Dirt (and Grass) Roads Day

We started in Spruce Pine, NC and let Dave's GPS take us north. Today she took us 4 wheeling. Had a nice chat with a local North Carolina guy who was a local, retired but spent his winters in New Mexico. We get the impression from the contractor boys last night (who woke us up at 4:30 this morning with their truck backup alarms) that they get half as much snow as we do, but like us, it varies from year to year. Enough so you need all the winter stuff like 4WD, snow tires, salt, etc. This is in the mountains of course. From talking to folks down low, they get a lot less but still enough to need plows. Dave gave the NC-NM guy some syrup which like the others, leaves a big impression. We still have not met anyone who was not really decent, helping and interested in us Yankees. I asked the boys last night how many generations 'til you are not a Yankee and you can guess the answer.

So Pocohontas gave us another 5 star tour through back roads not on the way to anywhere. Today her reputation was tarnished a bit when she dumped on a dirt road on top of a mountain with grass growing in the middle. Fortunately, a local truck driver on his 4 wheeler (pull start) stopped by and told us how to get back to blacktop. He had his dog, wife, cooler and 4 year old daughter (very cute) all loaded on the 4-wheeler and they were going camping for the night. Again, amazingly nice guy, very helpful and very interested that these 2 Yankees showed up in the middle of the woods. Dave gave him syrup too, which as it turned out they needed for "flapjacks". These folks look rough outside sometimes but they have a heart of gold.

We took the shorter route back to the blacktop which had my ABS system working overtime sliding down the hills through gravel, and back to blacktop, as promised. Now something to point out down here is that almost every little road is paved. Most of the little grey roads are paved 1-1/2 lane jobs. A lot of roads have n painted lines on them so I found myself being surprised after hours of these back roads to suddenly come out on a "painted" road. It felt like hitting a freeway. Another note to our congressman, all of these roads are in amazing shape. No potholes or cracks in the roads. No tire trenches from the big trucks that collect water. Somehow these states all have roads in great shape. It will be painful to go home to Rt116 with potholes, cracks and crevices, etc. There are a lot of 4 lane highways here that do not seem to connect anything very big, and have little traffic. We should haul some of that money up north to Vermont and fix our roads (actually I would love a bus or train system instead but..)

So the hotel is the last story today. We hit bottom. Pearisburg (not spelled Parisburg (damn frenchies)) as one women said has nothing in it. The kids get in a lot of trouble, leave town, etc (according to here). What it has a ton of is backpackers which are everywhere and worst than backpackers they are AT end-to-enders so they smell bad and are covered with grime and eat like wolverines (saw a guy polishing off an entire box of Little Debbie cookies (for dessert). So the hotel we stayed at was basically one large ashtray with some beds sprinkled in. When I asked if the room was smoking or non smoking he said "either way" and left it at that. He was an amazingly nice guy and even offered us his car to run errands if we were sick of riding the bikes. So I found something black with legs on my pillow but only found the one (probably a scout). So $44.00 even for the night, no mention of taxes of any kind (hmmm). And no WiFi so no blog last night. Lights off, quick moment of silence to see if the critters were afoot and then off to sleep.