Williamsburg Again, and More: the 2023 Condo Week in Virginia

 All the pictures I took on this trip -- not very many, really -- can be seen online here.

Mardi Gras

 As much as I love the thought of travelling by car around the country, I've not been particularly satisfied with the trips I've made so far this year, in some ways. My first, to New Orleans with my friend Marty, was as much fun as I'd hoped it would be; nice hotel, mostly good-enough weather while there, and we caught a Krewe of Chewbacchus parade. The only disappointment being that because of the threat of bad weather, I took the Subaru instead of the convertible. It was January, after all, so I couldn't be surprised that it was too cold to go top-down. Plus, the car mostly sat by the hotel anyway, while we took the streetcar or walked everywhere. Really the only driving was across Louisiana on the freeway, and how much fun would that have been? (I had, at one point, considered taking the coastal roads back -- from New Orleans to Houma and New Iberia, then across on State Highway 14. That would only have taken a couple of hours longer, but (a) I had the Subaru and (2) Marty had a plane to catch. Plus it rained pretty hard in Louisiana on the trip home.)

on the beach, South Padre Island

 The second trip was to South Padre island, just a few hours away. That was really good, first because the weather was glorious, second because we got to take Carly with us, and third because we got to visit with a good friend we hadn't seen in a while. (Joyce, who is one of about three people I've known for half a century. It seems impossible, given that we're both so young.) But, good as the trip was, it wasn't a wander.

 The third trip, to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, was also about what I'd expected. The trip up didn't go as planned, but it was okay. Freeway all the way, though I finally got to go to the lynching memorial in Montgomery, but was rushed in the nearby museum, and there was so much to see that I want to go back. We didn't get to the Georgia state park I'd planned to stop at, but we did go to an unexpected park in Alabama and had a good long hike to a waterfall. 

 It was on that trip that the Wyndham Rewards mobile web site stopped working right. (And I thought Google Maps was irksome!) I've tried the app, but it never worked right. Now the web site fails consistently as well. No matter what location I plug into it, it's unable to locate any hotels. A couple of times I've tried just calling the toll-free number and making a reservation that way, but that involves (usually) about 20 minutes on hold and a lot of questions that Wyndham should already have the answers to. I've also tried using their regular web site, and have had intermittent success with that. Lately, though, I've just gone with other hotel groups. I pay a little more for lodging (I'm sure) but have a lot less frustration. (The Wyndham Rewards website works fine on my computer at home, but most of the time I don't know in advance where I want to be at night.)

Big Dam Bridge

 This latest trip was, all in all, a good trip as well. The outbound leg could have gone better, but I didn't plan it well enough. First, there was a failure of communication, in that I'd expected to come home from my first-thing-in-the-morning doctor's appointment to find that Sherry had taken Carly to the kennel and was ready to go at 9:30 in the morning. She had not, and was not, so we got away kind of late. (I'm not saying it was her fault, I'm just saying I blame her.) We got across Texas with the top mostly down, and pulled in late at Hope, Arkansas the first night (because Wyndham couldn't locate any of its three hotels in Texarkana). The next day we drove to Little Rock, then spent the morning at the Big Dam Bridge, a scenic spot west of the city. I found a route to Memphis that avoided freeways for the most part, and even though the secondary highway route was less than scenic, it was still a grand improvement on Interstate 30. At Memphis, we walked across the Mississippi River on the Harahan bridge, an old railway span where the accompanying roadway has been converted to pedestrian use. It gives a nice view of downtown Memphis, which unfortunately isn't really much to see. From there, we went to the Crystal Shrine Grotto, in a local cemetery, which was a cool (literally) break from the heat (which was made worse by the fact that the car's A/C had stopped cooling; we got that fixed in Williamsburg). 

 I had planned to go up to Houston and Montgomery Counties, the last two Tennessee counties I haven't visited already; but I didn't accurately foresee the times and distances involved, constrained by the need to be in Richmond at a certain time on Friday. I also didn't foresee the fact that there are only three people in Tennessee who know how to drive on the freeway, so we faced long delays west of Jackson, in Nashville, and east of Knoxville, to go with the prior trip's hour-long stoppage in Chattanooga. So that planned diversion was tossed out, and we crossed the state on the freeway.

  I did, though, stop at the Parthenon in Nashville as planned, because I really wanted Sherry to see it. It's as much a Wonder of the World as the original in Athens, and is truly Not To Be Missed. So we didn't. (The picture here, by the way, is from a previous trip; I didn't take any pictures of it this time. The only difference is that the landscaping is now finished, and some of the irrelevant exhibits in the basement art gallery are different.)

Once we got past Knoxville the travel got easier. Even the freeways in the southern Appalachian Mountains are pleasant to drive. If Wyndham Rewards could have located any of their seven hotels around Wytheville, Virginia, it would have been nice. (Bitch, bitch, bitch.)

  I should mention the Muffin Incident. Years ago, during a condo week in Branson, the office sent over a box of doughnuts to welcome us to their complex. Sadly, Sherry answered the door, thanked the woman, and sent the doughnuts away because we were "all on a diet." This is now known in our circle as the Branson Doughnut Incident. None of us has forgiven her that bit of scruple, but at least I thought baked goods would be safe around her. At one of our hotels, I picked up a chocolate chip Otis Spunkmeyer muffin, and just in case she wanted something -- even thought I knew she wouldn't -- a packaged cinnamon roll. If it turned out she did, in fact, want one, I'd be perfectly happy with the other ... though I would have preferred the muffin. Both packages were lodged in our back-seat cooler.

  After a couple of days of patting myself on the back for my will-power, I said I wanted the muffin. "The muffin is gone," she said. "Then I'll have the cinnamon roll." "That's gone, too." I was astounded. Had they both gone bad, sitting in the cooler for two days? No, they'd been eaten. Shocked. Dismayed. Betrayed. In fact, this Muffin Incident stands to be the signature event of the entire 2023 Condo Week trip. I may never get over it.

 Next day, we got to Richmond, picked up Jeff's rented oxygen machine and went to the airport. Richmond has a nice, small airport, and offers an hour free parking in their garage, which made it convenient to meet up there before driving to Williamsburg, where we checked into our condo at Vacation Village. The people in their office tried hard (then, and again later) to get me to commit to a time-share song and dance, but after Pigeon Forge I wasn't about to sit through that again. 

It needs a name.

 One of the things I like about these condominium complexes we go to on these trips are the activities they provide. Most of the time we ignore them, but on occasion they prove fun or interesting. This year, we took advantage of two offerings. We went to the Activity Center on Sunday and painted ceramic piggy banks -- I particularly wanted to do that because the plastic plug on my cute little penguin piggy bank has failed; I really only wanted a new plug but came away with a new dinosaur bank. (Its plug doesn't quite fit the penguin. ¡Que lastima!)

 The other activity we took advantage of was a talk by a man who portrays an XVIII-Century Virginian, whose name I forget, as a means of bringing the Revolutionary Era to life. Think Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. It was entertaining and informative, even if it wasn't especially accurate, and made for a relaxing evening.

Zoom in

 The first thing we did, though, was to go to a local car show. It was advertised as "British," but about a third of the cars were Ferraris, Porsches or Mercedes. (They were interesting, too.) But I must be getting jaded, as I only took one photo, and that as much for the window sticker as the car. There were a few Jags in the show, but not nearly enough, and none as pretty as mine.

 We got a three-day ticket to Colonial Williamsburg, which I thought was more time than I would want, but it turned out to be just right. I won't go into all that we saw there; we had been to the place 15 years before and I remembered it pretty clearly. (Luckily for you, that was before I started blogging, otherwise I'd give you a link to a long-winded recounting of the visit, which you would be morally obligated to actually read. Here, though, is a link to the pictures I took on that trip, which include many of Williamsburg.) Not everything in Williamsburg is open every day, and some of the shops that were open during this visit were new to us: the wheelwright, for example. And this time, instead of getting to watch a stage performance of the type that would have been seen in Colonial times, we got a short lecture about theater of the era (because all the other actors had the day off). 

 But I'm not going to dwell on Colonial Williamsburg. It's a lot of fun, despite being educational, and very prettily restored. The artisans at work there, both in costume and behind the scenes, are a great historical resource, on a par with the National Parks Service (and better funded), and having Colonial Williamsburg available to visit is a treasure everyone should take advantage of. If you haven't been, go. If you have, go back.

 We stopped at Fort Eustis to see the US Army's Transportation Museum, which was closed for some unexplained reason, so we only got to look at the outdoor exhibits through the fences. What a collection of oddities it is! Then we headed over to Newport News to revisit the Mariner's Museum. We'd been there on our prior condo trip to Williamsburg, just a few years after the Monitor had been located off the North Carolina coast; now there's an extensive new exhibit about the famous Ironclad and its encounter with the CSS Virginia (better known as the Merrimack), that we wanted to see. Again, not enough time. Afterwards we drove around looking at some of the public art that Newport News makes a small fuss about.

on the VMFA lawn

 More interesting, though, was the art on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. While not as big as my favourite art museum, the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, this fine collection runs a close second. Probably because it has a lot of glass in it, ancient and modern, from art glass to leaded glass, and because it displays works by one of my favourite underappreciated artists, Charles Rennie MacIntosh (though, sadly, none of his glasswork). It also has a collection of Fabergé eggs, which are pretty but utterly decadent, and a good collection of Great Masters paintings.

 We paid a visit to the Virginia State Capitol building, which was not as architecturally interesting as its staff seems to think. (It was designed by one T. Jefferson, whose name is everywhere in Virginia, and who is mostly famous for having once written a deathless sentence -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal...", yada yada yada -- and for having known when to abandon principle for practicality; specifically, May 2, 1803.) The building's main attraction for me is the life-sized statue of George Washington, which was done at a particularly poignant moment in his great and eventful life, midway between his astonishing success as commander of the Continental forces that had wrested thirteen North American colonies from the powerful British Empire (with a little help from nos amix) and his return to public life to initiate the Federal government we have today. If King George III got one thing right in his life, it was this: 

When the King asked what General Washington planned to do now that he had won the war. [Benjamin] West replied: "They say he will return to his farm." King George exclaimed: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

Yup.

So we did some other touristy things around Richmond: a boat tour of the canals built before the railroads came, and a visit to a Tudor-style manor house of sorts, built from pieces of the genuine article transshipped from the English Midlands in the 1920s; a visit to the Old Ironworks, part of the Richmond Battlefield National Historical Park. We also spent an afternoon with some of Jeff's family, who held an impromptu get-together in honour of his return to Virginia. I had only previously met one of them, his sister Kathy (or Cathy; I don't know which spelling she uses), and that was decades ago. But sitting in the dining room of the vintage house (a very pretty, and nicely updated Arts-and-Crafts place) listening to the mostly 20- and 30-somethings talk, it struck me that of all these people, all of them born and raised in Virginia, not a one had the least hint of a Southern accent. In fact, their speech, both in accent and style, was indistinguishable from the unstressed postmodern open tones of the Great Plains. They all sounded as if they had been brought up in the same rooms as my niece and nephews. Any of them could host late-night talk shows and everyone from coast to coast would be able to understand them easily. I wasn't prepared for that, and I can't account for it, unless everyone of that generation got their diction from network television. (I blame the bloated Federal bureaucracy, the epicenter of which is only a few dozen miles to the north.)

 Richmond seems a much more pleasant place than I'd expected. Not that I saw all of it, or even much of it. We stayed in a hotel near the airport, in a suburb that I would call middle-class; on the way into town from there we passed through working-class neighbourhoods and one area that I would feel uncomfortable in, day or night. The area south of the James River, along Hull Avenue, seemed to me a vibrant working-class area full of potential, while downtown (on a weekend) was nothing if not sleepy under the soporific weight of government offices. Richmond, like San Antonio, is suffused with a largely ignored history. But everywhere in the city we encountered lively areas of small-scale commerce (the best kind) resisting the blight of franchise shops and chain stores; I doubt that there are a dozen Starbucks in the whole town. The streets of the older sections, where we spent most of our time, felt to me like Southtown, or New Orleans, or South Philadelphia: all places I enjoy being if it's not too hot. I liked it.

 The drive home was pleasant enough. We were concerned about rain along the way (there wasn't any, it turned out) and we both missed our dog Carly, who had endured a number of thunderstorms while in the kennel back home; like many dogs, they terrify her. I thought about going through Tennessee again, just to go through those two remaining counties that I'd hoped to get to on the way up, but decided instead to stick with my original plan of getting the last remaining county in North Carolina. I did that (making it the 38th state I've been to every county in), though we decided against going to Hanging Rock State Park or driving the Cherohala Skyway. Those would have added another day to the return trip, and would have forced us to take the same routes we had taken on the trip to Pigeon Forge a couple of weeks before. Instead we dropped down to central Georgia, where we were able to put the top down and spend a whole day wandering across the state from east to west, picking up 17 of the nearly 60 remaining unvisited counties there: the kind of travel I most enjoy. That done, we got on the freeway and headed home. The only departure from the tedium of freeway driving across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and east Texas came when we stopped for dinner in Flatonia, about an hour and a half east of home, and stumbled upon the Red Vault, a very nice restaurant owned by a French chef retired from California who shares my appreciation for old cars. (Wednesday is sushi night, by the way, and it was as good as any I've had anywhere.)

Pigeon Forge & the Smoky Mountains

This is the last post about the 2023 Pigeon Forge trip. You should read the previous post first.

 After Noccalula Falls Park, we stopped for breakfast at a Cracker Barrel, then headed for Pigeon Forge. There was an accident along the way, in Chattanooga. Google Maps announced a one-hour delay while we were still in Georgia, but then didn't revise the route, so we figured it'd been cleared up. Not! While we were stuck in traffic on the freeway I glanced at the map and saw there were at least three other highways heading our direction, so why it waited to change the route until the traffic finally started to move again is beyond me. Anyway, in the end it took us on a very scenic drive through northwestern Georgia and eastern Tennessee, not just on alternate highways but on neighbourhood streets and rural lanes that made me positively ache to be in a little convertible with the top down (not a drop of rain today, BTW).... 

  We got to Pigeon Forge at about 6:30 Eastern Time. First impression: Ghastly. Horrible. Utterly detestable. Like Vegas, but without the charm. The traffic on the road in front of our hotel has been bumper-to-bumper all evening (it's 11pm as I write this, and it's still a traffic jam out front). The electronic billboards are relentless. Everything is crowded with Middle America: restaurants, shops, streets.... Everything. I feel sorry for the people who come here with kids.

Pigeon Forge culture

  And kitsch beyond belief. Within a couple of blocks of our hotel is a building made to look like a wavy medieval castle; near that is a statue of King Kong carrying a biplane up what looks to be intended as Rockefeller Center, next to which is a stumpy Empire State Building. One of these monstrosities houses the uber-trashy Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Close to that is a building that looks like a Hollywood version of Mount Rushmore, with giant heads of dead celebrities stuck to its parapets. That's a wax museum, I think. A little further down is a "crime museum" meant to look like Alcatraz (it doesn't), and next to that is a giant yellow barn that appears to be a theater.

  Amid all this glitzy schlock, though, are a couple of almost-nice touches. I like the canopy of lights covering the access to The Island (see below), and in the courtyard of that development is a miniature version of the Bellagio's dancing fountains, lined with Adirondack chairs. Apparently, watching the fountain is a Thing here.

  We went to the Sunliner Diner for dinner, a popular 50s-themed place two blocks away (of course, that required us to go in the opposite direction and make a U-turn, because while everybody's glad to let you in, and let you move over, you just can't catch much of a break on traffic coming from the other direction).

  The Sunliner Diner is big and brightly lit and has décor that is a 21st-Century version of the 1950s. The food is just okay; the service is good; the ambience is so-so (too loud, mostly); and the value is poor, as everything is terribly overpriced. Don't tell me "resort," the Sunliner is no resort, despite its gift shop selling $30 T-shirts and $24 coffee cups.

 Then we went for moonshine. The distillery's tasting room and shop is located in The Island, a true resort development that features an amusement park, a shopping center, several hotels, and parking like Disneyland, complete with shuttle trams. It was fairly late by the time we got there, so it only took about half an hour to drive the five blocks from the diner to the turnoff for the Island -- think about that for a second -- and we got lucky in the parking lot, finding a place in the second section. We did our tasting and picked out our bottles and left. We will most assuredly not be going back there. (On the plus side, the 'shine is about $12 cheaper per bottle than it was at the liquor store next to our hotel, where I first discovered it. That makes it the only good deal yet to appear in this tawdry town.)

  On Friday morning, we had breakfast in the hotel, then headed off to hear Wyndham Resorts' timeshare-lite presentation. That wasn't really too bad. For one thing, it poured rain while we were warm & dry in there, and for another, the deal (if it's as it's presented -- watch the John Oliver segment on timeshares) is something I might've actually been interested in 10 or 15 years ago. But now? No way. Anyway, they went through their spiel, and when we didn't bite they called the manager over to make us a different offer, which again we weren't taking, so they gave up, gave us our little prize (a $200 gift card) and we left. 

  The rain had eased up some, but we still didn't want to spend much time wandering around on trails, so we went down to Gatlinburg to have a look at their Arts & Crafts Community. There's an eight-mile-long loop along three roads that features over a hundred artists' galleries and artisans' shops. I was particularly interested in finding some nice pottery, while Sherry was just interested in various things, generally. Most of the potteries were closed, though; possibly because of the Easter weekend. There was one larger place open, which had a few things that mildly interested me -- I want pottery that doubles as art -- but nothing really worth the asking price. Sherry did find a deal on yarn, and bought two skeins super cheap. ("The lady who taught me died," said the shopkeeper, "and her kids asked if I wanted what she had left over. I named a price, and they took it, and I got twenty-six big boxes of yarn.") Stroke of luck for Sherry.

  Then we went through Gatlinburg -- which is as crowded as Pigeon Forge but retains enough of its own character to be genuinely interesting; given a choice, it's the better place to stay if you ever come to the Smokies. There are silly touristy attractions there, too, but it's a walking town. Parking is outrageous, so leave the car at the hotel and take the free shuttles that cover pretty much the whole city. 

  We couldn't find the other place we wanted to have a look at, another arts-and-crafts market. There was nowhere we could leave the car and walk around to search for it. We got to within six numbers of its address (it was at 968 on whatever the street was called; we found 962 and there our search came to an end), then gave up, went back to our hotel and rested until dinner, for which we went to an interesting local restaurant next door, called Local Goat, which was started by a retired military man who began raising goats as a sort of therapy. When he had too much milk, he learned to make body lotions and such from it, and, well, one thing led to another and now he has a very well-thought-of restaurant (where you can buy goat's-milk lotions in the gift shop). My thumbnail review: good food, very good service, good ambience, reasonable prices by local standards (meaning, it was only a little overpriced). I went with the steak nachos, while Sherry had the Black & Blue Burger. 

  I slept like a log; Sherry's burger didn't sit well with her, she says.

  Saturday morning it was still raining, but not hard. We finally got out of the hotel around 9:30, and went for breakfast at a tiny little cafe on a road other than the Parkway (home of the constant traffic jam). They had an hour and a half wait, so we left to take our chances, which meant we pulled in at a Shoney's that hides in plain sight at the older end of the Parkway, where the traffic starts to thin. At least the coffee was good, as was the service. The ambience is as you'd expect at a crowded chain restaurant that features a breakfast buffet (we ordered off the menu), and the prices ... well ... have I mentioned that it's a resort town? Three-fifty for coffee and twelve bucks for eggs, toast and bacon might be de rigueur in Monaco or Abu Dhabi, but in Middle America, even resort-town Middle America, it's highway robbery. 

The Old Ogle Place

  We headed to the park. Our GPS took us an odd way, through new-ish subdivisions of houses that are literally one room per floor, stacked up three and four floors high, with balconies cantilevered off the back, and driveways that I would never attempt in the dark. These places seem to have proliferated wildly as land prices have skyrocketed.

  Like I say, it was still raining, but not badly. We went to the visitors' center for a parking pass and a passport stamp, then took the Motor Nature Trail, a roughly 40-mile one-way drive through luxuriant scenery. This park is the most visited in the country (mostly because it's the biggest park in the eastern half of the country, and so draws many visitors from all over the southeast, midwest and northeast, people who don't have time to drive out to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon) and the sheer number of visitors strains the resources. There was nowhere to park at many of the sites along the Nature Trail, so we didn't get to do any hikes along the way. The only beauty spots we could access were an old pioneer cabin and a roadside waterfall called, I kid you not, The Place of A Thousand Drips. But we enjoyed the drive.

Upper Laurel Falls

   By then, the rain had eased further, and we chanced a hike up to Laurel Falls, one of the most popular locations along the northwestern edge of the park, which is replete with waterfalls. It's a little over a mile each way, and the reward is one of the larger and higher waterfalls in the area. (The photo at left is only of the top portion of the falls; it continues below the level of the path, all the way down to the bottom of the valley.) While we encountered a lot of people on the (sort of paved) path, we had the falls to ourselves for as long as we felt like staying out there. Nice.

  Then we drove off in search of a couple of other waterfalls, ones that were said to be right beside the road. We apparently missed them, so we turned around and went back, and discovered Meigs Falls mostly by accident, maybe two hundred yards off to the right, with no sign; and then a place called The Sinks, indicated only by a sign warning of a "Congested Area" ahead. (It wasn't congested.) Both were very nice, and by this point the rain had pretty much stopped entirely, but it had gotten colder and the wind had picked up, so if anything it was more unpleasant being outside the car. It being fairly late in the afternoon anyway, we headed back to Pigeon Forge, having dinner on the way home to avoid having to go out in the local traffic again. (Oh, and we also stopped at another moonshine distillery we stumbled across. We are now fairly well stocked with the stuff.)

  I had planned a four-day relaxed excursion home, but as is usual with these trips, I now just want to be home. So we will likely make it in two and a half days. I went through my planned route on RoadTrippers, and cut out almost everything I'd included just because it was Along The Way. We're left with a scenic point near Birmingham and a botanical garden in Mississippi (and that, only to break the trip; we may skip it, too).

Here's a link to all the pictures from this trip.

 

P.S.: In the end, we went a different way, stopping only to see Birmingham's statue of Vulcan (which, judging from online comments, is best known for his bubble-butt). We got home on Monday, in time to collect Carly from the kennel.