Condo Trip 2024: Knoxville & Lake Lure 1

Part One: The Trip Up

Friday, May 10

 Strong storms passed through Texas just before we left on this trip: tornadoes and flooding and torrential rain. East Texas got over two feet of rain in a short time, and these storms continued to dump water across the southeastern part of the country. But my calculations were that we would be behind the bad weather, and further and further back each day, and it seems I was right. Not a drop of rain so far, and after the first day of clouds, we've had gorgeous spring weather. 

 Carly went to the kennel early on Friday, and as usual was thrilled to get her paper collar. If we could bring her on these condo trips, I'd gladly leave the Jag behind and drive the Subaru. And in fact, now that I'm so much fatter than before, despite still being only 49 years old, I'm close to the point of giving my little convertible to a car museum anyway. (If I thought any of my heirs were the least bit interested in it, I'd give it to them, but they're not. It's not their style.)

 So we were off. We stuck to I-10 all the way through Houston, listening to The Ink Black Heart, the sixth book in J.K. Rowling's "Cormoran Strike" series of mysteries. Like her Harry Potter series, each book is longer than the one before. This one -- the first we've listened to rather than reading -- is 33 hours long, so we won't finish it until the return trip. We enjoy the series: the regular characters are well-developed and likable, the plots are complex without being impenetrable, the language is precise and the tone is just slightly erudite. They're written for people who paid attention in school.

 East of Houston, we stopped for lunch in a Vietnamese noodle house called Vietnamese Noodle House. It was simple and downscale but the food was good, plentiful and cheap. Service was so-so and the restaurant itself was utterly unprepossessing, but I'd go back if I'm ever looking for lunch around there. (I won't be.) I'd planned, at that stage of the trip, to take the old highway as far as Beaumont, but Google Maps showed some kind of blockage ahead on that route, so back to I-10 we went. (That stretch of I-10 between Houston and Beaumont still holds the title of Dullest Freeway in the US, as far as I'm concerned.) We got off the interstate just east of Lake Charles and headed up through Alexandria to Natchez, where we spent the first night in a reasonably priced hotel that claims to be a 3-star place but really only gets two. We got our room key and found a parking spot nearby, then opened the room to find somebody else's luggage and shopping all over the room. The desk clerk blamed housekeeping, and I'm not giving a lot of thought to how it could be their fault. The replacement room was in the same general area, so it was no trouble to unload the car from where it was. 

 Then we headed Under the Hill. That's the part of Natchez, right along the riverbank at the bottom of the bluff, where the riverboats used to dock. Well, they still do, and there was actually one in the port, a stern-wheeler whose name I didn't catch. Lights were on in some of the rooms on board and you could tell that they were elegantly appointed. Makes me want to try a river cruise, but I would like to do that somewhere with less humidity and fewer mosquitos.

sunset on the Mississippi at Natchez

 Anyway: Natchez Under the Hill, years ago, was what we would call a red-light district: whorehouses, and saloons, mostly, plus warehouses and flophouses. Now, of course, it's all gentrified. Not a big area, but big enough for a few nice bars and restaurants, it's the center of night life for upscale Natchez. I hadn't been down there in about 40 years, so I was curious to see it again. We had a very pleasant dinner at a sports pub called The Camp, then went back to our hotel, where we were slightly relieved to find our own belongings undisturbed. 

Saturday, May 11

 In the morning I had a cup of very bad coffee, most of which I threw away because of the bugs swarming around me while I tried to drink it, then we drove up the highway to Port Gibson, to see a goldfingered church steeple and grab some breakfast. Found the steeple, but turns out there are no restaurants in Port Gibson. (McDonald's doesn't count.) So we dove into our ice chest and had hard-boiled eggs and apples for breakfast while lamenting the primitive resources available in rural Mississippi. 

 After a drive up the Natchez Trace we got off to go see the Mississippi Petrified Forest, a privately-owned attraction that, from the descriptions I found on line, smacked of tattiness. Yet it turned out to be quite a nice little diversion: about a half-hour's fairly easy walk through low forested hills with lots and lots of 30-million-year-old petrified logs lying around. The signage was good, making the natural forces at work easy to understand, and there was plenty of (living) flora and fauna to interest us on our slow progress through the park. At six bucks each (senior rate; regular adult tickets are $7) it felt like a real bargain.

 I had some trouble getting Google Maps to take me along the route I wanted, and we ended up passing through Jackson first on freeway, then on a six-lane divided highway. We stopped for lunch somewhere along the road there, in a new-ish cafe in a strip center, where the service was excellent, the menu was very short and the prices were reasonable. We each ordered salads, but when the servers carried the daily special fried chicken plates by for the folks at the next table, I knew I'd made a mistake. I'm still suffering. The salad was okay but, Man! did that fried chicken look good! I suspect it will backfire on me at some point in this trip.

 After that, we made a stop in a podunk little town called Shubuta (or Shubula; sources disagree) to drink some red water out of their "famous" red water artesian well. Shubuta (or Shubula) isn't actually a town, it's more a community that used to have a police force (we saw the car) and now is a convenience store, a bunch of abandoned businesses, and this artesian well. Iron-laced water bubbles up out of the ground into a 30-gallon pot, then flows into a small concrete coy pond, then drains into the ground, forming a nice breeding ground for Mississippi's state bird, the Mosquito. 

 The water was not as tasty as the iron-laced water we used to get from the pump at my grandparents' farm in Pumpkin Center sixty years ago. And not as much fun, because you don't have to pump it yourself.

 So that was as much of a roadside attraction as I could find to justify taking the back roads across Mississippi and Alabama. From there we drove over to Monroeville, Alabama, the "literary capital" of that state, so called because both Harper Lee and Truman Capote were born there. There is, it appeared, nothing to see after business hours, because the Old Court House, which we were assured would look just like the courtroom set constructed for the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird shuts down at 5pm. We didn't really care. We had dinner in the Court Cafe -- I had an excellent shrimp po-boy and fries, and we picked up scones for the next day's breakfast -- and drove up the road to Montgomery, where our hotel was.

Sunday, May 12

 Last time we went through Montgomery we stopped at the Peace and Justice Memorial, a very moving place, and then went to the Legacy Museum; but we got there too late to see the whole thing. So our plan was to stay the night in Montgomery, then finish viewing the museum Sunday morning. That's exactly what we did; we got there just after it opened at 9AM, We were there until about noon, and still kind of rushed the last part of it.

too on-the-nose

 Since last year's visit, the organization behind both facilities has added a third campus, this one a sculpture garden along the Alabama River, a few blocks away. We decided to go there before getting lunch, and honestly it was kind of disappointing. We expected art but got three-dimensional preaching. But we were both very hungry by then, so maybe it's better than I'm giving it credit for. (Not.) After waiting for a long slow-moving train to unblock the crossing, we got to the spot we'd picked for lunch. It being Mothers' Day, we wanted a place that wouldn't attract families taking mom out to eat after church, and we picked right: NYC Gyros, a tiny little storefront that felt like stepping through a wormhole into Brooklyn. Excellent middle-eastern fare, unexpectedly cheap, with a small dose of Noo Yawk sass from the owner. I'd give it four and a half jalapeños if I still did restaurant reviews.

 We drove top-up to Auburn, where we wasted half an hour seeing the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. There was no fine art there, just a few small galleries of postmodern race-sensitive crap. I'm sure it's very popular with the white-guilt woke arts community, but it's nothing I'd look twice at. Well, there was one sculpture, a wall-mounted piece with an old sailing ship model stuck into a lobster trap. If it had had a title like "Slave Ship" I'd have thought it was an excellent metaphorical representation of how 250 years of the slave trade, and its later consequences, still traps all of American society; but no, it was called something that related to a protégé of the sculptor, and so was meaningless to any large purpose.

 It was too early for dinner when we passed the Whistlin' Pig Cafe, which is reputed to have the best Brunswick Stew in all of Georgia ... why that should be a thing, I don't know ... but it's OK; it's closed on Sundays anyway. We drove up the mountain to see Franklin Delano Roosevelt's favourite picnic spot, right behind the CCC-built headquarters building for FDR State Park. (He used to come to that spot when he was at Warm Springs, which is just a few miles further east from there.) It was, as you might expect what with the presidential imprimatur and all, a nice view, but I didn't consider it photo-worthy, as I already have way too many photographs of indistinguishable broad forested valleys dotted with the occasional unidentifiable building in the distance. 

 For reasons I no longer remember, I'd decided to bypass Warm Springs, so we got on the freeway and headed north, hoping to bypass Atlanta traffic congestion completely while Mothers' Day was still in force. We didn't entirely succeed at this, as apparently one of the big things to do in that area on Mothers' Day is go watch the Braves play wearing pink gear. We also had to go right past Harts Field, the world's busiest airport, so there was a stretch of traffic to deal with. But all in all it wasn't that bad. We got out to the northwest suburbs while it was still broad daylight, and headed for Morgan Falls Overlook Park, which turns out to be a popular city park with a playground stuffed full of little kids, more than I've seen in one place since I was one myself. Unfortunately it has no waterfalls, and thus no overlook thereof. There used to be a waterfall, but it's now under the reservoir formed by a dam erected by the local power company on the Chattahoochee River. Well, I got some exercise while making this determination.

 We spent the night in Roswell, not quite beyond the reach of the Atlanta Metropolitan area, after having a late supper at a very good place called North River Tavern. It seemed about to close when we arrived, but by the time we left it was pretty well hopping, except that everyone was out on the patio. We were the only customers sitting inside, I think. I had a side salad and we split an order of hot dogs. (I don't know why I've been craving hot dogs lately, unless it's because I keep passing the Dog Father restaurant on San Pedro and wondering how it can have stayed in business for so many years.) My side salad ($2.95) was more like a chef's salad, and I could barely eat my hot dog afterwards. The dogs (two in the order) came with fries, which were, dare I say it? I dare: perfect. They were perfect. Crinkle cut, perfectly fried, and not too much salt. 

Monday, May 13

The cabbage patch

 In the morning we found our perfect travel weather had come to an end. It was drizzling, and it drizzled all day. And my carefully planned excursions for the day ended up out the window for the most part. Horsetrough Falls, supposedly in the town of Helen, turn out to be somewhere else, somewhere up in the mountains northwest of the town. (The town itself, by the way, is widely known for having remade itself in the image of an Alpine village. It looked farcical.) In searching for Horsetrough ("Continue straight," the Google Maps lady says, at a T-intersection.) we passed a sign directing us to another waterfall that was supposed to be about 20 miles away. When we couldn't find Horsetrough, we decided to go there. It's on federal lands, so free for us with our lifetime senior passes; we found this out after paying $5 for a Georgia State Parks daily parking pass. I need five dollars worth of vengeance against the State of Georgia. (When I think of Marjorie Taylor Greene and what she's doing to this country, that five bucks goes way up.) The Gourd Place (museum and studio) is only open by appointment, which we did not have. And Babyland General Hospital, the creepiest place on earth, smacked too much of cultishness. It looks like a plantation house, with extraordinary landscaping. Somebody made a pile of money on Cabbage Patch dolls.

 (Which reminds me -- the MTG reference, not the cabbage patch: in three days' driving across the Deep South we've seen exactly one Trump sign. I take it as a hopeful indication that, this close to a presidential election, the people who avidly supported the Great Orange Child in the past seem reluctant to let their neighbours know. May God bless and save the United States.)

Anna Ruby Falls

 We hiked up to the falls. Half a mile, not too steep but a long way up. Took us not quite half an hour going up, a little longer going down (because the tarmac was a little damp and my shoes don't have the best grip; I should have thought to change into sneakers for the hike.) Worth every gasping step. Anna Ruby Falls is actually two waterfalls, side by side, as two creeks (each of which has as much water in it as the San Antonio River) come together. One is about a 50-foot drop; the other is easily twice as high. They have a nice arrangement of viewing platforms built so you can get a good look at this natural wonder.

 Well, that was a really nice interlude, with more exercise than I've gotten since my heart attack last Christmas. I was relieved to make it to the top, and I was relieved to see that they had frequent benches available all the way up (though I only needed them twice, if I recall correctly.)

 After that, we stopped in at the Northeast Georgia Folk Pottery Museum, which has a nice, albeit small, exhibit showing the history of pottery in the area, which has been going on for about 200 years. In the earliest days, pottery was a basic necessity. "If a man couldn't put up 50 or 60 gallons of syrup" (the only sweetener available back then) "his family wasn't gonna make it through the winter." Later on, as glass storage jars and factory-made pottery became available, and new products like granulated sugar and molasses made it into the hills, pottery became more decorative, less of a necessity, and relatively cheaper.

 On the other side of the building is a series of art galleries. I walked into the first room and found eight things I wanted to buy. I stopped looking. That makes nine artisan works on this trip that I regret not having bought. Of course, the decisive question in my mind has become, Where would I put it? And there, I have me. I have no place left in my house to display a vase or a pot or a small wall hanging. I live in too much clutter. (I will, at this point, refrain from specific critiques of the habits of other members of the household in connection with available flat surfaces at home.) (Yes, Carly is something of a slob.)

wooden Model T model

 Then we went to the Miles Through Time Car Museum, in Clarkesville. This museum is run by the guy who maintains the Automotive Museum Guide, an essential part of my trip planning now that I'm running low on new counties to visit. (By the way, I visited my planned four new Georgia counties today.) It's located in the back part of an antique mall that his wife operates. The cars are arranged chronologically, and the exhibits include auto-adjacent topics like the development of service stations and auto repair shops; toy cars; and model cars, including unbelievable full-sized hand-made wooden models. I'll say this right now: this museum easily has the best explanatory signage of any I've visited so far (about 40, maybe?). I spent so much time reading things. Just as a fer-instance: I didn't know, and I bet you didn't either, that the Coca-Cola company tried to get the US Treasury to mint a seven-and-a-half-cent coin, so it could raise its prices above a nickel a bottle without requiring customers to use more than one coin for a purchase (this, at a time when five cents was real money), and that, when the Treasury declined to do so, for a brief time the company made its own seven-and-a-half-cent tokens, which were a flop. (It also tried a scheme where a small number of empty bottles were loaded into vending machines, so that some unlucky customers would have to spend ten cents for a nice cold Coke, thus raising the average revenue per serving to 5.62 cents. Wow. Is it any wonder business in this country needs to be regulated?)

 It was too late in the day to visit Tallulah Gorge State Park, which from the descriptions I've read is a must-see sort of stop; but it shuts down at 5pm sharp. One wonders why. So we didn't get to use our $5 Georgia State Parks parking pass, and I still want vengeance for that.

Tuesday, May 14

 First thing this morning after breakfast (at a popular cafe called The Rusty Bike, where I decided I didn't have to eat the entire breakfast burrito) we drove up the road to the one attraction on the trip that Sherry has actually gotten excited about seeing: the Foxfire Museum, in the tiny town of Mountain City. I'm sure all the world of a certain age remembers the Foxfire magazine that recorded the history and lifeways of the Appalachian Mountain settlers and their descendants; it was put together by a bunch of school kids in the Rabun County area of Georgia, kids who were concerned that these ancient ways were being lost to modernity. The magazine's articles were collected in a series of best-selling books; the royalties from the books enabled the group to buy some land, relocate a bunch of Appalachian buildings -- cabins, barns, mills, etc. -- and those buildings now comprise the Foxfire Museum, a sort of Living History project where people can come and see how to grind corn or make buckets or do smithing and whatever.

 Of course, early on a rainy Tuesday morning there weren't any volunteers there to man the various buildings and studios, so we just walked slowly up the hill, the only people there at that time of day, looking in each building (if it was unlocked), then back down the hill. It took us not quite an hour. Sherry enjoyed it pretty thoroughly; I was nonplussed, as (1) I'd never been a fan of the Foxfire stuff as a kid in the 1970s when this was all popular, and (2) after a year and a half living in West Virginia, where time moves much more slowly, so a year and a half counts as twenty-five years of normal life, I'd seen all the ramshackle cabins and 'shiner stills and axe handles I care to see. I've been in enough log cabins, barns and sheds, most of them much older that those at Foxfire, and most of them still in regular use, and cluttered with people and things, and seen enough of the lifeways of poverty-stricken Appalachians. And I've been to enough Living History museums, from Louisbourg to Sturbridge to Acadian Village, to keep me satisfied for the remainder of my days.

Bridal Veil Falls

 Following that, we crossed into North Carolina and went by Bridal Veil Falls, which is right next to the highway. As soon as we came 'round the curve and saw the falls, we realized we'd been there before. There's a roadway passing under the falls themselves, and I have a picture of me driving my old blue Jag convertible through it. The road under the falls is closed to traffic now, I hope only temporarily, so we just got a pic with the car in the distance. It's not the same.

 From there, it was up to the airport at Asheville to collect Nancy and Jeff. We are now ensconced in an Asheville hotel for the night. We had dinner at a nice restaurant a couple of miles down the road and will get an early start tomorrow, driving in a roundabout way to Knoxville, where we'll spend three nights before heading to our condo week east of Asheville. Tomorrow will start Part 2 of this blog post. 

And by the way, as usual all my pictures from this trip are available for viewing in my Google Photos albums, "2024-06 Lake Lure Trip". All of my pictures, I believe, are captioned, so you don't have to just guess at what you're looking at. In some applications, the captions show at the bottom of the photo; otherwise, when you view the pictures in Google Photos, you'll see a little "Information" icon at the top right -- an "i" in a circle. Click on that to read the captions.

Streaming Experience

 We cut the cable at our house a year and a half ago. We had talked about it for months, and tried to look into streaming services and all the things associated with the new-ish tech involved; but like most things of a technical nature, the combination of obscurantist jargon and arcane pricing practices made it difficult to evaluate streaming with any confidence. Plus there was another inhibiting factor: I didn't find any commentary from ordinary non-techie users that described streaming as an experience, in comparison to cable. After a year and a half of streaming (and about 25 years of cable), I think maybe I can rectify that.

The immediate impetus that got us to change was cost. In mid-2022 we were paying about $250 a month for cable, internet and a landline, plus $100 a month for 4-G cellphone service. At that point, our cable bill had been going up steadily in drips and drabs for ... well, forever. By October, it was up to $282 a month, and I suddenly felt like Popeye. ("That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more.") We turned off the cable. We also changed our cellphone plan to a 5-G program because it offered free premium streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+). We had to buy new smartphones, $700 for a pair of Motorola phones loaded with Android; but they will last us for years and are worth every penny.

So our cable bill dropped from $280 to $95 a month, while our phone bill increased from $100 to $175, for a net savings of $110 a month. I felt good about that. (In the year and a half since then, those bills have crept up by about $30. I feel less good.) We also added one premium streaming service, Peacock Premium, for the Premier League soccer matches that are important to us; we got it for $5 a month and it immediately went up 20%, to $6. (On the other hand, we no longer get USA Network, a cable-only channel where many matches we want are shown.)

 To summarize the cost:

services based on cable TV: $380

services based on streaming TV: $300

So what's the streaming experience like? Well, first we had to have another router added, to get a strong enough signal in that room. That was frustrating but immaterial for present purposes. (It also cost us nothing.) Then we had to get a digital antenna to receive local broadcast channels that had been included with the cable package. It does not work well, but honestly, except for some programs on Public TV (which we can't get with the antenna we have) the content of broadcast TV isn't worth the added cost of a better antenna. 

 There are three aspects of use that I find significant: 

• recording shows; 
• finding shows to watch; and 
• actually watching. 

 When we had cable, we had a DVR that would record several programs at once. We used that all the time, and it seems to have made our TV watching easier and more enjoyable. If there's a way to record "live" streaming programs, I haven't found it, but with a few exceptions, we don't need to record them. Just about everything of interest to us is available on demand. Finding a program can be tricky, and once found it's not as convenient to watch, but we're not limited to what the DVR drive can hold. So that's pretty much a wash.

 Finding shows is generally much more difficult with streaming. Just by chance, we have a Samsung TV, and when, after 2 or 3 years of watching it, we attached it to the internet (with our privacy settings carefully chosen and re-checked from time to time) we discovered that it can access something like 500 channels of mostly drivel, but some of it is in our fields of interest, and we watch that crap most of the time. We have the Peacock Premium service, and the service in the Disney Bundle; there are also a number of free streaming apps -- Pluto, Plex, Tubi ... I can't remember all the names. They all contain various old TV series, free movies, and the same sort of crap that makes up most of your average 350-channel cable lineup. We occasionally will watch soccer matches on ESPN+, but after sampling what's on Disney+ for a couple of months, I don't think I've even opened that app in over a year. If you're a real Star Wars fan, or have small children, you'll probably feel differently about it, but to me it's pretty uninteresting. Hulu might be good if you could sort the wheat from the chaff quickly, but you can't.

 The problem with all these things is finding anything. If you don't already know where a program is, there's a "global search" function, but it doesn't work very well. Despite its name, it's not comprehensive; it seems to be intended to promote streaming services we don't have and don't want, like Apple TV and Netflix; and it's very hard to use, so generally we don't bother. 

 So we've settled in to our favourite channels, and hardly look at anything else. I flip through a dozen or so news channels* and channels devoted to a single long-running program: the Top Gear channel; the America's Test Kitchen channel; BBC Earth; Modern Marvels; and so on. These channels run the same programs over and over, but since the subject matter is of interest, I'm willing to check it out and maybe stick with it long enough to see how they make their jambalaya or get that roast to brown just right, or see why a ship sank or a bridge collapsed, or explore how scientists are learning that plants hear sounds. (Top Gear is an English skit-comedy show about cars, though it's very rarely funny. I like some of the cars, and the scenery.)

 Each streaming app has its own guide function. They're all a little bit different, but they all share two attributes. One, they're clunky to use, and two, they all give minimal but inaccurate descriptive information. If you already know what a show is, that doesn't matter; but if you're trying to decide if you might want to watch something you're not familiar with, the only way to know is to try it and see. In my case, the answer is almost always No, but the App will keep pushing the program to me anyway -- "Made you look!" -- and will recommend other crap of equal disinterest on the strength of my having sampled the first crap show.

 (In a similar vein, each app uses the buttons on my remote differently, so I end up having to start over a lot before I can settle in to watch a show.)

 The third aspect, actually watching TV, is one that makes me less and less satisfied with streaming as time goes by. With cable, I could change quickly from one channel to another. This, combined with digital video recording, made it possible for me to go months without actually watching a single commercial. When one came up on the channel I was watching, I'd use the two or three minute interval to surf around other channels I frequented, and since I was seldom really invested in a show, often I'd find something more interesting to me than what I'd been watching. It'd drive my wife crazy, though, so to keep peace I'd often just mute the TV and read until the commercials ended.

 You can't surf channels with streaming. Most of the apps prevent you skipping the commercials at all, so all I can do is leave the room or, more often, mute the TV and read emails on my phone. Luckily, many streaming channels count down how long is left before the programming returns. But if you're watching something on, say, Hulu and a commercial comes on, you can't switch to another app, you just have to sit through that time, watching as life ebbs away to no good purpose. 

 On my Samsung TV, I can switch channels. But whereas a new cable channel comes up after a minimal delay -- a second, two at the most -- streaming channels seem to take FOREVER to start up. Usually it's only in reality maybe 3 or 4 seconds, but too often it's longer, up to 15 or even 20 seconds. I don't usually wait that long, but switch to yet another channel and make my way back later on. Honestly, the content is so uncompelling that it doesn't really matter. (And switching to a channel accessed by the digital antenna is even more painfully slow; plus the picture quality is often abysmal.)

 And there are so many commercial breaks on streaming channels. They advertise "fewer commercials than cable," but if that's true it's because there's so much unsold commercial time allocated. (They also have relatively few different commercials, so you end up seeing the same damn thing over and over and over, no matter what channel you're watching.) You frequently end up staring at a screen with what amounts to a screen-saver on it, and it just goes on and on. You would think that the channels' bosses would recognise that by skipping the commercial breaks where there are no ads sold, they could build viewership. They would have to adjust the starting times for each program on the basically-worthless programming guide, but that's the job of a moment. But they'd rather just stick to their planned ad breaks, even thought they've nothing to show. I find it frustrating.

 The upshot is, I'm seriously thinking about going back to cable. Meanwhile, though, I'm watching a lot less TV overall.

TL,DR:

Streaming is no better than cable; cable is no better than streaming. It's all crap.

 * The news channels are particularly bad about commercial breaks. CNN's stream, for example, frequently cuts off mid-sentence and goes to a "we'll be right back" screen-saver, or changes in medias res from one report to the middle of another before the first is finished.