May 2020 Since all state parks in North Carolina are closed at present due to the pandemic my go-to has been county parks, which remain open.  It's been a blessing, believe me.  After spending some time in Winston-Salem I moved a tad south to Lexington, NC, the county seat of Davidson County.  Poring over the map revealed two excellent prospects: Boone's Cave Park and Eagle Point Nature Preserve down near High Rock Lake.  The [...]

April 2020 I usually do posts on a single site -- a park, a garden, whatever it may be -- but I've been tooling around North Carolina just for the fun of it and taking pics as I go.  I see lovely things and get lovely pics but they're not a full set for a single post.  Consequently, this post is a catch-all of pics of various places I've been to on the fly.  [...]

April 2020 Clemmons is just a smidge south of Winston-Salem so we're well within the geo-ambit of the city, not out in the boonies somewhere.  Far from it -- Tanglewood is as much a class act as you could hope to find in a county park.  It has not one but TWO carefully manicured golf courses, full-on stables with horseback rides, tennis courts, a posh aquatic center and a historic house built in 1859 [...]

April 2020 Winston-Salem is a very pleasant place.  It's very leafy and green and gives the impression of being fairly well-heeled.  It does well to remember that North Carolina was one of the 13 original colonies with all the historical baggage that entails.  There are standards to live up to when you're one of the original 13, after all.  You have to know your way around Federalist architecture, you have to be able to [...]

April 2020 Just so it's clear, Haven Point is North Carolina.  There will be a couple weeks spent tooling around Virginia, which is also dear to my heart, but North Carolina offers the nomad traveller much better home-away-from-home options than the bottom half of Virginia, so I'm a temporary Tarheel.  During the years I spent in North Carolina I lived in Raleigh, Durham and Salisbury.  I had friends in Cullowhee (in the mountains) I [...]

April 2020 As I mentioned in the last post, Hot Springs is nothing to write home about.  That point proved itself meteorologically the day after my arrival when it started to piss down rain.  You win some, you lose some.  Fortunately I'm a veteran indoorsman so I kept myself busy with this and that for the day and a half the clouds let loose.  The rain finally stopped and the clouds thinned out enough [...]

April 2020 When last I wrote I was in the desert.  Since then a lot of road has hit the rear view mirror so let me bring things up-to-date.  After a suprisingly pleasant stay in Gallup, NM my next stop was Amarillo, TX.  It was a matter of necessity more than anything else but I had a passing acquaintance with the place from a trip taken many years by bus from Idaho to Mexico [...]

April 2020 When the going gets tough, the tough hit the interstate.  After my exercise in agenda flexibility in California's Central Valley I decided it was time to shorten the trip across the country and make a beeline for the hardwood forests of the East.  Where's that transporter when you need it?  Scotty, WTF?? Since only one option remained I hit the road.  Having modified my itinerary to make the drives longer but not [...]