Peggy stayed up real late last night and did not rise until after 10 this morning. We ate a late breakfast, did our shower stuff and promptly sat down to take a day off from sightseeing since it is so strenuous. Sightseeing is right up there with drinking, reading and purchasing expensive meals for pure calorie expenditure and we sort of elected to loaf around and watch cable TV instead. It is very trying but we were able to tough it out.
It did rain a bit today but not enough to make us change our minds about doing nothing.

Today we drove down the lumpy paving of I-64 to Newport News, VA, to visit the Mariner’s Museum, a maritime museum with a bunch of great exhibits. We initially paid them $14 a head to get in and wandered into a large section of the museum that dealt exclusively with the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia which most folks call the Merrimack. The USS Merrimack was salvaged by the Confederates after the shipyard at Newport News was burned by retreating Union forces at the beginning of the Civil War. The partially destroyed Merrimack was re-outfitted as the ironclad CSS Virginia and was shortly thereafter involved in the first battle of ironclads which ended in a decisive draw.
The Virginia / Monitor exhibit is extensive and we were beginning to think that the museum should be called the Monitor / Virginia place when we arrived back in the lobby and found out we had only seen a little fraction of the facility. The place also has a great variety of sailing ship bowsprit art, model ships, a small craft museum with real boats, a section on submarines, cannons, mortars, reconstructions of parts of sailing vessels, lots of biographical material about seagoing types, maritime instruments for timekeeping and navigation, a life-size reconstruction of the USS Monitor, reconstructions of the Monitor’s turret and the actual turret that they recovered off Hampton Roads, VA, which is still in an enormous conservation water tank until it quits exuding salt.
After wandering about in the museum until our feet bellowed for relief, we departed and drove to Yorktown. At this location you can see all the old earthworks for the protection of guns and soldiers for both the British and the U.S. sides in the Battle of Yorktown. Yorktown was where George Washington and the Continental Army surrounded the British and their commander, Cornwallis. Once surrounded by artillery, even the Brits knew they were screwed since there were Continental guns on most sides of their garrison and the York River at their backs. It did not take long for them to bail out, having the British Navy pick them up and take them back to the U.K. We won and they lost. It is probably fortunate that we won here since the Continental Army was much harried during the war and had Cornwallis not gathered all his forces here to be driven into the sea and the war continued, the result could have been quite different. If it had been different, we might still be eating crummy food and driving on the wrong side of the road.
We decided to splurge on a meal in a seafood restaurant on the way home but, as usual, the place we selected to eat was closed so we went back to the Invader and had good food.

Culture day for the uncultured. We hopped in Charlotte and drove to the Visitor Center parking lot at Colonial Williamsburg, a carefully reconstructed likeness of original Williamsburg. We started the day in the facility museum which had a great variety of museum stuff. There is a bunch of art, primarily portraits of rich folks that were pivotal in W’burg’s early history. They also have an enormous colonial furniture collection, lots of china and glass, a bunch of old weather vanes, a reconstructed mental institution where is is evident that loony care was horribly bleak, Paul Revere’s silver works and a load of old handmade quilts which Peggy really enjoyed.
After spending a few hours in the museum, we strolled down one side of the main drag of W’burg, taking in the colonial armament magazine, magnificent horse-drawn carriages, a stop for beer and a cookie apparently from 1619, some shops, an armory facility and ending up at the Capitol building. One side of the building is where the colonial House of Burgesses met to legislate and the other side was the crown’s side where the laws that were contrary to British interests were rejected upstairs and downstairs was the big court of that era. Only really nasty crimes like armed robbery, rape and murder were adjudicated here with minor crimes being handled at the lower county courts. The building is a beautiful brick structure with allegedly four brick-thick walls, oval and circular decorative windows and, fortunately, air conditioning because is was pretty warm today.
This place requires substantial amounts of walking since motor vehicles are not allowed inside W’burg during the daytime. The rather stiff multi-day entrance fee of $50 covers all the museums and exhibits but not actual admission to the area which is quite scenic. However, without access to the exhibits, the place just wouldn’t be the same. After putting in our 5 or 6 hours on our feet, we retreated to the Invader to loaf for the remainder of the day.

Today we reluctantly departed NC and drove to Williamsburg TT near Williamsburg, VA. The scenery from the road is wonderful which almost makes you ignore the absolutely horrible highway paving in Virginia, at least on I-95 and I-64, the two highways we took to get here. It would seem that their Department of Transportation has mandated that all lanes of their highways should be as lumpy as possible utilizing terrible patchwork, cavernous and yawning potholes the size of wheelbarrow tubs, uneven lane surfaces and bridge approaches that seemingly were mined but unrepaired after detonation of the explosive charges. At least it was not raining which would have partially concealed the myriad hazards under poorly directed drainage. Perhaps the state has a deal with technicians that engage in wheel alignment services.
Regardless of the crummy roads, the place is quite beautiful. The Williamsburg TT park is a bit crowded but the spaces are almost all pull-thru types and easily accessible by competent drivers, a classification which does not apply to me. We have nice neighbors and the facility has ample amenities for trailer trash like us.
It was a pretty harrowing drive for us to get here so we loafed for the rest of the day once we were set up in the camp spot.

Uh-oh. Laundry day. I drove Peg to the facility’s laundry and walked back to the Invader where I did some simple maintenance while Peg was sweet enough to carry out the miserable clothes washing duties. Very little other elective activities today other than some very pleasant napping.

Today was a trip of exploration but there was not too much to discover. We started by driving back down the road to Henderson, NC, to pick up another water pressure regulator to replace the unit that the world’s smartest living person, me, had left firmly attached to the spigot back in Advance. What a bozo.
Our drive took us on about a 90 mile loop through northern NC and a little bit of southern VA. Although there is nothing here to get excited about other than Lake Gaston, the drive was spectacular anyway. The foliage is putting on a show that people like me who have lived in the drought-plagued west would find exquisite. There are trees and shrubs that are flowering almost wherever you look interspersed with small farms with emerald green crops just coming out of the soil. The roads are a bit narrow but that probably just keeps the tourists at bay.

We departed Forest Lake campground and Advance and cruised east to another TT campground in Littleton, NC, called Lake Gaston. This campground is right on a very large lake with some neat lakefront private residences around it. The lake has some tiny little wooded islands that look great from the campground but since we are not equipped with a boat we are out of luck on island exploration. No Tom Sawyer stuff for us.
The camp spots are quite a bit more spread out than in the Forest Lake campground and we pulled into a nice spot within view of the lake. There is easy access to a beach, great camp spots in a mature pine forest, nice docks and piers, a store, a pretty good sized library in the lodge and a good laundry. Peg and I took a nice walk along the lake and found a good bench to sit on the shore and watch the sun go down. It is quite beautiful here.

Dianne, Gary, Peggy and I hopped in Charlotte and took a spin around Advance to take in the sights. Unfortunately, there are few man-made sights in this area other than some spectacular old houses (still with lousy foundations) but the foliage is beautiful.
We did find something called the “Bullhole” which formerly was the dam and waterworks for a textile mill that is still visible but quite closed. The Bullhole is the section of a river below a large masonry gravity dam which has water pouring over the top creating nifty little waterfalls. There were about 30 turtles sunning themselves on the rocks and a few visitors wading or fishing in the river. It is no Hoover Dam but it is a neat area nonetheless and if I lived in this rural part of NC, I would be lounging around the Bullhole quite frequently.
Gary and Dianne had to depart around dinner time to get back to work the next day so we gave them a farewell sniff and they split. They called about two and a half hours later indicating they were back home in Greenville which makes me think Gary might have exceeded the posted speed limit on the freeway. Very naughty.

5/2/15 We have some internet access here in Forest Lake so we were able to determine that there was both a Costco and a Trader Joe’s in Winston-Salem. We gathered up our wallets and drove into town for some shopping which only set us back about $260, plus fuel. The drive from Advance to Winston-Salem is gorgeous and almost worth the trip even without shopping. The hardwood / pine forests along the road and the neat old houses near the road are quite scenic and I was frequently not surprised to look in my rear-view mirror to find I was impeding traffic. We pulled over quite a bit to let normal drivers pass us gawkers.
Dianne and Gary, our newly renewed friends from Greenville, SC, had expressed an interest in seeing us again prior to our departure from the area and were gracious enough to drive the long way from their home to occupy a cabin at the campground for the night. They checked in about dinner time and we all probably drank too much having a wonderful time. Dianne had already prepped some chili for dinner and brought it with her so we dined on her tasty food and avoided the hassle of cooking. We may have stayed up past my bedtime but I’m not sure because Gary brought a bottle of Maker’s Mark which seemed quite a bit lighter in the morning.

Today we are scheduled to go back to Charlotte, NC, to get our replacement canopy. We reluctantly departed Stone Mountain and drove to Golden Gait Trailers near Charlotte, for the second time in two weeks. Ron Ulp, the guy who helped us when the awning was removed back in April was mysteriously absent from work on this day. Perhaps it was because he had ordered what appeared to be a shorter awning support system (the arms were shorter than the units removed) and the awning type was intended for an installation with a metal retracted awning cover, which our trailer does not have. There were some sheepish faces from the GGT staff when they told me that the stuff they had was the wrong stuff and it would be another week or two before they could get the correct stuff.
I quickly formulated another plan. I directed them to install what they had bollixed up and, surprisingly, it worked okay. The awning extends and retracts just like it is supposed to and I will have to be satisfied because we were unwilling to disappear for another week or two in NC before returning a third time. We don’t really have a fixed schedule but we have a very firmly flimsy plan about where we are going to go and when we want to be there so we felt obliged to accept what was ordered and vamoose.
After parting with the remainder of the $1501 they charged us to install the alternate awning we departed GGT’s spacious and very clean facility and continued our drive to a TT campground called Forest Lake near Advance, NC. Advance is near Lexington which is about 2/3 of the way from Charlotte to Winston-Salem. I only had to fiddle around for about a half an hour demonstrating my complete ineptitude at backing up a fifth-wheel trailer before we were safely ensconced in the space of our choice. The spaces are a bit close for our liking but certainly adequate. The campground also has a pond which I believe is the water feature that makes for the campground name. It is not very big for a lake but it did have some very healthy-looking geese swimming in it. However, after all our adventures for today we were pooped so we set up, climbed inside the trailer and had some drinks without scoping out the pond / lake before flaking out for the day.