MPH Travels: Carolinas on My Mind – 12th, 13th and 14th May

12/5/10

We left St George after a great breakfast at the motel, and hit the road for Charleston. Just out of town, we stopped at the Charles Towne Landing State Park. This is the site of the original settlement. Now it is an archaeological site, and park with rebuilt settlements, the original Plantation house and a small preserve for native animals. It was really interesting to learn a bit about the local history and at the preserve we saw Bobcat, Puma, Black Bear, Bison, Deer, Elk and Otter. No more Alligators, though.

About lunchtime, we headed into the Historic District of downtown Charleston. We had heard that it was a very attractive city. It didn’t disappoint, either. We spent the whole afternoon looking around the waterfront and downtown. It was probably unfair of us to look upon Charleston with eyes that had seen Savannah the day before. It just didn’t have the magic of Savannah. But it was lovely, though. It kinda reminded us both a bit of Hobart.

We spent the night in a kinda dingy motel off of Interstate 95, right between the truck stop and the freight train tracks. It was steeped in ‘Atmosphere’. It sprawled about an hour south of the SC/ NC border. At least the restaurant next door was good. Chicken in Southern BBQ sauce. Yum. Our waiter was a young black guy putting himself through college. He didn’t say what he studied as a major but said that he had studied marine biology, and one of the great ambitions of his life is to come to Queensland and see the Great Barrier Reef. Small world, huh.

13/5/10

In the morning we headed up the I95 and stopped at a place, just south of the border, called…ummm…well, called “South of the Border”.
This place defies description. It really does. But I’ll try anyway.
It is a Mexican-themed Hotel/ Motel/ Campground/ Truckstop/ General Store/ Gas Station/ Playground/ Fireworks Outlet/ Gift Shop/ Burger joint/ Mexican restaurant/ Garage and Theme Park. It covers about 10 acres at the side of the highway, is painted in very gaudy colours and populated with large concrete statues of spaceships, dinosaurs and very cheery-looking Mexicans in novelty-sized sombreros.
Overall a sophisticated and subdued venue, then.

Over the North Carolina border we turned westward. After all, how many chances do you get to drive the famous Blue Ridge Parkway? At this point, it’s worth saying, for those that don’t know that I have a great aunt and cousin in Richmond, Virginia and if we stayed on the I95, we could have been there in about 6 or 7 hours. But instead, we decided to drive a half-day out of our way to take the slowest, most scenic route possible, adding about two days to our trip. So, just the usual, right?

The Blue Ridge Parkway runs along the ridgetops of the Appalachian Mountains, from the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in the Carolinas to the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. It is some of the most stunning scenery we have seen yet. The road is a two-lane blacktop that’s mainly smooth and rises and falls and negotiates sweeping corners. We were thinking of Dallas and Renee. They would love it. It would be exhilarating at speed and bikers and RV’ers come from all around the country to drive it. But the speed limit is a stately 45MPH, and that’s fine because the woods, Pines, Oaks, Beeches and native Black Gums represent every shade of bright and dark green, and come right to the edges of the road, meeting in the middle over it, gabling it, and making a stunning sun-dappled corridor to drive through. Except where they don’t, leaving you with stunning views of mountain peaks and meadows right to the hazy distant horizon.

In the early evening, we left the Parkway, and (after getting lost in the backwoods, and asking a local guy for directions that were accurate, though they were relayed in a molasses-dipped voice that had to fight to get around the marbles in his mouth), we found our way to the Rivercamp campgrounds, NC. It is the most idyllic campground we’ve found yet. So far…
Our site was on lush, green grass, about 10 feet from a lovely, slowly-moving river. We lit a great campfire and sat around it on sawn-off logs, playing cards and eating our dinner, while the fireflies flashed in the trees.

14/5/10

The Rivercamp campground was shrouded in mist when we got up this morning. We headed back to the Blue Ridge Parkway and continued north. Unfortunately we were both feeling a bit unwell. I’ve had a congested chest for a few days and Pia has caught a stomach bug. Poor Pia has been nauseous and unwell all day. The scenery was just as spectacular today as yesterday, but our enjoyment was diminished, so in the mid afternoon, we got off the Parkway, and decided to get a motel room in Roanoke.

Perhaps, this was ill-considered. Remember me saying that the school year here ends in May, just before their summer break? Well, it turned out that Virginia Tech was having a Graduation Ceremony at their Roanoke campus. About 20,000 family members from all around the USA had descended on Roanoke. Rooms within an hour of town were simply unavailable, except at exorbitantly inflated prices.

So about an hour north of town, we got a cheap motel room off the highway, at a slightly less exorbitantly inflated price. It is a pleasingly shabby, cliché’d American, one-storey motor-court type of place, next to a big, pink concrete building, called the Pink Cadillac Restaurant, which has, under the faded, pink neon sign, an equally faded 1948 pink Cadillac, and, just to drive the point home, a 15-foot high concrete statue of King Kong? No, he wasn’t wearing pink.
In the evening, Pia began to feel a bit better and we watched Forrest Gump on TV. It’s funny to watch it now that we’ve been to Bubba Gump Shrimp and stood where his park bench is, in Savannah.

Malby Mill, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC