The Cumberland Plateau

Thursday (Nov 1)

I slept poorly for whatever reason. I kept smelling the big box, collapsed and about two feet from my head. Finally got a decent sleep between 5 am and 9:30 am. Good enough.

The road down the valley and out of here follows North Creek as it joins a bigger creek, which in turn joins a bigger creek. It’s a very pretty drive. And despite little sleep I found myself in a really good mood. I recalled that I had this feeling last time. A kind of elation that I am coming back to the light and going to better places. That place has some kind of spell on it, where you are really happy to leave it! Kinda like the end of Deliverance, come to thing of it. :)

I make a point to drive through Buchanon, to see how it hits me eight years the last unfortunate visit. It hits me as a sad place – just another run-down, forgotten by progress little town. Happily I didn’t have to stop this time so I missed communing with the locals.

I am looking forward to Roanoke. Lloyd mentioned it as a cool town. I quite liked it! The coffee place I chose turned out to be in the Taubman Museum of Art right in downtown! The parking meter payment was difficult, but I went in and did my internet and coffee thing. Being there was cool, but the coffee and cookie and service weren’t very good so I decided to eat somewhere else. Downtown seemed really cool. I wanted to buy more time to eat and check out the art museum and just wander abound a little, but the machine wouldn’t let me, so with an expired meter I hustled across the street into this cool old building that had been made into a food court and got some kind of Korean stir fry thing to go from Blue Ridge Burrito. It turned out to be pretty good.

As long as I was in a big townI needed my usual things – a tank of diesel and deli food and beer – and the Kroger four miles away had it all: cheap Diesel, (relatively) cheap beer, good deli … and it was just a coupla miles from a Blue Ridge Parkway entry point, so woo!

The BRP is really pretty. I drove a few miles to a nice overlook and ate half of my Roanoke stir fry. Quite good. The BRP is not quite as dramatic a drive as Skyline Drive, which was engineered back in the 1930’s to take the road right along great vistas. I imagine they were more constrained when they laid this one out . But the trees here further south are closer to peak fall color, so it’s pretty awesome.

One of the (very tiny) tragedies of this trip is that all of the really excellent high-quality, low-cost campgrounds on the Blue Ridge Parkway closed for the year last week! Really? But sad of not, I must leave this lovely drive at some point and descend into the valley to find a place to spend the night. Where the Parkway crosses I-77 I get off and drive 20 miles northwest to:

This place looked tremendously boring on the web, but is in fact really, really great! With the thoroughness and fairness you expect out of the federal government, all the choices are laid out on a sign keyed to a map of the campground:

• no hook-ups,
• electric and water,
• electric and water and sewer

each clearly marked and clearly priced, with Senior Card holders getting half price on each. I chose a “no hookups” site next to the creek, out of sight of all the hooked-up RVs. It’s only drawback is that it’s a pretty long walk to the heated bathroom with the nice shower, and my leg is still pretty messed up. I look like Chester from Gunsmoke (old person reference :). First hobbling around the loop to find which bathroom is open, then hobbling over and back later for the actual shower. That said, this is easily the most deluxe campground I’ve stayed at in a while at a really cheap price.

Friday

The morning serenity of this beautiful place was destroyed by the OCD camp host couple who were methodically leaf-blowing the road and every campsite pad.  They each had their own blower, so they made quite a racket. And the didn’t move fast, so they come over the rise, so I get the noise full-on and demolish my peace and quiet for the next few minutes. I gave them what though was my stink eye when they were on the next pad, but he took it to mean “c’mon over!” In his tidy world he was doing me a favor by blasting away all those nasty leaves, even while I was sitting there. What is wrong with those (very nice) people? I cannot imagine a greater waste of time than leaf-blowing campground pavement in a hardwood forest in October. Anyway I stopped the dude in his tracks on my pad and they continued on down the line of empty campsites. I guess the couple that leaf-blows together says together.

I have to drive the campground loop one more time to get out of here, and at the dumpster, I get rid of the big box! It’s the small things that give me satisfaction! :)

It was a pretty short drive to the town of Wytheville VA, where there is a coffeehouse with wifi. It was right on a downtown corner, attached to a drugstore. The drugstore was kinda understocked, so my guess is that someone got the brilliant idea to take the best third of the underperforming drugstore (the third right on on the corner) and turn it into a food and coffee place. They serve coffee and tasty goodies in the daytime, and they serve dinner at night. From the conversation it looks like they do some kind of fixed menu community dinners. which sounds like a great, small-town thing. Good luck to them.

While I was in there a pretty heavy rain started up. It was fun and cozy there, sitting in the corner window and watching folks scurry from awning to awning, but eventually I had to hit the road, and then was less fun. It rained hard on those country roads for a couple of hours  which made a bit tiring, but better than heavy rain on the interstate!

Didn’t quite make it back onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, but it still a very pretty drive, but with 25 mph towns interspersed. Again, I am going to get to my destination after dark. This sucks.

Got here after dark in a light rain, but I lucked out a little because the camp hosts pulled in right behind me. They had been doing their nightly round of gate closings. We went into the standard TVA campground office and they wrote me up then showed me my spot, close to the bathroom, thank goodness. Ten minutes later I am fully set up for the evening. Happy!

Saturday

The rain seems to have left for the moment, and it is a spectacular morning here. People are fishing ten feet from their RVs, everyone is walking around chatting up their neighbors, it’s quite nice. I stayed till checkout time of 1 pm, then killed another half hour or so driving up to the overlook over the lake.

Then I made my way back to the highway, only one wrong turn! Im off to Johnson City for coffee at a nice place called Willow Creek in the old downtown. I had my coffee and goodie, but lunch is still an outstanding issue. Turns out there is a German restaurant right down the block, and I don’t get enough German food. So I parked the laptop in the van and hobbled down to Freiberg’s German Restaurant and had a big ole stein of beer and the bratwurst and German potatoes special. It was quite tasty, but again it took longer than I thought and I will probably get to my campsite with little or no daylight left.

I don’t even know what this place is like. It’s wet and cold and dark, and I am kind of miserable. I walk back to the payment kiosk, and my ankle hurts. On the was back some campers are visiting other campers to have a little Saturday night party, which somehow cheers me up. There is fun going on here, despite how gloomy I might feel.

Sunday

Happy Birthday Me! This place is quite pretty in the daylight. I have phone reception so I am trying to figure out what special thing I should do for myself today. Sadly I am leaning towards not much, but we’ll see. The one frustrating thing is that I discover a place called Hot Springs NC, which is indeed an upscale hot springs in the North Carolina mountains. If I had discovered this yesterday it woulda been a great birthday treat, me spending on a nice place which I usually don’t do. But it’s two hours in the wrong direction now, and I just can’t get up for backtracking. Oh well…

Yelp showed a coffee place quite close in the little town of Cumberland Gap, TN. It was really, really good!. It was only like seven minutes away, but I got over confident. The right turn I needed to take looked like all it did was go to a gas station and a Quality Inn, but in fact it is the only way in and out of this little hamlet. ANd because of the tunnel and the general weirdness of the roads right around the Gap, the 7 minute drive became a 18 minute drive because there was NO ESCAPE! I had to do a cloverleaf. drive two miles down the divided highway, do one of those cross median sketchy U-eys, drive back two miles to the exit ramp to get to … 50 feet from where I was when I realized my mistake. Happy Birthday!

But once i got there the Gap Creek Coffee House was fully birthday-worthy! It’s a converted house by itself in a field next to what I assume was Gap Creek. They had wifi (which came and went).

Drove the tunnel into Kentucky for the Visitors Center. There was a nice little half mile trail I wanted to take. Not being able to walk well is really bumming me out.

Just as an interesting aside, the reason there is a tunnel here is evidently to preserve the gap as a historical site, which I think is awesome If there was a major 4 lane highway trough the area where the Gap Creek Cafe is, it wouldn’t be nearly the same..

Took the scenic way through Kentucky to tonight’s government campground. Maps fucked me up good today. I’m taking my scenic route through the hills, and it suddenly shows me an alternative that looks even cooler. So I turn off on that tiny little road, then I lose phone reception, and I’m just wandering the hills with no idea where I am. I finally when into a little market and was going to follow a couple of fellows to “Widok” … Widok? He said a coupla more times … oh … “White Oak”. White Oak was on my map, so that worked for me. While I was waiting for them I got myself oriented enough to get out on my own. This means … you guess it … that I will get to my camp spot in the dark yet again.

To my befuddlement, it is not actually dark when I get here, so I pick a site and get settled in daylight, which I am sad to say hasn’t happened often lately. This turns out to be another great National Park bargain. Spacious campsites, great bathroom/shower, recycling(!), quiet.

Because my leg is still messed up I park close to the showers. It’s quite awesome to hobble 50 feet and have a quality government shower. My leg is swollen which  freaks me out a bit. A week later I can say my leg is normal, so it must have been some kind of sprain with the usual sprain kind of limb swelling, but since I have heart issues I spent that night being afraid it was some kind of circulation issue or thrombosis, or god knows what. Getting old sucks.

I’m doing the thing I do of blogging at my picnic table till well after dark because I can. In the summer the bugs are too bad, and in the winter it’s too fucking cold, but right now it’s really fun to do. I just have to remember to bring the flashlight, because those 15 feet from the picnic table to the van that were no problem in the twilight can be pretty tough in a strange place on a no-moon night.