Backwoods (Sort Of)

April 26

We left Chapel Hill Monday morning and made it as far as Hillsboro before we got seriously distracted. Hillsboro was the capital of North Carolina during the Revolution. Some Tories arrested the governor and shipped him off to Charleston.

Earlier in the 1770s, before the Revolution, the Regulators were active in the area. I think they beat up the mayor or burned down his house.  A few of them were later hanged in town.

Hillsboro is also the home town of Billy Strayhorn, who wrote "Take the A Train" for (or with) Duke Ellington.

It's a great little walk of several blocks. We had lunch at a shop called La Place, which offers Louisiana cooking, and served us the best fried oysters and oyster stew I've had in a long time.

The restaurant has a large print of another jazz musician on its walls. Kid Ory was born near La Place, Louisiana.

We were going to the Woodberry Inn at Meadows of Dan, Va., which is on the Blue Ridge.

There was little delay. When you climb into the mountain country, some of the views are worth stopping for, so we did from time to time.

We got one surprise. I was driving us around a bend on a narrow mountain road. Below us, around another bend was a knot of vehicles. One was a police car with flashing lights blocking the road. I was pretty sure this wasn’t about a fallen power line.

At first it looked like a crash. But no, the cars and trucks were all whole.

A tractor-trailer couldn’t make the climb and apparently broke down. Another tractor had been summoned to take the load. And a tow truck of bigger proportions had come to tow the stalled tractor away. Uphill.

We got to the Woodberry a little after three. We introduced ourselves, and the lady said she had given our room away. I thought she was joking.

Seems the place had been full all weekend and only a few rooms had been cleaned, when somebody showed up for a room. That body got the last clean room.

She called her brother on her cell phone and told him to clean up a room for us.

We went to the Woodberry because it is close to the Mabry Mill, which is the center of a small park of recovered buildings and artifacts from regional farms and towns. 

We decided to visit the mill while the room was being prepared. We discovered that the mill was closed till the season begins on May 1. Mabry Mill was the reason I detoured to western Virginia on this trip, and I was a week too early.

We wound up in a small room with a view of the pond. It’s a quaint place, maybe 1960s quaint, and it’s almost on the Blue Ridge Parkway, so the disappointment about Mabry Mill wasn’t so bad.

We had dinner at the inn. The special was Dixie fried pork chop with baked potato. They also served us a specialty of the house—fried biscuits and apple butter.

Everything tasted great, of course, and I knew I was somewhere else. I mean, come on. Deep fried biscuits? Where else but the Confederacy?

Today, Tuesday, we took our time covering about 125 miles, mostly on the Blue Ridge Parkway, to Blowing Rock, N.C. On the way we passed a sign pointing the way to Roaring Gap. I wonder what other noisy geological formations they have around here.

We stopped along the parkway at a couple of the old cabins left by the people who used to live on the mountains. One was a single-room affair that belonged to a midwife named Puckett who lived to be 102. 

The other belonged to a couple named Brinegar. Its springhouse, root cellar, and granary are still standing. Mr. Brinegar died in the 1920s of pneumonia he caught on the way home from church in a storm. Mrs. Brinegar sold the farm to the State of North Carolina or the federal government or somebody who was building the parkway.

She was allowed to stay on the farm for life, but according to a sign, it got too noisy for her, so she moved in with a daughter somewhere else. 

We stopped at several overlooks. It's fun to see so far and watch the shadows of the clouds on the hills.

We spent most of the day somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 feet, so we were often above the tops of the mountains on either side of the Blue Ridge. The elevation affects climate, and the season here is about a month behind northern New Jersey. 

The dogwood are in bloom and most of the leaves are small buds, so you often can get a better view now than you will later when the trees are in full leaf.

We're in Blowing Rock now and have found a promising pub just up the highway. The Foggy Rock says it has 15 taps devoted to North Carolina beers. 

I'm going to go try that soon.

Be well, all.