We drove through Stone Mountain State Park using both paved and good gravel roads to start the day. The park is gorgeous and the roads mostly follow what starts out as a little creek but which gets additional flow from maybe 10 tributary creeks and ends up as a pretty good river by the time we ran out of road.
Once we ran out of park, we got on back roads to the town of Elkin about 20 miles or 30 minutes away. Elkin is a beautiful little town with a great assortment of spectacular old houses. We blocked many citizens engaged in their lawful business while we were gawking at these magnificent old structures.
We took a few house pictures and you can see them if you click here

The weather is acting up here, thanks to something called subtropical depression Alberto or tropical subdepression Alberto or outright heavy rains interspersed with dreadfully humid outbreaks in between. It seems the water is either falling on us or being sucked out of our old, corpulent bodies, sometimes at the same time.
I am also having a dispute with my intestines which makes for some interesting car trips, particularly those with bathrooms with a distance between them exceeding 5 miles. So we took it easy today and drove over near to Elkin, a nearby town, and bought groceries and used their dunny and then went to get a liquor re-supply at the local package store. Liquor sales in North Carolina only take place at state liquor stores, like in Oregon. Prices are high but not as outlandish as in Washington state. We got fuel and used the growler again before turning toward home.
After shopping, we returned to our camp spot at Stone Mountain SP and took the remainder of the day off.

Today was a travel day and, unfortunately, we had to leave Rocky Top RV Park even though it wasn’t in Rocky Top, if there is one. Rocky Top RV is the nicest park we can recall from our four years on the road. We have been in Tennessee for about a month and it was time to move on. It was cloudy and very humid when we left and I had worked up a full sweat doing some simple departure functions in preparation for departure.
We initially got onto I-81 headed northeast and pretty quickly we were in Virginia. As in Tennessee, the terrain was mountainous with an abundance of hardwood forest and pasture land. It is quite pretty. About an hour into Virginia, we swung south on I-77 toward North Carolina. In a half hour or so, we crossed into N.C. and light rain. An hour later, we got off at Zephyr onto some of the skinniest roads in the northern hemisphere for about a 20 mile to Stone Mountain State Park.
We stayed at Stone Mountain for a few days when we passed this way in 2015. That is a primary reason for our return to the obscure but beautiful place. The campground is very nice with water and electrical hookups but no sewer, wifi, phone or data. Our satellite dish works very well from our camping spot. The scenery is outstanding. There is really not much to do around here other than check out a mother turkey and her rambunctious offspring that linger near our campsite and Stone Mountain itself which is a massive monolith of rock that periodically sheds huge slabs of itself that crash down into the pasture below. It is fortunate this only happens rarely because the slabs are gigantic. They break into chunks about the size of a three bedroom house when they hit the valley floor.
Since communication with the outside world is impossible from here, we can lay low and maybe do a little grocery shopping mixed in with our explorations of the nearby treasures, if any. It will be nice to take a rest. And sleep. And drink. And watch the turkeys devour insects.
Pix? Click here