Hello again! Has it been another week already? My goodness, time is flying as we zoom around the North of the…”South”? That is, the big weird middle-of-America area that’s not really in the south but likes to call itself The South. After our big loopy route from Brian’s last post, we’ve been keeping a mostly eastward course from Chattanooga, TN to Fayetteville, NC. This will be our last time venturing in the opposite direction of home – it’s pretty much all south and west from here on out. Which means deeper and deeper into the real, honest-to-goodness no-foolin’ SOUTH. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!

We awoke last monday at a campsite in Davis Pond, a cute little dispersed area in the Prentice Cooper State Forest of Tennessee. There were several campsites located around a small pond but we were the only visitors during our time there. We made some coffee and – wait for it – NOT oats for breakfast! We’ve been holding onto some onions and potatoes for quite some time, so we decided to use some of those up and mixed them into soup. Our first major destination of the week was Chattanooga, TN – you know, land of fast internet! We hit a Planet Fitness first for some exercise and much-needed showers. We left the gym pretty hungry and didn’t have any specific plans until evening, so we sought out somewhere to get a nice late lunch/early dinner. The winning contender was Sweet Basil Thai after reading that THE Sidney Kiner on Google reviews informed us that “This is the superior Thai food.” We couldn’t waste our money on inferior Thai food! As we sat in the restaurant admiring the twisty straw tops, I gazed out of the window and discovered that we were sitting right beside South Chickamauga Creek. I thought to myself, “where do I know ‘Chickamauga’ from?” I pondered for a while and then remembered – Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga”! Thanks, American Lit courses! I couldn’t remember the exact story; just that it had given me a feeling of serious unsettled-ness before. I decided to find it online and read it for Brian on the way to our next stop. But while I was downloading the PDF, I heard Brian high-pitched gag-gasp in an almost theatrical way. Disaster had struck!!!!!

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As you may recall from the blog post THREE WEEKS AGO, Brian’s car key’s plastic cover had snapped and we were left operating the car with the metal remainder of the key and a pair of pliers. We had fully intended to get the key replaced…until it proved sort of inconvenient. The task was soon forgotten, as we were getting by just fine with what was left of the key. On this fine evening, Brian was going to put the key in the ignition with his left hand instead of his right, as his right was busy holding the pliers. He fumbled and lost his grip on the key. Trying to catch it “cack-handed”, he instead knocked it out of range entirely and it fell, seemingly in slow motion, toward the hand brake…and down a tiny slit in the rubber into the darkness beneath.

Oh dear. What a pickle.

We sat in disbelief for a few minutes. I couldn’t help but laugh at Brian’s reaction, which seemed very lighthearted and silly. I soon discovered, however, that this was more severe than his squeaky sound might have suggested. We peered down the crack by the hand brake and tried to locate the key with the help of our phone flashlights. We saw nothing. Fortunately, Sweet Basil Thai was right next to a Harbor Freight store, so Brian ventured off to try to find some sort of tool to help us. While he was gone, I pried up the plastic cover about 45˚ to get a better look inside. The good news – I found the key! The bad news – it was very precariously sandwiched between the driver’s seat and the hand brake base, inside a small circular hole in the metal floor of this section and balanced on the next metal layer a couple of inches underneath. It looked ready to slip through underneath at the slightest wrong move. I tried to shove my hand inside the tight area and poke around to reach the key, but it was no use. Brian soon returned with an extendo-grabby-guy that looked just right for the job! I showed him where the key had fallen and we took turns trying to snatch it out of its hidey hole. A few tries in and we’d managed to knock it through the hole and out of sight.

Well.

Ultimately, it was TO THE INTERNET for a tutorial on how to break apart the center console. Thankfully we found this video to show us how to dig in there and get the key out. That was not my idea. You know who you are…You’re welcome. This video which showed us just enough to get what we needed accomplished, and then some. We popped off all the plastic in front of our key’s prison and I poked my fingers into the metal void. Success!!! We clicked all the pieces back together and vowed to get another key cut AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

But, no…We still haven’t done it ; ~;

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Back to our ACTUAL plan for the evening! Elated to not be trapped in Chattanooga for the rest of time, we continued the merriment by reading “Chickamauga” on the way to our next destination… 😬 We were headed for Songbirds in downtown ‘Nooga for their Monday Night Blues Jam. Any and all local musicians are able to sign up to jam together in a big jammy jam sesh. They have house musicians and randos off the street up on stage together, even offering house instruments so participants don’t have to bring their own. It was a great little show featuring all kinds of music – one of the last people was an electric violinist! He was super talented but didn’t seem to know quite how to read the rest of the band and when to call it quits. Feeling a renewed sense of need to pick up the violin when I get home, we headed back to the car right as the show wound down. I had a little leftover Pad Thai in the car, which we shared before heading off to a Cabela’s parking lot for the night.

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The next morning we headed into a nearby Costco for some yummy Tuesday morning samples! We feigned interest in crackers, juice, grilled cheese fixins and seaweed, all of which were very tasty. We headed to the holiday candy aisle and contemplated an addition to Brian’s giant birthday bag…but we still had some of those left. In the end we had a simple healthy breakfast of cheese pizza slices and Mountain Dew and headed into the city.

It was time for some daytime exploration of doontoon ‘Noog. We wandered around the Art District and walked across one of the longest foot bridges in the whole wide world! On the other side we found a cute little street of shops and decided to nip into Clumpies ice cream and A Novel Idea bookstore. We only had 2 hours of parking, so it was soon time to return across the bridge and drive off to another place.

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Not having a specific location to head to in the downtown area, we drove toward the same area we’d been to the night before for Songbirds. As we drove by, we noticed a little bar/restaurant called Pickle Barrel. We love pickles! Our next destination was decided. We found some nearby street parking and braved the torn up construction area all around the bar. Y’all…this place was CUTE. And spooky! We sat on the patio upstairs admiring the building, eating fried pickles and enjoying some local brews. We pondered Chattanooga as a place to live and decided to add it to our growing list of potentials. There are 11 on the list in front of it, though…the decision is far from made.

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Y’know, for after Chicago 😛

Having seen enough to get the gist of Chattanooga, we decided to head to a laundromat for the evening before leaving the city. We soaped up our stinks and made our way toward Fires Creek Recreation Area in the Nantahala National Forest for the night.

We arrived in the dark, gingerly navigating through a rainy campground covered in a carpet of fallen leaves. In the morning we were glad to see we’d followed an actual path and landed in an actual camping spot! The area was gorgeous and full of autumnal orange-ness. The rain hadn’t stopped all night and continued into the morning. We were a little disappointed to leave it after one night, but we had our sights set on a different forest and could only spend so long cooped up in the car hoping the rain would clear. It had no plan of stopping, apparently.

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Instead of standing in the rain to cook breakfast, we checked along the route for a Waffle House. Have we talked about this place yet? It’s a true gem of the “south”. We were the only patrons in the whole place and the server made light conversation with us as we ordered our loaded hash browns and coffee. And we learned what “in the cut” means!

Nearby was a grocery store called Ingles. I pronounced it like inglés, naturally. However, it was founded by the very white, very North Carolinian Robert Ingle and is owned by his family…so…¯\_(ツ)_/¯ less fun. We got a few staples like bread and dark chocolate salted caramels and generic Easy Cheese (Laura Lynn Cheese Snack!) and were back out to the next camping spot.

The rain gave us no peace, but at least the scenery was nice. The Nantahala National Forest, with the Great Smoky Mountains off in the distance, made for an amazing view while we drove from campground to city and back to campground again. The leaves on the trees were a crazy mix of red, orange, yellow and green. A few skeletal branches poked out here and there. Clouds and fog hung low all around the mountains. It was spooky fall perfection! …much better appreciated from inside the car than out.

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We remained inside the car for the majority of the time at the next spot, too. We’d looked up a campsite online but arrived to find that it was a single site and was already occupied. Dangit! We continued down the road, as there were others tucked behind roadside pullouts, and ultimately found a cute spot next to a river. The campground itself was slightly separate from the parking space and inaccessible by vehicle. We didn’t feel much like setting up a tent in the rain and there was no dry firewood around for the fire pit anyway. We holed up inside the car making tuna sandwiches for dinner, doing some puzzles and listening to more Game of Thrones audiobooks. It was a nice “evening in”, chatting and laughing until we eventually fell asleep.

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Another day…another rainy morning. Using our limited resources we made a light breakfast of PB+J sandwiches in the car. Again, we waited for a while for the rain to let up. It came down hard, it came down lightly, it came down in-between-y… but it sure didn’t stop! Due to my (perhaps irrational?) fear of Brian rolling an ankle at some point on this trip, it seemed ill advised to go on a rainy hike through the forest with mud and slick fallen leaves all over the ground. We packed up and headed into civilization again – this time headed for Asheville, NC.

Since we hadn’t had any coffee yet this morning, the first stop was a Starbucks. We found one in a little village called Biltmore. An employee with pizzazz-y face makeup pulled up at the same time and we remembered – it was officially Halloween! We had made it! It was time to eat the remnants of our giant bag o’ candy!

(did we mention our goal when we purchased the bag? We decided that, to pace ourselves, we AT LEAST had to make it the month and 3 days to Halloween before we finished it. Everything in moderation eh?)

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We were stuck at the Starbucks for a while, as a storm was rolling through at the same time as us. We sat by the window and watched a little King Charles Cavalier whining at his human and moving to the middle of the patio so as to not get quite so splashed. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to make the most of the free wifi and find some free campsites for the next few weeks. We also searched for things to do in Biltmore…but we came up pretty short. It seems that this wasn’t the most happenin’ village around, adorable as it may have been. We’d recently discussed stopping by a thrift store to kill some time, so we set our sights on some of those nearby in Asheville.

There were several stores in the area but it was already late afternoon, so a good handful of them would be closing within the next 45-or-so minutes. We narrowed our choices down to 2 that happened to be on a simple route – the WNC Bridge Foundation thrift store and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. WNC Bridge uses its profits to support MountainCare and is part of a bigger organization that collaborates with several nonprofits throughout the Western North Carolina region. They had all kinds of cool stuff that we were VERY tempted to find room for, but alas…it wasn’t meant to be. We wandered around rows of housewares and gathered ideas for the kinds of things we’d like to have when we have our own place (not on wheels!) one day. Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore sells mostly donated home goods and saves tons and tons of stuff from ending up in the landfill! We found some seriously cool things and considered the possibility of having medical equipment in place of furniture in the future…🤔jury’s still out on that one. We also found some amazing older pieces, like a record player/radio cabinet for $25! Oh man, if only we lived in Asheville, NC…

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By the time the ReStore closed it was only 6pm. We’d found little else of interest in the area and decided to once again visit a Starbucks so that Brian could use the time productively and do some more remote work. We stopped at a rest area on the way to make soup and use the restroom and caught a really pretty sunset. Back on the road, it was dark by the time we arrived at the Starbucks. As it was Halloween, I decided to be daring and watch a scary movie – The Blackcoat’s Daughter. It left me a little confused and I had to read some reviews of the ending to figure out exactly what I missed…and then I was spooked for the rest of the night 😣just kidding, I was brave!

Mostly!

Friday morning found us sleepy and chilly at a rest area in Claremont. We had our usual breakfast of oats and coffee and headed to a Planet Fitness outside of Charlotte to pump guns and shower off our grime. McAlpine Creek park was our next stop for a light soup lunch. We also got a chance to admire pups at a dog park that just so happened to be right next to us! Next it was into downtown Charlotte for the first time. Our timing was just right to catch their First Friday gallery crawl. We started our evening at SouthEnd ARTS and saw some really cool and moving stuff from a handful of local artists. Our favorite was a collection organized by Andrea Renee Downs called “Airing Out the ‘Dirty’ Laundry“. We spent a while exploring all the different pieces and then got to talking with the gallery’s founder about how we wound up here in the first place. The gallery provided nibbles, wine and cider, but we were pretty hungry by this point. We set out in search of something more substantial for our 4th first-of-the-monthiversary dinner.

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We had begun walking vaguely in the direction of other galleries in case there was anywhere we wanted to stop on the way. After a moment of panic and a mad dash back to SouthEnd ARTS to pick up my deserted water bottle, we set out in search of food once again. It was Friday night and downtown, so most of the places we walked past were pretty dang busy. We talked over some food options and decided on Italian food, but that fell by the wayside when we saw the Big Ben Pub. The decision was made for us. We enjoyed some delicious traditional English fare (including bubble and squeak as an appetizer!) and listened to the live musical duo for a few hours, reflecting on some highlights from the past month of travels and making some predictions for the upcoming one. 4 months already…what a trip.

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After dinner we headed back toward the car, but decided to make one last pit stop at the Leroy Fox bar and restaurant for a drink. We’d stopped by on the search for food, drawn by the cute little foxies, but moved on to the next place when we saw that all of their menu items included meat. (Let’s ignore the fact that we ended up eating fish & chips and steak & kidney pie…lol) But for drinks, this place was a great stop! I had a Macho Man Dandy Savage and Brian had a Babymaker double IPA. We snagged a handful of their leftover Halloween candy on our way out and headed back to the car to find a place to sleep.

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Our bedroom for the evening was a trusty Cracker Barrel parking lot. We snuggled in to a spot near a giant RV and got cozy for the evening. When we fell asleep, we were one of maybe 4 or 5 vehicles parked there. When we woke up on Saturday morning, however, there were maybe 5 open parking spaces left. The place was PACKED! Luckily, our nifty window blockers offer us a good amount of privacy so we didn’t have any people peeking in at us.

It’s been a handful of nights now that we’ve spent outside Cracker Barrels, so we decided it was time we paid them back a little. We stopped in for the first time to get some breakfast. When we approached the building, however, we saw people spilling out the front door. Hmm…Saturday morning? A busy time for a place that specializes in breakfasts?? Groundbreaking. We shrugged and elbowed our way through the mob to the host stand and put our name down on the list. We had 45 minutes to wander around the store looking at discounted Halloween junk and piles and piles of Thanksgiving/Christmas junk. I had never been inside a Cracker Barrel before (in my whole life!) but Brian was familiar with the general vibe before heading in. It’s hard to describe, but there sure were a lot of antlers and sparkles and Jesus!

When we finally got sat in the restaurant, we’d worked up quite an appetite. We’ve been splitting a lot of meals on the road as we’re generally eating less and have no real storage for leftovers, but this time we risked it and got separate plates. What a mistake. The meals each come with sides of grits, 2 eggs, 2 biscuits and gravy, as well as the stuff on the main plate. I decided to keep the meat train rollin’ and got a dish with chicken fingers, expecting MAYBE 2 or 3. Nope. 7… SEVEN!?!?! Needless to say we had lots of leftovers. It was cool enough that day that we figured we’d be able to save the rest for later without it spending toooo long in ThE dAnGeR ZoNe. We lived to tell the tale, hooray!

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After a little while of lying in the car again and letting all that food go down, we decided to go check out a local library. There were several in the Charlotte Mecklenburg group, but one of the highest reviewed and closest ones was the Morrison regional library. It was a lovely building and a great place for us to hang out for a while, Brian getting some work done and me taking the opportunity to do a little journaling (which I’ve been slacking on SO much – maybe because all of my writing is done on this blog!) We were sat right beside the book sale shelves so we got to overhear some really cute conversations between adults and children deciding which books to buy. The library closed at 5, so we had to find somewhere else to spend the rest of the evening.

We saw that there were a handful of downtown events happening this Saturday evening and in the end we picked the Sycamore Brewing 5th anniversary party. We began to notice a distinct sameness in a lot of the style choices of all the young guys and gals here in Charlotte. We also noticed that a lot of people our kind of age had designer dogs instead of children. We weren’t complaining. One circuit of the outdoor area, booths, music stage and indoor bar at the brewery was enough for us to decide that this wasn’t really our kind of scene (despite the fact that the beer was delicious). We got a distinctly phony I’m-just-here-to-post-about-it-on-Instagram vibe quite quickly. We saw two dudes get into an almost-fight, one getting dragged away from the other one. We heard some people nearby whispering “did you hear that? He told him to go back to his country! That’s messed up!” (good ol’ South 🙄). Brian overheard the #1 quote of the evening, which was “where is Taylor? Everyone looks the fucking same!” I’m glad we outsiders weren’t the only ones who thought so. We soon skedaddled. On our way back to the car, Brian became enraged watching a lady let her dog poop on the pavement and not clean it up. SO RUDE. Charlotte is not on our list.

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A Cabela’s in the tippy toppy northern part of South Carolina was our bedroom for this evening. Here there were 2 or 3 other RVs in the assigned overnight parking area, which made us feel comfortable that we likely wouldn’t be towed in the middle of the night. We awoke to the sound of many children screaming……..the Carowinds amusement park was just around the corner! We went into the Cabela’s to use the facilities, marveled at the fact that they ALREADY have a giant Christmas tree up in the lobby area (November 3…🤦🏼‍♂️), and walked out watching the rollercoaster cars flying through the sky in front of us. We discussed our earliest memories of rollercoaster riding and why Brian was scared of them for so long. But we’re both big and brave and not scared anymore! Maybe we’ll ride a rollercoaster somewhere else on this trip, but today was not the day. We had a date to keep!

Instead of cooking some breakfast, Brian suggested going to another Waffle House (the gem of the region, remember?). We stopped at one on the route back up in North Carolina. It was crazy busy and only had 3 staff members working. On to the next one! Luckily there’s a Waffle House on practically every street. The next one was much more adequately staffed and we were sat and eating within about 5 or 10 minutes. Mmmm, hash browns!

We had been looking forward to this Sunday for quite some time, as it was time to stay with another lovely friend! This week it’d be Brian’s buddy and ex-Sea Dog coworker Nate, his wife Rachel, and their 4 cute kids in Fayetteville, NC. They were generous enough to offer us their swanky RV for a few days. After sleeping in the car consistently for a couple of weeks, it was a welcome upgrade. We made our way from the western side of North Carolina to the east, through pine trees, fields of freshly harvested cotton, and…cacti? What a strange mixture of flora. We stopped at yet another Starbucks for a couple of hours so that I could start working on this blog post, but I wasn’t finished when we were due to head to Nate & Co’s in time for dinner. I’ll let Brian pick up there next week.

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Did we make it on time? Did the kids eat all our dinner? Just how swanky is this swanky RV? Answers to these questions and more next week! ❤️