Friday 08.08
After breakfast we packed our tents up and got ready to set off for the next campsite. During the early morning, I heard the sound that any camper dreads: the sound of raindrops hitting the tent fabric. Luckily, it turned out to just be a slight drizzle which stopped soon, and our tents were dry when we got up. We wanted to follow the scenic Blueridge Parkway from Virginia into North Carolina to the next campground. As we drove off, the clouds seemed to grow darker and more dense. A slight rain started to fall. We found the parkway and started driving. Pretty soon we hit some stretches with very dense fog, and when I almost hit a family of deer, I realized that I had to drive extremely carefully. The parkway was full of outlooks but we could enjoy very little of it because of the fog. I am sure it would have been beautiful had you been able to see anything... We did stop at Rocky Knob, though, looking for a toilet and discovered an enormous drive-in picnic area with a wonderfully mysterious and deserted world of tall oak and maple trees in the fog.
Hiroko and Mai at Rocky Knob in the fog
As the weather did not improve we soon decided not to camp and planned on finding a hotel in the late afternoon. For lunch we stopped at an archetypical American diner called Lake View in Fancy Gap.
I had fried flounder (stegt rødspætte) which was really good and came with battered and deep fried okra and fries. It was great. Apparently, they eat a lot of okra here and down south. I am really developing a taste for that vegetable. Hiroko had fried oysters which were also very tasty.
In Boone we started to look for a hotel. The weather was dreadful so we had given up on the parkway entirely. A couple of fancy hotels close to the highway caught our attention. I went in and negotiated with the clerks in both hotels. A funny dude in the Country Inn hotel sold me a double queen suite for the night. Hearing we came from Germany, he replied that his favorite super hero was from Germany (what the f!ck?) I said that it was surely not Herr Schmidt? (Redskull from Cpt. America, a super villain). It wasn't.
The hotel was not cheap but it was wonderful to get internet and all our devices charged (they were running out as we did not have electricity at the camping). We also had a really big load of dirty laundry that we could get done. As usual, we also used the pool and exercise room. It was a busy evening.
Hiroko and I shared a bottle of red Virginia wine while planning our further journey. As rain was in the forecast for the entire weekend, we decided to drive south instead of continuing as planned with the camping in the mountains. It was a shame, because we liked the camping life a lot (a surprise really, because we had suspected it would be very uncomfortable to sleep on the thin camping mats). But nothing kills the joy of camping as rain does, and further along on our route, camping would be no option because of the heat. On the internet, I found a really cheap hotel i Augusta, which seemed to be at a suitable point on our way to Savannah, so I booked a room there. The Virginia wine was OK but not fantastic at the price of over $8. When we both felt strangely dizzy half way into the bottle, we remembered that we had forgotten to drink any water after the workout!
Saturday 09.08
We took a slow breakfast in the hotel. We looked at some incredibly big and fat people in the hotel restaurant... One man was so big he basically had to squat on the dining chair, with his legs spread out to make room for his big belly. What a difference from the cool, multi-ethnic, athletic population of Boston and NY.
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