is to spend two days at Mount Mitchell, then make our way slowly north again along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

We both slept extremely well at the Sleep Inn, not surprisingly – it was our first night with air-conditioning, since the unit in the Carlton Arms had been far too noisy to leave on at night. So a night with no mosquitoes, no cicadas and no sweltering heat (the night before, our second at First Landing, had been agonisingly hot and humid).  And a huge complimentary breakfast to start the day – cereal, bagels, tea!!, eggs and William’s special home-made waffles.

Our only real stop of the day was at Johnson City, TN, where we didn’t hear any authentic frontier gibberish spoken, but stocked up on food for 2 or more days in the wilds of the Blue Ridge, and satisfied William’s craving for fish and chips at a Drive-Thru seafood joint called Long John Silver’s, in style an infinitely downmarked McDonald’s, but the food melt-in-the-mouth delicious fish and fries.  How are the Americans able, in a landlocked state, to achieve quality that eludes 99% of British chippies?

Then back across the Blue Ridge – really big here, much bigger than up by Charlottesville – across a pass at 3750 feet and into North Carolina.  Very helpful lady at NC Welcome Centre gave us maps and directions to the Black Mountain Campground in the Mount Mitchell State Park, which finished up with an exciting ride down an unsurfaced track (South Toe River Road) to the site – the most beautiful imaginable, wooded, with a rushing river – the South Toe River, in fact – on one side and the rising ridge of Mount Mitchell on the other.

 

There are one or two big permanent residents:

We are at about 3200 feet here, so another 3400 to climb the big one tomorrow.

Sunday 14th July

So now, after 3 nights in the tent, we are enjoying a bit of luxury at the Sleep Inn, Charlottesville, VA,

after a long day on the road up from Virginia Beach.  We interstated it first of all as far as Richmond, with a brief excursion to see Williamsburg, which we were told we must – but we never did find it, and eventually found ourselves back on the interstate.  No real regrets; I’m not that fussed about historical re-enactment, and would prefer to spend time with Civil War history, which Richmond provides in abundance.  It’s a very fine city, with lots of monuments and buildings worth seeing:

The Washington Memorial, Richmond

The Virginia State Capitol

but most memorable is the riverfront, which is about as different from a riverfront in any British city as can possibly be imagined:

The James River here is about half a mile wide and goes crashing over rapids and shoals, looking especially good just now because of the volume of water from the recent rain.  It is crossed by two huge modern road bridges and a variety of derelict railway ones, including one that forms part of the Historic Tredegar site and which has notable Civil War quotes incised into its walkway, including this almost unbearably poignant one:

And yes, that was Tredegar, although pronounced locally with the stress on the 1st syllable:

Largely built by Rhys Davies, from our Tredegar, and the biggest (and just about the only) manufactory of heavy arms in the Confederacy.

Then in the afternoon on scenic roads to the lovely town of Charlottesville

where we plunged (quite literally, since it has a swimming pool) into the unaccustomed luxury of the Sleep Inn – which I now must do.

Things that go squeak in the night…

…and croak, groan, baa, whee, fizz – and I don’t mean William.  The sound of nocturnal wildlife has been with us so constantly at Virginia Beach that it deserves a post of its own.  I’ve mentioned the cicadas, which keep up their din all day, and which may possibly quieten down at night, or it may be that they are just drowned out by all the other stuff that kicks off.  Close to, an individual cicada sounds like a small angry pressure-cooker just coming up to the boil; you can get so close that the sound is almost deafening, yet the insect itself remains completely invisible.  At night, they form the upper treble register for a whole orchestra of other sounds.  In the alto range is a constant high croaking of frogs, joined now and again by a sound exactly like a sheep whose source is a mystery.  Then in the bass register are the bullfrogs:

with a whole range of bassoon-like, farting calls.  There are also some good visuals provided by the fireflies, which weave trails through the tops of the trees.   Things finally get a bit quieter at around 4am, but with the increasing light the “You’re stupid” bird starts up – again, no idea what it is, but that’s what it says, over and over.