Today we had our last meal at the Blue Parrot and, again, we were fed top-notch food. Ruth, Cully and Julie arrived by boat and Peggy and I drove over because I was afflicted with geezer gut and was reluctant to be caught in the middle of Lake Normal without a growler.
We all got together again at Ruth’s after lunch but the party started to break up. Julie and Ruth headed for Charlotte airport so Julie could catch a flight back to California. Cully was packing up his stuff for the drive back to D.C. And we headed to the trailer for a nap. Tomorrow we will do some shopping and prep for departure. Due to our schedule, we are going further south where I imagine it will be even more humid and hotter than here. One of the drawbacks of living in this region has got to be the broiling temperatures and oppressive humidity. I have been a sweaty beast whenever outside for the last few days.

There was general loafing by all parties today. Fortunately, we were all gathered at Ruth’s gorgeous and, more importantly, well-air conditioned house. Ruth maintains a terrific larder and we have been eating like kings or queens in Peggy’s, Julie’s and Ruth’s cases.
The girls popped down to Lake Normal for some water noodling and I got to watch the NASCAR race, a rare luxury with our equipment in our trailer. Kyle Busch did not win which suits me fine, especially after I saw his house on the shore of Lake Normal. He has enough.

Yesterday we missed going on the lake for a day but today my favorite sister, Julie, arrived and the party could begin in earnest. To add interest to the situation, Ruth’s son, Cully, also arrived from the D.C. area where he had been malingering until his home hockey team won the Stanley Cup. Of course we all piled into Ruth’s pontoon boat for some more lake cruising on Lake Normal. The lake’s actual name is Norman but my keyboard seems to like Normal better. Cully was very nice and performed well as the designated boat captain ushering the tipsy ancients around beautiful Lake Normal.
We docked at a shoreline restaurant called The Landing and were again surprised at the great food we received. It isn’t as good as the Blue Parrot across the lake but that doesn’t mean the food was in any way crummy. I’m starting to like quite a bit about North Carolina except the weird barbecue they have some places here which has way too much vinegar for me. All the rest of the food we have had has been great and Ruth had quite a bit to do with that. She has been feeding us every night and my diet is in shambles.
We had to break the party up at about 11:30 PM because Julie got no sleep on the red-eye on the way here last night and we had consumed a bit of water but mostly Mimosas, beer, wine and Margaritas and if we kept on with it we may have become intoxicated.
There are some pictures. Click here

Today we were happy to accompany Ruth on Lake Norman for another leisurely cruise. This day we had an additional passenger, Jim, who lives in another very nice house down the street from Ruth’s palatial digs. Jim was a font of additional info about the privileged that live along the shores of this gorgeous lake. He also has a very sweet German Shepherd that I got to play with while the women were doing the real work getting the boat away from the dock.
We are not too imaginative so we went to the Blue Parrot again today. The first time we went here yesterday I got the shrimp plate with seasoned fries and it was fantastic costing about $15. However, Peggy got fish and chips and I noted there was a very generous portion of fish. Today I tried the fish and chips (although I substituted fried plantains for fries) and, again, the food was terrific. The fish and substituted chips were $13 and a great deal. My first venture into plantains turned out well, too, because they were scrumptious.
Jim had to disembark early so we stopped by his dock, dropping him off and heading back out for another journey of exploration. We went past something called Governor’s Island where the houses are even spiffier than the other 12,000 square foot shacks occupied by the slightly less affluent lake edge dwellers. We also felt obliged to stop at the dock of the Port City Club where we went in for some more drinks because lake cruising can make you thirsty. During the trip we also stopped by a place Jim referred to as Heron Island and, sure enough, there was an entire community of big blue herons perching in the trees instead of strolling around the shallows. They look kind of funny in trees with their long wading bird legs gripping bare branches 60 feet up in a tree. Regardless of where they stand, they are magnificent creatures and very handsome.
There are fireflies here. They are terrific to watch. They create little streaks of light in the air just above the ground just before dark. It is magical.
We got pix. To see them, click here

After our morning constitutional of coffee and Irish Cream, we piled into the truck and returned to Ruth’s for a ride on Lake Norman. It turns out that Ruth has a craft called a pontoon boat that seems to be an ideal platform for relaxing in the shade while watching the world go by. It is docked not far from her house so it was not long before we had boarded and were on our way. Ruth mostly cruises at very reasonable speeds but there is a big black but remarkably quiet Mercury outboard attached to the back end and once in a while she would demonstrate that the craft will actually zing along but mostly she stayed in relaxation mode.
There is a big canopy on the boat that shades the comfy, couch-like seats that line the periphery of the boat and it turns out that there are few more relaxing activities to engage in when it is hot than cruising around Lake Norman. The houses along the shoreline appear to be owned by corporate execs and race car drivers (remember- we are in the middle of NASCAR country) and they are stunning. It seems these folks need substantially more space to live than we do because the houses were almost universally enormous. Architects locally have done good work because all the houses don’t look similar or identical. The lots are big and there are very few fences, even around swimming pools.
Partway into our cruise, Ruth took us to a place called the Blue Parrot which offers excellent food at reasonable prices, a great drink selection, shady patio dining and the ability to drive a boat right up to their dock where their flunkies will fuel your craft while you dine and drink. It is a great place to eat while viewing the goings-on on the lake and one can depart with the tanks topped off.
Ruth was bad and fed us again after providing us with entertainment all day. We were forced to deal with barbecued chicken and cheese tortellini and we left quite full. We are still running our GPS to find our way home because this place looks different in the dark.
We got a few pix during our boating. Click here

Today was a travel day so we loaded the Barbarian Invader and happily slipped out of Forest Lake TT near Advance and Lexington, NC. We were able to stay on back roads, all the way to our next destination at Denver, NC, not far from Ruth N’s house which sits along the edge of Lake Norman. Ruth is part of the Gang of Many who all join us in Cabo San Lucas every winter so we take vacations from doing nothing. Lake Norman is a massive reservoir almost wholly owned by Duke Power that is located northwest of Charlotte. A good portion of the lake shore is dotted with really gorgeous houses owned by folks who make more money than we do.
It was hot and humid when we arrived but we did our due diligence and got the trailer set up pretty quickly although we were pretty damp at the end. Not long afterwards, we contacted Ruth and she invited us over to her beautiful house that has superb air conditioning and nice deck to sit on while gazing out over the lake. Ruth barbecued up flank steak for dinner alleging we must be tired so she was going to feed us. The steak was very tasty. We eventually left the confines of her cool house and headed the 10 miles or so back to our trailer with an arrangement to meet again tomorrow for a cruise out on Lake Norman.

The weather has been tough on the elderly and smart the last few days but today started sunny with almost reasonable temperatures and humidity below 50%. We took a drive into nearby Lexington to hit the post office so we could get our kids’ birthday presents to them only a few days late. We accessed the Gas Buddy app on our phone and found it was completely inaccurate about the price of diesel but we bought it at the wrong price anyway because it was too late to go on a town-wide accuracy check of a free app.
However, the best thing we did was give ourselves a reward by going to the Lexington Barbecue. It is a small but busy joint. It was here we found that North Carolina has two forms of barbecue and this place serves the wrong type. The meat was quite tender and the fries and hush puppies were very tasty but the barbecue type around here has BBQ sauce that is thin, runny stuff with lots of vinegar in it. We prefer the more robust, tomato-based sauces we so eagerly devoured as we crossed Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi to the watery acetic acid stuff here. If you like the skinny stuff they serve around here, the prices were good and service was great. It was about $30 for two, including drinks.

Although we have been Thousand Trails members for four years, we encountered a new park entry procedure here that we have never encountered before. Upon our arrival, Peggy was shown a document with a listing of available spaces and asked to choose. Actual, eyes-on perusal of the RV space was not allowed so Peggy made her choice and, fortunately, we were placed into a nice, shady spot with full hookups and superb wifi. There is an ungrouted concrete block restroom across the road for dying in when the tornado comes.
There is a neighbor across the road that seems to be operating the Church of the Internal Combustion Engine with many worshipers that arrive and depart at odd hours. The pastor has, as his flock, not less than two golf carts with gas engines and defective mufflers, a four-person sand rail with a Volkswagen engine but no muffler whatsoever, a couple of cars and two pickup trucks with aftermarket exhaust components intended to piss off the elderly. The last visitor departed from his place last night at 12:30 AM, a bit after the park’s shut up time of 11:00. The departing visitor also had exhaust system components apparently purchased at the same place. There are also some Harley guys nearby with nothing other than straight, short tailpipes that rev their bikes a lot but never seem to leave. However, the trees around our campsite are beautiful.
Yesterday we woke up late, moved slowly and were all-around loafers. We took a short walk to the scummy pond they euphemistically refer to as a “lake” and found some nice seating at the shoreline. From our vantage point we spotted many exotic and happy shoreline plants, pollywogs, lots of birds and many varieties of unidentifiable insects dining and having sex. The dragonflies seemed particularly randy.
Today we were a bit more mobile and we took a drive through nearby Lexington and surrounding communities. There must be a shitload of Bible-thumper types in Lexington because the place is lousy with big churches about two blocks on-center. Other than the handsome churches, most of the remainder of the buildings in town are less than two stories but there are many grand old residences lining the streets. The downtown area screens two abandoned factories and one partially burned manufacturing complex that look like the jobs left town some time ago. We spotted some fiberglass or gelcoat hogs with strange decorations in the center of town, one standing and the other seated. Strangely, one of them was directly in front of the courthouse.
After getting an eyefull of great residential architecture, we took off northeast for a while before turning off on some back roads to check out the sights. There is an abundance of really handsome estates along the back roads in this part of the world. All the plants and trees along the way look very happy and about the only descriptor that comes to mind is “overgrown” since the only things that are not green are the sky, the road, some buildings and scattered recently-harvested fields of crops.
We eventually found our way back to Forest Lake Preserve only missing a couple of turns and performing a couple U-turns which is really quite good considering the layout of roads in this convoluted terrain. We found very few straight stretches on our drive today and none longer than about a half mile. Other than major highways, all the roads we drove today were quite narrow and our F-250 barely fit between the double yellow line on the left and the white fog line on the right. Most of the trip I could look in the right mirror and see the back right tire covering the white line and my driver’s side mirror over the yellow stripes. Passing oncoming traffic is exciting in these conditions. Sometimes we noted the oncoming drivers were on the phone which made us feel completely safe.
We got pictures of a satisfied squirrel, some nice houses, fiberglass pigs and a state-of-the-art North Carolina building foundation that you can see if you click here

Today was a travel day so we loaded up our stuff, stopped by the dump station and departed from Stone Mountain State Park. It is a gorgeous place.
We fiddled around on some skinny NC roads for a bit before getting on I-77 southbound for about 10 minutes. Our F-250 has a great air conditioning system and it was greatly appreciated today because the humidity was greater than 80% and merely moving one’s eyes generates blooms of stinky sweat from armpits and other even worse locations. Long before we got near Charlotte, we turned eastward and followed NC-601 and US-64 through beautiful green countryside until we got to Forest Lake Preserve, a Thousand Trails facility. We were here in 2015 but, due to my faltering geezer memory, it seemed all new.
This TT facility seems to be different than other TT sites because here we encountered a pudgy curmudgeon at the gate who’s function was to make everybody wait in line and sweat. When we initially arrived, there was nobody at the kiosk. After a few minutes, the little turd arrived and started taking care of the RV in front of us. After moving at glacial speeds filling out simple forms and getting license numbers that they don’t need, he disappeared in his golf cart to lead the folks ahead of us into the park. We have never encountered a kiosk troll before at a TT park and I can now suggest to Thousand Trails that trolls are unnecessary. We have never been led into a TT facility by a dedicated gatekeeper previously because that, too, is unnecessary. The little hobbit would not even speak to us until he had finished the business with the folks in the RV ahead of us in line and even then he was a grumpy midget.
After about 20 minutes of sweltering in the nearly underwater conditions, the gate Nazi took down our information in longhand despite all the information already being in the Thousand Trails data base. We were finally allowed access to our reserved spot in the facility but the insignificant squint deemed us bright enough to find our assigned space and his sloth-like efforts were, therefore, unnecessary when it came to leading us into a place plainly shown on a map. We have never had an assigned space in a TT facility previously but with an access guardian like they have here, someone has deemed it prudent, if misguided, and perhaps the creator of this plan and his lieutenant can be boiled and eaten by orcs.
I was dribbling from everywhere by the time we made it to our spot and after setting up the trailer utilities outside, my shirt looked like a well-used dish towel. Fortunately, we have a good 50-amp electrical hookup and we could run our air conditioning. Some time later after climbing into our trailer, I quit sweating copiously. There is no cable TV or satellite reception in our RV space but a fine wifi connection is available so I suppose we will be getting a lot of Amazon Prime and Netflix movies during our stay.

Today we returned to what I consider the finest road in the U.S.A. for scenery – the Blue Ridge Parkway. On our way up the 25 miles to the Parkway, we passed over roads bounded by emerald green scenery. We also passed by some box turtles malingering near the road, maybe in an attempt to get out of the abundant rain saturating everything else for the last few days.
We were on the Parkway from near Laurel Springs, N.C., to just over the Virginia border but were treated to abundant wildlife, outstanding views of North Carolina and numerous roadside waterfalls. It is stunning country. From one overlook on the Parkway, we could look a couple thousand feet down to Stone Mountain SP where we are currently set up with our Barbarian Invader. Stone Mountain itself looks puny from the Blue Ridge.
We left the Parkway near Mount Airy, the town that allegedly is the model for Mount Pilot, the neighboring town to Mayberry in the old Andy Griffith Show. This was so long ago, Ron Howard, who played Opie, was a little kid with all his hair. There are many stunning residences in Mount Airy and it is also the place where Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins, settled in the 1800’s after a great circus career. The historical sign for them indicates they farmed near here although it does seem tough for conjoined twins to multi-task seeing as they had two heads but only one set of legs. They were also married to two unconjoined women. I bet their lovemaking must have been interesting in a perverse way.
Got some pix. Click the word “here” at the end of this line here