Staunton, VA

So after some delay, I finally set off on my trip on Sunday August 28th. Beautiful day and a beautiful drive, through Northern NC and South West VA.  I stopped for the night in Staunton, VA.

This is a pretty town.  it's very hilly, and there are lots of old, well maintained buildings and houses. There is also a College in the middle of town, with gorgeous old trees.  On a Sunday night there wasn't much to do.
After some dinner at a local Sushi restaurant, I had a beer before turning in and heard an interesting story:

This area used to be called Asylum and apparently you can still find that name on old maps.  There was an old-fashioned insane asylum here at least through the beginning of the 20th century.  Below is a picture of the main builidng.  It's now all boarded up. (By the way, the pictures don't do justice to the beauty of the landscape here).

Later in the 20th Century one of the State Universities took over the Asylum and it was then named a hospital for the mentally impaired.  Eventually many of the patients were released into the community. With limited skill sets and income, many of them ended up in the local flop house downtown. 

Then, a number of years ago, that flophouse was bought to be renovated and turned into a swank downtown hotel.  The new owners gave the occupants $6000 and a scooter to get them to leave the hotel.   Why a scooter is not revealed in this story.

"So now", as the local bartender who told me this story said, "we have a bunch of people who are quite crazy and run around on scooters".  Like the lady who will always tell you, as a first sentence, that she has lost her umbrella. Or the guy who will always tell you that he's too busy to talk to you now, but please, could he get back to you later.  We've all met people like that, but on scooters?  That's pretty odd.

Overall a good day driving through gorgeous country.  I'm vaguely thinking of abandoning the Quebec idea and coming back down here to spend some time exploring the Shenandoa Valley and Southwestern VA. We'll see.

 

New and worrisone things to consider.

I'm planning to visit a friend who lives in the Catskills in New York on this road trip.  It's a little tricky since she has to do some business elsewhere and doesn't know yet when she's going to be at home exactly.  But that's what a road trip is about: keeping your options open and being able to change plans quickly and easily.  If she isn't there, I'll keep going to Quebec (city), hang out there for a few days and then catch my friend on the way back.

All this was fine until I looked at the predicted path of Hurricane Irene.  I don't usually worry much about hurricanes.  After all, Charlotte, NC is several hundred miles from the ocean.  The fall-out of hurricanes is usually torrential rain for a couple of days, but that's all.  However, with my current travel plans, I'd be following that torrential rain all the way to the Catskills and on to Quebec.  Road trip or not, driving 1300 miles in the pouring rain is not my idea of a vacation.  Of course the predictions aren't always accurate, especially at this stage of the hurricane, but methinks it's time to have an alternative destination ready. Especially for next week.

The other problem with this hurricane is that, if it slams into the NC coast,  it may cause 60-75 mile/hr winds here in Charlotte.  I live on the 4th floor and I have big windows. I'm afraid at least one of those windows may not survive that sort of winds.  It would be a big mess if that happened, but it would be worse when I'm hundreds of miles away.

Yesterday I experienced my first earthquake here.  The whole building rattled and shook and, had it lasted longer, my TV would have crashed to the floor.  Now I have to worry about a hurricane.

It seems like we live in interesting times.


Follow up on Monday August 29th:  Fortunately, the hurricane was not an issue in Charlotte.  And its path was not such that much rain is on my way.  I may see some flooding in the Catskills, but we'll see.

Planning a road trip

It's been quite a few years since the workload allowed me to take 2 weeks off.  American business culture, for some reason, frowns on people taking off more than a week or 10 days.  It's a strange custom.  Capitalism seems alive and well in Europe where taking a month off is considered normal. 
But when some expected work was pushed back 6 weeks, my manager agreed (bless him..he's a great guy) that this would be a good time to take two weeks to re-charge the batteries.  When I return it will be very busy for the foreseeable future.
So what to do with my precious time off?  I considered Europe, but that's more than I want to spend:  Airfare is in the stratosphere at the moment and the Euro is up there too.  Besides, in order to see the people I'd like to see, I have to do a lot of running around on trains, planes and automobiles (actually, not much in automobiles, but a lot in trains and planes). I want to do something different.
So I decided to remain on this side of the Atlantic and take a road trip. My trusted car and I will visit some places I haven't been to, see some friends I haven't seen in a while and leave a lot of unstructured time to make last-minute decisions about the next destination.  It's been a really, really, long time since I've taken that kind of trip so I look forward to it.  And I'll write this blog about it. Maybe others will find it interesting to read, maybe not.  That doesn't matter. I will find it interesting to write it.  I've never really done that. It's time for doing something new.