Cuyahoga Valley National Park

The Quality Inn in Fayetteville was nothing special, perhaps our least memorable hotel, but it was clean and convenient and the breakfast was interesting.  It was staged in a gift shop, with T-shirts and refrigerator magnets for sale along the perimeter of the tiny room and, strangely enough, cartoons playing silently on the TV. 

 

We left the mountains of West Virginia and drove north into the flat lower Great Lakes Basin, mostly interstate driving with more and more industry, traffic, and trucks on the road.  I have noticed that there is a peculiar community among travelers.  Often we would see the same familiar cars at rest stops along the way, again and again, and almost feel as if we knew them, although they were complete strangers.  And there are bonds of civility, too – cars graciously moving over into the other lane to allow others to join the flow of traffic from an entrance ramp, or rudely hogging the left-hand lane so that you would have to pass dangerously on the right, or angrily hanging one car length behind waiting to roar past.  We live in a relatively rural part of the country, but it did seem to me that the farther north we drove the more aggressive the driving became.  The route through Akron and northward toward Cleveland was especially nerve-wracking, and we were glad when we were able to get off the interstate onto two-lane roads again and put the top down on the Mini.  

 

Somewhere along the way we noticed that we were not seeing kudzu anymore, that ubiquitous invasive Southern vine that climbs up utility poles and engulfs abandoned houses and cars in fantastic topiary formations along the roadside.  Was kudzu just a southern phenomenon, like grits and cornbread, or would we see little patches of it as we traveled north into Ohio and Indiana?  We took a nice detour to Brandywine Falls on the way to our second National Park.   

 

I had never heard of Cuyahoga Valley National Park before this trip, but it turned out to be a lovely place.

There was a small historic village behind the Visitor Center, and we enjoyed visiting the old buildings.

 

There were still remnants of the tow path of the Erie Canal nearby, which was grown in now but was being used for cycling and hiking. 

 

Our lodging for the night was one of our nicest ones, Shady Oaks Farm Bed & Breakfast in nearby Northfield, Ohio.  We drove down a long, shady gravel driveway to the house and met the young owners, Melanie and Jeff, and their two daughters, Addy and Amelia, a lovely little family.   

 

The room was beautiful, furnished with antique furniture.  We asked Melanie if there was a restaurant nearby and she directed us to Dos Coronas, the first of many Mexican restaurants which we found worked well for us on this trip.  On the way, though, I couldn’t help noticing, right down the road in this quiet neighborhood among these gentle innkeepers and their daughters, a run-down-looking house with a huge sign displayed out front, half as big as the house:  BIDEN SUCKS.  Oh, please:  get over it.  Or as the object of this embittered Northfield resident put it in that memorable debate, “Will you shut up, Man?”

 

We returned after dinner to the peace and quiet of Shady Oaks Farm and discovered that there was a Scrabble game in the well-equipped dining room, so we sat outside on the patio and enjoyed the simple pastime of making words out of random letters as the sun went down.

New River Gorge

One of my concerns on this long journey was being able to stay fit on the road.  We planned to hike whenever we could, since we would be in National Parks, but I am used to running at least three days a week and working out with weights at home or at the gym a couple of times a week.  Fortunately, all of the places we stayed were in safe locations, and some of them even had fairly decent fitness rooms.  I was able to go out the front door of the hotel in Wytheville for my daily Tai Chi on this cool Virginia morning and witness a bright orange sunrise over rolling fields and patches of woods, not much different from our part of the country except for the trucks rolling by on I-81.  Then I ran around the parking lot two or three times, a mile or so, and was also able to lift weights in the fitness room.

 

One of the benefits of breaking up our first day of travel was that it would allow us more time to explore New River Gorge, which was only about an hour-and-a-half from Wytheville.  Because we had the extra time, I found a route that took us on two-lane roads through the countryside instead of I-81, something we tried to do throughout the trip.  This morning’s destination was Big Walker Scenic Overlook, which was at the top of a mountain pass on Stony Fork Road.  

 

The vistas were very nice, and there was a little shop (closed at this time of morning) and a picturesque old truck nearby.  A friendly cat ran across the empty parking lot and greeted us warmly as we stretched our legs and took in the scenery.  

 

There was little traffic on the road, which is the way we like it.  But the road grew less scenic as we continued through the dismal small towns of West Virginia toward Fayetteville.  There was so much poverty and despair in these abandoned coal towns with nothing but the usual Walmarts and fast food chains, dilapidated shacks and single-wide trailers with five, six, seven trucks parked outside.  What if I lived in a place like this, I wondered?  Could I escape?  Or would I just resign myself to the squalor of poverty? - drugs and TV and fast food and a suitcase of cheap beer, not even a good pub to share a miserable pint with your friends.  An illuminated sign along the highway advertised DENTAL IMPLANTS, and I caught myself making a crude joke about missing teeth.

 

My apologies to the rest of West Virginia.  The countryside is still very beautiful in this part of the world, especially so when we reached the New River Gorge and its graceful suspension bridge, barely noticeable when driving across it but spectacular when seen from the Visitor Center below.  It was an engineering marvel, 3030 feet long, 876 feet high, with a 1700-foot arch span.

Our daughter had been following our trip and I sent her a photo of the bridge.  She remembered that, years ago in a different job than she has now, she had flown with her boss in his small private plane over this bridge, and she sent us this photo she had taken at the time.

We had plenty of time in this first National Park on our trip, and we made the most of it by hiking the Endless Trail out to the Gorge, a wooded trail not unlike trails that we hike in Western North Carolina, with precipitous drops to the gorge below.

We took our Mini down the old one-way switch-backing Fayette Station Road and crossed the river on the rickety old Tunney Hunsaker Bridge, which offered beautiful views looking up at the new bridge. A man we had met at the Visitor Center earlier told us that there was a catwalk you could walk on suspended under the bridge, available only on special tours, which seemed to me as frightening a thing to do as skydiving.

The busiest restaurant in Fayetteville seemed to be Pies and Pints - good pizza, good beer, and friendly service.  This well-preserved little city was doing pretty well for itself, in large part due to the visitors to the National Park, and there did not seem to be any of the rural poverty we had seen out on the road earlier in the day.

Wytheville

When we return from a long journey, friends are likely to ask us, “What did you see?”  I am often at a loss for words when asked that question.  How to describe, for example, that lovely morning seven years ago in July when we found ourselves at the Grand Canyon.  I wrote this in my blog: 

Sunrise is going to occur at 5:30 a.m., so we awaken early and set out for the rim.  I do my Tai Chi in the darkness, and it is cool and very quiet at this time of morning.  And I want to run very much, so we walk to the path and I am in my running clothes.  On the way, we see this herd of elk, wandering along the railroad tracks.  Other people have gathered to watch he sunrise, too, and some of them are wrapped in blankets and wearing slippers.  It reminds me of the beach, where people will get up so early to see such a simple event, wrapped in the blankets they slept in. Sunrise.  And while the world is still aglow, I take off on one of my most memorable runs, along this path.  And I keep thinking, That's the Grand Canyon, right there! 

Even that description cannot convey the fragrance of the cool morning air, the sudden surprise at seeing that herd of elk, and the enormous silence as I ran.

After every journey we should ask ourselves the same questions:

·       What did you see?

·       What did you learn?

·       How has it changed you?

I expected this road trip to be no different.  Where can I even begin my account of a journey that would ultimately take five weeks to complete?  7,340 miles, 18 states, 14 National Parks.  I began to take notes for this blog on the first day, in a slim book that Martha had given me for such a purpose, and at the same time I began jotting down a few lines of what I expected would be a long poem:

Let us go then, you and I,
across this wide beautiful broken country
America, to see if we can find the lost place
that we remember in our dreams,
our troubled sleep, the nation we once believed in. 

Here in the rolling August mountains

of Western North Carolina and Tennessee,

and then the wide rolling Virginia countryside

so beautiful on a thick humid morning,

so green, as green as we ever could imagine.

 

"Broken country" may sound a little cynical, but it has been seven years since we crossed this country in a little car on its back roads and highways, and much has changed in that short period of time.  We are both older, of course, although still healthy and eager to travel now that we have reached a time in our lives when we can.  Our 2018 Mini Cooper has relatively low mileage (33,000), we had it serviced last month, and like many Minis it has "run flat" tires.  But, more importantly, our country has changed in the meantime, and unlike seven years ago we may find ourselves wondering if it is a “red state” or a “blue state” through which we will be driving.  I was hoping that we would be able to leave that behind for a few weeks, the political signs and the shallow slogans, and simply look for the real beauty in America again. 

We had ambitiously planned that Day One would be a drive to our first National Park, New River Gorge in West Virginia, 325 miles away, five hours and 20 minutes.  We realized that such a distance would be challenging on the first day of a long road trip.  Our rule of thumb in 2016 when we drove to California and back had been to limit daily mileage to 300, if possible, with each of us taking turns every 50 miles or so.  So we decided to break the first day up by driving to Wytheville, Virginia, only 230 miles, three hours and 45 minutes from home.  We had traveled in this part of  Virginia before but we had never made it to Wytheville.  It seemed to be a comfortable place to begin, familiar terrain, a prologue to what we expected to be some strange and unfamiliar places.

We could not have chosen a more beautiful first day of travel, with little traffic on I-26 as we drove through Asheville and continued north, the sky bright blue and the rolling hills of Tennessee and Virginia beautiful to behold.

We stopped at a log-cabin-themed welcome center in Tennessee which was clean and attractive with plenty of picnic tables, features we would come to appreciate more and more since we planned to stop most days for a picnic lunch.  Martha posed next to a cut-out of a smiling Dolly Parton, a woman beloved by all, blue or red, country music lover or not.

Wytheville was a pretty little town that was proud of its history, with walkable sidewalks and plaques and photos everywhere, especially of Woodrow Wilson and his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.  I had asked the desk clerk at our hotel if it was safe to walk around (a good question to ask in some places we have visited), and he assured us it was.  We stopped for pizza in a little place not far from the Wytheville Office Supply, known locally for the huge pencil angled over the sidewalk as if preparing to write a very large poem, and I thought this must be one of the few office supply stores left in the day of Quill and Amazon.

Back at the hotel, I realized that we were already a little sunburned despite liberal application of sunblock.  Tonight’s lodging was a Hampton Inn with a reliable breakfast buffet the next morning.  Martha posted an account of our daily travels on her Facebook page, and more than once was asked if  we had planned where to stay ahead of time or were just "winging it."  The answer was yes:  we planned the whole route together back in January, and Martha found and reserved all of the lodging months ago (some of it much more interesting than a Hampton Inn!)  Weary travelers like to know that they have a place to rest their heads at the end of a long day.

Ready to Hit the Road

We have decided to break up the first planned day of travel on Tuesday into two days.  340 miles from Highlands to Fayetteville, WV, where the New River Gorge is located, seemed like a long way to drive on the first day of our road trip.  And then there is the other factor:  we are nearly packed and we are ready to hit the road.  So we have decided to drive to Wytheville, VA tomorrow and then less than two hours to Fayetteville on Tuesday, which will allow for more time visiting the Gorge and its iconic bridge, an engineering marvel constructed in 1977.

This is a photo I found on the internet on the National Park Service website.  But this is the last time I will post stock photos from the internet.  After we depart in the morning, we will see these sights for ourselves, with our own eyes, and capture them forever on our cameras and in our memories.  That is what is so wonderful about travel.  On the eve of our trip to the UK and Ireland in 2019, I wrote this on the blackboard:

We have seen photos of Stonehenge and the Eiffel Tower and the Mediterranean Sea for most of our lives.  But we will never forget walking across that wide field on Salisbury Plain dotted with clumps of sheep dung early in the morning and slowly approaching those huge standing stones, or toasting each other with champagne on the very top of the Eiffel Tower and gazing down at Paris and the lazy curve of the Seine river below us, or seeing that indescribably bright blue Mediterranean Sea on the Côte d'Azur.  Those unforgettable moments of beauty experienced in person.

 Yes, we are ready to hit the road!

Let The Adventure Begin

The days are full this summer – Chamber Music Concerts, construction projects around the house and yard, harvesting from our garden, running – and there has not been much time for posting to this blog.  I am not even sure that I have any readers aside from my faithful proofreader Martha.  But I continue to update it from time to time when we have completed a race, celebrate a holiday or anniversary, discover new adventures in Atlantic Beach over the winter, or when we are going on a long trip.  

It is the latter that will be the subject of this blog during the month of August, a road trip in our Mini Cooper to the western United States that we began planning in January and that will begin a week from now.  Like our “Mini Takes the States” adventure in 2016, we will be traveling light and driving a little over 300 miles most days, beginning with a Mini rally in St. Ignace, Michigan (“Mini on the Mack”), where several hundred Minis will cross the Mackinac bridge.  From there, we will be on our own, just the two of us, as we explore those places we missed in 2016, mostly National Parks, including New River Gorge, Cuyahoga Valley, Indian Dunes, Theodore Roosevelt, Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, Garden of the Gods, Pikes Peak, and Natchez Trace.  We outlined the adventure months ago, but in the meantime Martha has found interesting places for us to stay each night and exciting adventures along the way.

These past two weeks we have been preparing and packing and reminiscing about that 2016 road trip that took us even farther out west, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  We are seven years older, but our Mini is newer, has fewer miles than the last time (and run flat tires), and is surprisingly comfortable for a tall man like me.  And we have, I think, become more experienced travelers, unpacking each night and packing up quickly and efficiently the next morning.  We sometimes say to each other (in a British accent) what our wonderful Tour Director Steve Morris asked each morning during our trip to the UK, “Have a little think now:  Do you have everything?  Phones?  Chargers?  Wallets?”  We have gotten pretty good at having a little think.

Just as on our road trip in 2016, our trip to the UK in 2019, and our trip to France last year, this blog will fall silent for several weeks.  But I will take notes, day by day, and write it all up when we return.  There is so much to see!  As Tennyson wrote:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

Let the adventure begin.

 

44th Anniversary

We have run races on the Fourth of July for many years and in many different locations:  Bryson City, Brevard, and last year the Independence Day 5-K in Asheville combined with a celebration of our 43^rd anniversary.  One race I have never run is the Peachtree Road Race, in which 50,000 participants crowd the streets of Atlanta, more a festival than a race.  We know several runners who went to Peachtree this year, including my 84-year-old friend Fred, who is recovering from hip surgery and decided to walk the 6.2 miles.  Good for them!  As for me, I decided this year to go running in Highlands, where I could enjoy relatively empty streets and the cool temperatures.  That did not stop a woman I did not know who was walking on Main Street from calling out to me, “You should be in Atlanta!”  I told her, no thanks, too many runners for me, and asked if she had run Peachtree.  “Oh no, I’m not a runner!” she replied.  Some people just love to give advice. 

Although we did not run a race this year, we did celebrate another anniversary, and in the same location as last year, Echo Mountain Inn in Laurel Park, just outside of Hendersonville.  This was the fourth time we have stayed at this beautiful, hidden gem on a mountaintop only minutes from Hendersonville.  It is family-owned and was originally built in 1896 as a private residence, then used for years as a girl’s camp – “Camp Happiness.”  Last year we discovered many attractions in the area that we had not had time to explore in the past, such as seeing West Side Story at Flat Rock Playhouse and visiting the Carl Sandburg House, both just a few minutes away.  There are also good restaurants in the area, and our first stop on Wednesday was at one of them, White Duck Taco Shop, which features some of the best tacos in the area.

After lunch, we had plenty of time to walk around Main Street before climbing the winding, narrow Laurel Park Highway to Echo Mountain and checking in.  The family that operates the Inn is a friendly one and they remembered us from last year.  The family matriarch, a remarkable 93-year-old lady named Marcy, also lives full-time there and it is always a treat to talk to her.  We found out last year that she and her husband had celebrated 60 anniversaries before he died of Lou Gehrig's Disease.  When she found out we had “only” been married 44 years, she told us we were just kids.  “Time goes by so fast,” she told us wistfully, and as if in corroboration Martha noticed that she was wearing a necklace made of several watch faces.

We enjoyed dinner in downtown Hendersonville at a newly-discovered place called Shine, and then walked up and down the wide sidewalks where it seemed that every restaurant had outside dining. 

The next morning, on our anniversary itself, we explored another new place that Martha had read about, the Park at Flat Rock, a former golf course transformed into a park and operated by a foundation.  It includes gardens, a lovely water-lily lake, and walking trails where cart paths had once connected the tees.  The Park is right down the mountain from Highland Lake Inn, and I remembered running there on the same cart paths several years after it had been abandoned as a golf course but before it had been transformed into a park.

From there we drove to Marked Tree Vineyard, which one of the owners at Echo Mountain had told us had been named one of the country’s top ten new vineyards by USA Today.  It was located on top of a peaceful mountain surrounded by rolling hills which we looked out over while enjoying smoked trout and a bottle of Grüner Veltliner, a white wine we had not encountered before and a 2023 NC Fine Wines gold medal winner.  On the northern horizon, a hazy Mount Pisgah could be seen in the distance.

We drove back to Flat Rock and spent some time shopping before freshening up for our anniversary dinner at Season’s Restaurant, located at Highland Lake Inn.  We have enjoyed many special dinners there, including Easter, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, and this one proved just as memorable.  Returning to the Inn, we engaged in a romantic 44^th anniversary activity – a torrid, passionate game of Scrabble. 

Friday morning, we left after breakfast and drove to Pearson’s Falls, just on the other side of Saluda and only a 30-minute drive from Echo Mountain.  It was another place we only had time to explore because we were staying in the area for several days.  A short hike up a trail nicely-maintained by the Tryon Garden Club led along a cascading branch to one of the prettiest waterfalls in the area.

We returned to Saluda, had lunch at The Purple Onion, and spent some time walking around the historic town, which was preparing for Coon Dog Day on Saturday, which attracts 10,000 visitors to celebrate said dog, known for its unique bark and keen sense of smell.

From Saluda, we returned to Flat Rock and watched the newly-released and final Indiana Jones movie, The Dial of Destiny, at the Flat Rock Bistro Cinema, a cozy little place just across the street from the shops we had visited yesterday.  The movie was pure silliness – Indy running along the top of a train, ducking just in time for the tunnels, Indy swinging from ropes as in an old Tarzan movie, Indy diving at a shipwreck in the Mediterranean amidst clusters of eels in search of a precious artifact, Indy riding a horse down the New York subway – but it was the very last adventure for Harrison Ford, whom I later read made $25 million dollars for the movie.

One of the graphics that appeared over and over in the movie was a globe-trotting plane flying from place to place, as in old timey movies, and I remarked to Martha that, although a lot less perilous, I felt a little like that on this trip as we flew from adventure to adventure.

 
So onward we flew to dinner at West First Wood-Fired in Hendersonville (delicious), and then walked down the street to the Hendersonville Theater and a performance of Rock of Ages.  Whew!  Our final flight of the day took us up the now-familiar road to Echo Mountain Inn.

Saturday morning, we packed our little Mini and bid farewell to the Inn, and to Travis and Bud and Marcy and the rest of the family, and started heading back home.  But first we took a 30-minute detour to a place we had visited decades ago, and only once, possibly before we moved to Highlands:  Chimney Rock State Park.  Like Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, where the iconic “See Rock City” signs originated, we found Chimney Rock less of a tourist trap than you might expect.  The Town itself was a small one and had its share of places selling fried Twinkies and the like, but it also had a fine establishment called Bubba O’Leary’s General Store, named after a gentle, laid-back English Labrador dog (the third generation was calmly dozing by the front counter), with wooden floors and nice merchandise, similar to Mast Store in Hendersonville. 

And there was Chimney Rock itself, a remarkable rock formation accessible by either 499 steps or by an elevator.  We opted for the steps, and thoroughly enjoyed the climb to the summit, which we considered “cross-training” and a good substitute for the usual Saturday morning group run in Highlands.

We had lunch at Old Rock Café overlooking the river, and then made our way back through Hendersonville, through Brevard, and on to Highlands, where we were just in time to listen to some good music in the Park before (yawn) finally winding our way on the last leg of our anniversary adventure down the Walhalla Road to home.

It was a wonderful anniversary!  And I am thankful once again for being able to celebrate the adventure every day with my beautiful wife.