North Carolina | Fulltime Ramblings

Savoring Savannah

Posted on May 3, 2016 by taleena4

To catch up everything up from the events of our last post, we did end up adding another week to our stay at Savannah Oaks RV Resort. The gentleman who had the accident and whose dog we were watching had to have brain surgery to alleviate the pressure from the hematoma and resulting clot, but was released from the hospital into the care of his friend who had arrived a couple days after it all happened. We were very glad everything turned out okay for the gentleman and hope him and his sweet dog all the best in the future.

Since we added the extra week to our stay, and no longer had dog-watching duty, we ventured into downtown Savannah to have lunch at Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room and explore a bit. The lunch was awesome, and both of us ate a bit (okay – a lot) more than we should have. It was definitely some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever had, and each of the extremely plentiful side dishes that sprawled across our family-style table of 10 people seemed even more delicious than the one previous. It was a lot of fun talking with the rest of the table between bites, learning where everyone was from, how long they’d been in Savannah, and what they’d recommend seeing in the city. At the conclusion of the meal, the 10 of us had eaten about 90% of what had been presented for our gastronomic delight and each of us pronounced ourselves stuffed. We waddled up to the register to pay, then went our separate ways, hoping to walk off at least some of the absolutely divine calories we’d consumed.

We strolled past the Mercer-Williams House and stopped to check it out, but didn’t see any of the ghosts that are said to haunt the place due to the several deaths that had occurred there. In addition to the events that are recounted in John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, there had been two other tragedies within the home’s environs. A previous owner had tripped over the second floor banister, fractured his hip, suffered a concussion, and died 3 days later, and a young boy who was chasing pigeons on the roof had slipped and fallen, impaling himself on the wrought-iron fence that surrounds the home. Maybe the ghosts were just shy that day, but we continued on our way with nary a cold chill or raised hair. Our final stop for the day was Forsyth Park. As everyone does, we stopped to photograph the fountain, then moved on to view the Confederate Memorial and enjoy the fragrance garden.

The Mercer-Williams House, featured in the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”.

The fountain at Forsyth Park. Probably the most photographed landmark in Savannah.

The Confederate War Memorial in Forsyth Park.

A rose blooming within the Fragrance Garden at Forsyth Park.

The next day, we headed over to Bonaventure Cemetery. That might not sound like much of a tourist destination to most people, but Bonaventure is an absolutely beautiful and historical cemetery that seems to draw visitors like a magnet. Containing the final resting places of several Confederate generals, lyricist Johnny Mercer, and writer Conrad Aiken, along with many others, Bonaventure also feels like a sculpture garden, as quite a few of the plots are graced with elaborate monuments to those that have been buried there. There are also memorials for World War veterans and for victims of the Jewish Holocaust. It was definitely worth the few hours we spent walking through the grounds, reading inscriptions on the stones and feeling the ever-present peace that lies upon the grounds.

An ornate Celtic cross monument marking a grave site in Bonaventure Cemetery.

Little Gracie Watson, who died of pneumonia in 1889. Her monument is said to be a life-sized and picture perfect representation.

One of many angels adorning the graves at Bonaventure Cemetery.

Another intricately sculpted grave monument at Bonaventure Cemetery.

One of the more massive monuments in Bonaventure Cemetery.

A hauntingly poignant memorial at Bonaventure Cemetery. Note the fingers on the sculpture that have been broken off by careless or souvenir-seeking visitors.

After Savannah Oaks, we drifted slowly up the East Coast, stopping for a night at Bass Lake Campground in Dillon, SC (just one exit shy of that famous tourist trap known as South of the Border), then settled in for a week in Roanoke Rapids, NC at The RV Resort at Carolina Crossroads. This is just a planned stop to kill a bit more time before we head up towards Manassas, VA and Washington, D.C. Hopefully we’ll find out this week if we managed to score a tour of the White House while we’re there.

Until next post…

Catching Up, Part 1

Posted on November 4, 2015 by taleena4

Obviously I need to set aside time every few days to write a new blog post, otherwise I forget about it. But to catch this blog up to date, I’m going to split this post into two different ones, so it makes a bit more sense.

Maybe I shouldn’t say things like, “hopefully nothing else will break” because it just brings bad luck for us. A while back, we had a belt break in one of our truck’s front tires, but instead of replacing it with a new tire right then, we threw on the full-sized spare instead. Well, of course the other front tire would have to have a belt break in it as we’re out seeing a few sights around the Concord area. Thankfully we were on the outskirts of a large city (Charlotte, NC), so finding a tire shop with the correct size tires for our truck in stock was fairly easy. We opted to just replace the front tires for the moment as the bloody things are expensive! About $600 for the pair. Ouch.

So we return to the fifth wheel after getting the tires put on and, lo and behold, what does Lewis spy a couple hours later? Two of our fifth wheel’s tires are also bulging! Crap! We had been planning on upgrading the fifth wheel from standard trailer tires to light truck tires this winter, but obviously it’s going to be done right now. Good thing we’re in a fairly cheap campground because this bill was going to hurt. And hurt it certainly did – almost $1200 for four new tires. Plus the hassle of jacking up one side of the fifth wheel, removing two tires, taking them over to the tire store to be replaced, then bringing the new ones back to the campground, putting them on and repeating the process for the other side. But it was easier to do it that way instead of taking the fifth wheel to the tire store and back.

Having to spend $1800 on tires really put a damper on our plans for visiting things around Charlotte. We did manage to go see the three race shops of our favorite NASCAR drivers, however: Hendrick (Jimmy Johnson), Stewart-Haas (Tony Stewart), and Ganassi (Kyle Larson).

Jimmy Johnson’s #48 at the Hendrick Race Shop & Museum

The Stewart-Haas Race Shop

The Chip Ganassi Race Shop, featuring the #42 of Kyle Larson

It was very interesting watching the teams working on all the cars, getting them ready for an upcoming race and fixing the ones from the previous week. We picked up a couple minor souvenirs and took a few pictures at each, then headed back to the campground to plan for traveling to our next location(s). Time to head up to Williamsburg, VA to meet with Lewis’ mom, with a stop somewhere along the way to break the distance into shorter drives.

The Big Chill & A New Location

Posted on October 20, 2015 by taleena4

Wow, it’s been over a week since we last posted. I guess time flies when you’re going crazy! Yes, it seems like it’s been that type of a week. It started off with us having to change campsites twice because we decided to stay at Flaming Arrow one more week and Joni had to move us to spots that weren’t already reserved. So of course, there’s all the fun of packing up all the knick-knacks and pictures, making sure everything breakable is safely stowed, putting our outside chairs & table into the Montana’s “basement” storage compartment, etc. Then comes hooking up to the truck and the actual move itself. Finally, it’s time to level the fifth wheel, unhook, and set everything back up again the way we like it. Moving to a campsite that’s only a thousand feet away can take half a day or more and we had the fun of doing it twice in three days.

Then our four-month old EMS (electrical management system – basically a very fancy surge protector that does a few other necessary things) decided to malfunction, so we had to call up Progressive Industries to get a replacement. We hate risking all our electronics by being plugged straight into a campground’s power, but we had to do it for the two days it took for the new EMS to arrive. A bit nerve-wracking, and not something we would have done if we’d had a choice. At least the replacement EMS didn’t cost us anything, since Progressive Industries has a very good warranty and excellent customer service.

This was followed the very next day by our converter crapping out, resulting in no furnace and no refrigerator because our house batteries weren’t charging. Ah, the joys of a 9-year old RV! Why do these things always happen at a time when you could really use the thing that decides to stop working? It got down below freezing that night and after 11 years of living in Florida, we’re not used to temperatures like that. We woke up about an hour before the alarm was set for, shivering in the bed, even with both the pets curled up in bed with us. Obviously they thought it was too cold also!

Two more days waiting for a new converter to show up, and of course the mountains of western North Carolina had to be having their first true cold snap, complete with temperatures below freezing and frost and freeze warnings. So each night we played it safe and unhooked our water hose, running strictly off fresh water we put in our holding tank. Of course, the water pump for moving this water from holding tank to faucets and toilet also uses battery power, so we had to run out and purchase a battery charger to keep some power in our house batteries to provide at least a little heat and running water overnight.

A pair of does visiting the campground to browse on the grass before the cold snap.

We did manage to enjoy ourselves a bit even with all this chaos going on, however. We had a check that we needed to cash at TD Bank, so we drove about 30 miles over to Waynesville (the closest TD Bank to where we were staying) to take care of it. We poked around the stores in the beautifully quaint downtown area for a couple hours, purchased a Christmas present for Lewis’ mother, picked up a couple pounds of miscellaneous candy at Mast General Store (we all have our weaknesses!), then drove back to Cherokee along the Blue Ridge Parkway, stopping to take a couple pictures along the way.

Woodfin Valley, along the Blue Ridge Parkway

Woodfin Valley, seen from an overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway

Bunches Bald Tunnel, one of 26 tunnels located along the Blue Ridge Parkway

And finally on Sunday, we moved from Flaming Arrow Campground in Whittier, North Carolina to Ver-El Mobile Village which is literally across the street from this place:

The view from our fifth wheel this week

If you’re not a die-hard NASCAR fan, you probably looked at that picture and said, “Okay, so you’re in a grassy parking area across the street from some sort of big structure. So what?” If you are a die-hard NASCAR fan, you’re probably a bit green with envy. But for the non-fans, let me explain that this is a picture of Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina, the home of NASCAR. We’re planning on staying here for at least one week and maybe two, depending on how quickly we are able to see all the things around here that we want to visit, such as the race shops (aka: the garages and workshops) of our favorite NASCAR drivers and the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Hopefully nothing else will break or fail this week!

Busy, Busy

Posted on October 10, 2015 by taleena4

It’s been a fairly busy week for us.

On Tuesday we went over to the historic downtown area of Sylva and browsed around the various shops, picking up a few fishing flies, a couple used books, and some very tasty handmade chocolates.

Wednesday, we spent most of the morning trout fishing on the Cherokee reservation along the Oconaluftee River. Unfortunately we left the river completely empty-handed, since both the air temps and the river itself have been running too high for the Cherokee to do a full stocking. We also called a handful of campgrounds over in Asheville area to check availability. Nothing. So we asked Joni if she had any cancellations and, lo and behold, she had not one but two sites that had been cancelled that morning. It did require us to move our campsite twice this weekend, but no big deal.

Thursday was a day to relax. The only thing we did was grab a dinner of Taco Bell and take it up into the National Park to eat beside the river and elk watch on our way back to Flaming Arrow. The pictures I was able to take of the elk weren’t very good (it was getting too dark for my camera), but it was pretty neat to hear a big bull elk bugling as he chased the cows in his harem around only a short distance from our truck.

A nice-sized cow elk.

The second-largest bull elk that we’ve seen in Great Smoky Mountain Nation Park.

On Friday we decided to head to the “old side” of downtown Cherokee to do some more shopping. After all, Christmas is coming! We purchased a few small things here and there, and just had fun going through all the little (and some not so little) shops. We nibbled on some delicious handmade fudge and split a large bottle of locally made apple cider. You can work up quite a thirst browsing stores in the mountains, y’know!

Today is apple butter day at Flaming Arrow. Everyone at the campground who helps Joni make the apple butter gets a free pint jar of it, so that’s what we’ve been doing. Stirring a huge copper kettle with big wooden paddle while watching college football games on a projection tv in the outdoor pavilion. Small-town entertainment at its finest.

Sunshine, Finally!

Posted on October 5, 2015 by taleena4

Hurricane Joaquin has left the building, or at least gone far enough out into the Atlantic to help stop the rain from falling here in the Smokies. So yesterday finally became a nice enough day to start serious sightseeing. After an hour or so of browsing through the shops along US-441 in “downtown” Cherokee, we headed up into Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We’d already been through the Oconaluftee Visitor Center and Mountain Farm Museum on one of the simply drizzly days earlier this week, so we continued a little farther up Newfound Gap Road to Mingus Mill, a restored water-powered grain mill originally built in 1886. The mill itself wasn’t running, but the creek flowing alongside the mill was fairly photogenic.

Mingus Creek

After visiting the mill for about 45 minutes, we hopped back in the truck and continued up Newfound Gap Road toward Gatlinburg. Suddenly, just a few miles up the road, traffic had come to a complete halt in both directions. Normally this means a critter sighting, but not this time. As we were pulling out of the Mingus Mill parking area, a small gust of wind had occurred. We didn’t think anything of it, but obviously when coupled with all the rainfall from Hurricane Joaquin, it was enough to cause a tree come crashing down across the road.

Park rangers evaluating a tree that has fallen across Newfound Gap Road.

A few cars had been able to drive beneath the right side of the fallen tree and continue on, but as we came upon the scene, park rangers also pulled up and stopped that from happening, concerned that the tree could fall the rest of the way. We had to wait for about 40 minutes while the rangers called in a crew with chainsaws to remove the tree from the road.

A park ranger cutting a fallen tree into more manageable sections to clear the road.

Once the tree had been cut back to a few feet from the right side of the road and all the sawdust cleaned up, traffic was allowed to proceed and off we went.

Since we had already driven Newfound Gap Road up to the turnoff for Clingman’s Dome, and it was still a bit too cloudy up on the mountainsides to justify stopping, we kept going all the way to Gatlinburg. Lewis hadn’t visited Gatlinburg since he was a little kid and I had never been there, so we wanted to see what all the fuss was about and also check if we wanted to take the RV over to that side of the Smokies for a couple weeks after leaving Flaming Arrow.

As we came out of Great Smoky Mountain National Park and into Gatlinburg, both of our jaws dropped to the floorboard of the truck. What the heck was this?! The traffic was outrageous and the hordes of pedestrians cruising the tourist-trap businesses on either side of the road seemed intent on stepping out into the street right in front of us. I suddenly understood why all the advertising for the campgrounds on the North Carolina side said “The Quiet Side of the Smokies”. This wasn’t just a tourist trap: this was a tourist trap city! It was as if Main Street USA at Walt Disney World was suddenly open for driving. Lewis and I took one look at each other and shook our heads. No way we were coming over here with the fifth wheel! We found a gas station up the road a little bit, put some fuel in the truck, then hightailed it out of there and back toward Cherokee. The weather seemed to be pleased with our decision and the sun brightened our return journey enough to justify stopping at a couple of the pull-offs for pictures.

Fall color starting to brighten up the Smokies.

Another view from along Newfound Gap Road.

One of the many streams rushing through Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

Rainy Days and… Every days?

Posted on October 2, 2015 by taleena4

Yep, it’s been raining pretty much each and every day this week, thanks to the interaction between Hurricane Joaquin and a stationary front. I can’t even see the mountains out the window. It’s just a big blob of rain-filled fog. This is the side of fulltime RVing that nobody ever talks about: not every day is sun-filled hikes and beautiful, awe-inspiring vistas. Sometimes it rains for several days in a row and the vistas are nothing more exciting than 100 feet or so of campground. Even the local squirrels and birds aren’t inclined to come out to frolic in this kind of weather. And it’s supposed to keep doing this throughout the weekend. So much for getting away from tropical weather by leaving Florida and heading for the mountains! But on a positive note, we were able to score another week at this campground and the weather should clear up by Tuesday, so hopefully we’ll finally get to see something other than raindrops on our windows.

In the Smokies!

Posted on September 28, 2015 by taleena4

Yep, we made it to Cherokee, North Carolina. Well, technically the address for Flaming Arrow Campground says Whittier, North Carolina, but it’s actually closer to Cherokee. Go figure. Even with an overnight stop at Little Ocmulgee State Park in Helena, Georgia, it was a long drive to get here. Lewis isn’t used to mountain driving while hauling something, and coming north on US-441 was a bit of a chore for him. He did manage to keep our speed up around 40 mph, but it still took its toll on both of us since neither one of us slept well the night before. The misty rainy weather we had for almost the entire drive didn’t help, but at least we made it here. The temperatures are much cooler than we’ve had to deal with for several months (we actually used our furnace last night!) but the view from our campsite is to die for. The trees are just starting to change color – something we’ve really missed as Floridians for the last 11 years.

The view out of our dining area window.

Joni, the owner-manager of the campground was very helpful, giving us a bunch of tourist-type information and brochures after we got settled into our site. Hopefully we’ll find the time to do some of the many things to do around the area. I wish we could stay longer than a week, but Joni told us that the campground is booked solid next week. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will cancel, but if that doesn’t happen, we’ll just try to find another campground somewhere nearby with an opening for a couple of weeks.