Day 4 - Oklahoma City

We got up early again and headed across the Mississippi River into Arkansas.  The landscape continued to be very much like that of the Piedmont of NC.  We stopped in Ozark for lunch and I took over driving.  Large truck traffic increased as we went into Arkansas and most businesses you could see along the highway were trucking related.  I realized that the headquarters for Walmart is in Bentonville, AK, so it is likely that the truckers were shipping things to or from there.

I had always thought that truckers were some of the safest drivers on the road but after this trip I no longer feel that way.  The truckers would weave into neighboring lanes, they would cut in front of you as you would start to pass them and for the most part their disregard for others scared me half to death.  The automobile drivers were well behaved and overly cautious.  The truckers drove as if they owned the road and everyone should move out of their way.  Driving with so many trucks on the highway was extremely stressful and exhausting.

After we had been driving for an hour or so we could see dark clouds ahead and a storm approaching.  We discussed how we were in the middle of Tornado Alley.  The sky grew darker and darker and lightning flashed in the clouds.  Randy kept a check on the radar and could see that the storm was bad but not a long lasting one.  Suddenly the bottom fell out and almost as quickly the hail began.  The sound was almost deafening and it sounded like rocks hitting the hood and top of the car

We had seen on the news before leaving on our trip where hail had broken out car windows and that was my immediate thought...that our windows would be broken and our vacation plans would be messed up.  We fully expected to have dents all over.  We continued on and saw a bridge up ahead and pulled underneath until the storm passed.  Amazingly enough, there was no damage at all to the car and it would be the following week when devastating tornadoes would rip through towns near by.  

We arrived in Oklahoma City around 3 p.m. Or so, took a nap and went to Abuelo's in the Bricktown area for dinner.  We were excited to find Abuelo's, we had enjoyed the one in Chesapeake, VA when we lived in Currituck and we had really missed their food.  After we ate we walked over to their river walk and got a little exercise.  I had remembered doing a case study on Oklahoma City's revitalization of their downtown area by adding a river walk when I was at Salem College.

View from our hotel room

Tile mosaic at the beginning of the Riverwalk

The Oklahoma City river walk is still a sparsely inhabited area with many empty spaces.  The water doesn't seem to flow very much and tended to smell stagnant.  I think the idea will eventually catch on with vendors if they are persistent and do more to encourage full occupancy.  We headed back to the hotel and stayed up late talking before we went to sleep.  Tomorrow we would drive across Texas

Day 3 - Memphis

We got an early start and left Chattanooga heading up I-24 toward Nashville.  This was beautiful horse country with many large pastures and picturesque barns and farm buildings visible from the highway.  Just outside Nashville we took a highway that would take us southwest of Nashville around to I-40 and on to Memphis.  We stopped in Jackson, TN for lunch at a place called Rafferty's and then arrived in Memphis around 3 p.m.  We stayed at a really cool hotel, one that had been a Kress's Department Store and was converted into hotel suites.  Ours was the top left in the photo below. From our window we could see the trolleys go past, in fact, the stop was in front of our building.

We had a nap and then walked around the waterfront area of the city on the river walk.  Our hotel was in the area of the courthouse and it was surprising how little traffic there was on the streets.  There was also little foot traffic, just an occasional office worker or panhandler.  There was an elevated walkway over to a river park island in the Mississippi River but it had already closed for the day by the time we got there.  It seemed that the town all but rolls up the sidewalks at 5 pm.

 We went into the Memphis Welcome Center where we saw a bronze statue of B.B. King as well as one of Elvis Presley.  I was not a huge fan of Elvis when he was living. My older sister's generation was probably his largest fan base (those born in the 1940s to early 1950s).

We continued along the riverside where we sat on a bench to find a restaurant for dinner.  While sitting there, we were passed by a group of nuns.  We headed down the riverwalk and as we got further along, we saw that the nuns had chosen a spot and were eating their dinner from brown bags.  We see so few nuns at home in Winston-Salem and it was a treat to see a group of them on an outing.  We turned left onto Beale Street and walked a few blocks to B.B. King's Blues Club.

The street was blocked off for a motorcycle rally and after we ate our BBQ dinner we walked along looking at the riders and their bikes.

We walked around town a little more and took some photos before heading back to our room for the night.  Memphis is a very clean and beautiful city with a really cool streetcar system and many old historic buildings alongside newer buildings. There seem to be several music venues related to the blues.  It would be great to go back for a long weekend sometime.

Day 2 - Blue Ridge Parkway, Cherokee, Chattanooga

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Today we got an early start.  We had breakfast at a little cafe in Asheville and then drove along th Blue Ridge Parkway from Asheville to the parkway's end  in Cherokee.

The morning started out cloudy and within a couple of hours it was raining.  Even with the cloud cover giving the mountains that smokey look, the drive was still beautiful and I drove while Randy mastered the video feature with his iPad.  He was able to capture the curvy roads and the dark, spooky tunnels.

As we got nearer Cherokee the stress of the curvy road and the rain got the best of me and I pulled over and let Randy take over driving.  We arrived in Cherokee around lunchtime and had lunch at a local restaurant.  It was where the locals eat and they had an all you can eat buffet.   After lunch we stopped in at the Qualla Arts and Craft Center.  All of their merchandise is made by Native Americans and it was beautiful!  They had nationally known Native American brands (Minnetonka moccasins  and Pendleton blankets) as well but the majority of their items were hand made.  We then drove by Harrah's Casino because neither of us had seen it before, then headed on to Chattanooga.

The trip was very scenic because the road followed  the Oconoluftee and the Tuckasegee Rivers.  There were beautiful lakes but the drive was so curvy and traffic was so thick that it was not easy to enjoy the scenery.  By the time we arrived in Chattanooga we were exhausted and just went to bed without even having dinner.

Day 1 - Winston-Salem to Asheville, NC

After a good report from my dermatologist, we had lunch and headed to Asheville which would be the springboard of our trip.  The ride there is always long but beautiful.  We arrived around 4:30 and checked in at the Marriott Renaissance by the Thomas Wolf Memorial Homeplace.

Randy got a power nap and we walked over for dinner at the Mellow Mushroom.  I have eaten at several different Mellow Mushroom locations over the years but I think the employees at this particular Mellow Mushroom try a little too hard to be funky...

Our waiter only missed the full '60s experience by leaving out the word "groovy", he seemed to hit all the others.  After dinner, we decided to find a sporting goods store to look at binoculars to take on the trip.  On our way we took a detour through an alleyway that we had seen some time back, that was covered with the most amazing graffiti.  We wanted to see if it was still being used as a canvas.  We found the alley easily enough.  As we drove slowly through, there were a few young men loitering about but it seemed as if the graffiti craze had either been banished or the artists had lost interest and moved on.  There were only a couple of things that more resembled gang tags than art.  The rest of the walls had simply been painted over.  It was disappointing because the art we had previously seen had been pretty amazing considering it was done with spray paint.

Asheville is such a pretty little city and artists seem to be drawn there.  Since we've already visited there several times, there really wasn't any reason to stay more than overnight.  We were really wanting to begin our adventure so we finished up the evening early so we could get an early start in the morning.

Our Great Adventure (R.C. & Moon Pi Fly by the Seat of Their Pants)

Due to various family and job obligations, we just haven't traveled very much since we got married in 2009.  In fact, we didn't even go on a honeymoon because we got married and immediately moved to the coast.  We joked that our new home was our honeymoon and that actually lasted for 4 years.  We made regular trips back to Winston-Salem to visit family and that was a 5 hour, one way trip, but it wasn't really anything that we could consider a vacation.

Randy retired in June of 2013 and we moved to Winston-Salem.  We took a couple of trips in the fall of 2013...a short trip to Atlanta for my birthday in September and then a longer trip to NYC for Randy's birthday in October.  But we were wanting something epic, something memorable.

In January Randy's son had a skiing accident that laid him up for several months.  In fact he is just now getting back to work on a limited basis.  Randy was busy staying with him during most of his recuperation and once he was able to make it on his own Randy said, "I'm giving you fair warning... get your bags packed because we are going on a road trip.  I don't know where we're going or when but just be ready."

We had been talking about various places in the United States that we had previously visited and places we would like to visit so he was formulating a list.  Randy is very methodical and once he tells you something, he usually has already worked out the plan in his mind so I knew that I needed to contact a pet sitter for Jhett and get that lined up as soon as possible.  Fortunately for me, the woman who fostered Jhett when she was awaiting adoption lives close by and does pet sitting.  She agreed to take care of Jhett and water the plants while we were gone.  I just had to be on standby for when the plan fell into place.

We started out planning the places that were "must see" on our trip and then worked from there.  We really wanted to see New Orleans but found that the weekend we planned to be there was one of 2 consecutive Jazz Festival Weekends.  We love Jazz but are such introverts that we avoid crowds whenever possible.  We also wanted to see the Mexican border at El Paso and the Grand Canyon.  We had decided to sort of make a big circle, returning home via I-40.  The Jazz Festival changed our game plan and we decided to make the circle in the opposite direction and would instead arrive in New Orleans after the Festival weekends.

We got our little old (14 yrs. old) road atlas and determined where we would stop for the night along the way to get to the Grand Canyon and made a tentative plan to drive no more than 6 hours per day, splitting up the driving, to New Mexico.  We would stay a couple of nights there just to get a little rest and then arrive at the Grand on a Sunday evening, hoping to avoid any weekend crowds.

We only booked hotels about 3 days ahead so that if we decided to stay an extra day or take an unplanned side trip, we were free to do so.  We were truly flying by the seat of our pants.  We scanned Trip Advisor, local resources, city pages, etc. to find various things to do and places worth stopping.  There was only one reservation along the way that was non-refundable if we had decided to change plans, but that didn't prove to be a problem.

Some stops were in places that we had studied about in school... famous places that just seemed to stick in our minds and when we saw them on the map we said, "Let's stop!  We may not get the chance again."  The the next several posts will chronicle our trip.  We truly did have a great trip and even though we felt that we had a close relationship before, I think in many ways the trip drew us even closer together.