230 miles via NC 96, I-85, I-95 and VA 234. Cumulative tow miles: 1459. Truck miles: 321. Cumulative truck miles: 2095. The extra truck miles were primarily due to the lunch I had with Mary Markunas, an old friend that I had not seen for over 40 years.
This was a very pleasant trip in beautiful weather, mostly on I-85 which is now on my list of favorite roads: flat, smooth and little truck traffic. However the trip was marred by two unpleasant incidents. The first was a violent disagreement between the GPS and Google. The Google route was 223 miles and took me to I-85 via US 1. The GPS’s preferred route was 274 miles and I didn’t even bothet to look at the details as that was unnecessarily long. So I started on the Google route and the GPS route was soon down under 240 miles. However, it was insistent that I not go on US 1. It advised me at least 20 times to turn or do a U-turn. The last time I encountered this kind of GPS obstinancy – in 2017, south of Buffalo – it was correctly detecting a low bridge on the route. This made me very nervous so I eventually caved in and took NC 96 to I-85 rather than US 1.
I am going to have to take a close look at that US 1 segment and see if the GPS was right to object.
The second unpleasant incident occurred about 40 miles from Dumfries on I-95. I let a large tow truck merge onto the road in front of me and it thanked me by immediately propelling a large stone into my windshield, cracking it. At first it was just a star but but the time I got to Dumfries it was a full-fledged crack. I will have to get the windshield replaced, either in Dumfries or when I get to MA. The crack is on the passenger side to it doesn’t interfere with my vision of the road.
I should also mention that before I left Wake Forest I had to climb onto the roof to reposition a piece of slide weather stripping that had slipped out of place. I discovered, on the roof, a large number of scrapes in the rubber roofing material. At some point on this trip I must have encountered some low-hanging branches. These scrapes are minor, but I will have to spend an afternoon patching them sometime this summer.
So the first two “dings” on the trip. Not bad, really.
My home in Wake Forest was the Holly Point Campground, part of the state-run Falls Lake State Recreation Area. I usually favor commercial campgrounds as I am never sure what I am going to find in a state campground. In this case the surprise was a pleasant one: the sites were HUGE and very secluded – lots of space between the sites. Although I didn’t use them, the campground also has a very nice bathhouse and beach on the lake. This is a very nice campground.
I did embarrass myself, though. I had picked a site which looked to be larger that most (before I knew how large the other sites were) and, surprisingly, was one of the very few pull-through sites in the campground. But did I take advantage of it? No, I did not. First, I passed the entrance and rather than back up to the entrance decided to back into the site. Then I decided that I was oriented incorrectly, with the utilities on the wrong side (I wasn’t), so I turned around and backed in from the other end. Only to discover that I was now incorrectly oriented. So I pulled out, turned around again and backed in from the other side.
It took me about 30 minutes to get positioned in a pull-through site. After 8 years on the road I should have done much better. Embarrassing.
I had redemption of sorts in Dumfries – I backed into a fairly difficult site on a single try.
The woman that I had lunch with on Monday – Mary Markunas – was married for many years to one of my best college friends and had two lovely daughters with him. He died young, but after they divorced. I have many fond memories of the times my first wife and I had with them, including a wonderful week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina which included my one-and-only flounder gigging expedition with Bob.
I lost touch with them after they moved to NC and hadn’t spoken to her in 40 years. But since I was going to be near Chapel Hill – where they lived when I lost touch – I thought I would see if she might still be in the area. Surprisingly, I found a telephone number for her almost immediately and, even more surprisingly, she answered on the first ring. We agreed to meet for lunch at the Umstead Hotel in Cary. When I looked at the menu for the restaurant there I nearly threw a shoe – EXPENSIVE! But we dined on the patio at the bar which, though still pricey, was not outrageously so.
We had a lovely 2.5-hour lunch and pretty much caught up on each other’s lives. I would call it totally successful and satisfying except that I got a sunburned face.
A winter in Florida with 2 softball games every week and no sunburn, but a lunch in NC does me in. Go figure.
