As I am sitting on my back screened-in porch, ceiling fan blowing on me in the dripping wetness of still a summery forest in The South, listening to cicadas, frogs, and an occasional mourning dove, I cannot help but send many thanks to the universe for all this, and more. I am so grateful to be here, to be whole, to have a job and security and a roof over my head. The world we live in today makes all these sound like luxuries and having this in my back yard and the time to write about it make me feel nothing if not an opportunistic and ungrateful spoiled brat.
I am sitting here, recounting our staycation this year which
passed as the last week closed and August 2020 with it. We were both tired and
weary of work, news, sadness, no end in sight, disappointment, drained of one
internet page after the other bleeding with bad news. Every. Single. Day. From.
Every. Realm. Of the planet and of humanity.
We knew we needed a break, but we were feeling guilty for
even dreaming about one, and working from home translates into
working-all-the-time, because what is there to do?! Thus, we kept putting
vacation off till the next opportunity to “go back to normal” would present
itself. Only this year does not teach you anything if it doesn’t teach you that
“normal” might never come, and instead you must learn to adapt to the inconspicuous
“now”. So, guilty, and hesitant, we called it a day and asked for a week
vacation which ended, as I mentioned, this weekend.
Because both of us are considered high-risk patients should
we get Covid19, we don’t feel quite safe to stay overnight in hotels, or even to
go to restaurants yet. So, grateful for our central North Carolina location
that has you either in the mountains or on the beach in a matter of hours, we
planned to stay home, eat home, sleep and shower at home and visit as many
places as we can reach in 5 or so days, by taking a day-long road trip. If you need a distraction from the every day
and want to see our adventures in pictures, here they come:
Our itinerary:
Great Bend Park, Burlington, NC – The Biltmore Estate
in Asheville, NC – Around town in Apex, Cary, Pittsboro, NC – Washington,
NC – Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, Wilson, NC - Chinqua Penn Walking
Trail with friends, Reidsville, NC – The Old Mill of Guildford, Oak Ridge,
NC – Dinner with friends in Greensboro, NC
Day 1: Great Bend Park, Burlington, NC
I am not sure what I liked most about this: the drive there
from our home or the park itself.
To get to the park you drive through the historic downtown
of Graham, NC where The Courthouse reigns imposing over the busy weekend
passers-by that are rushing to get their coffee and to-go orders from busy
downtown restaurants, further on through the Glencoe Historic Mill District,
where history seemed to have stood still for tens of years at least, everything
as quiet as a graveyard.
The Great Bend Park is a small affair, on the banks of the
Haw River, so mysterious and picture-worthy nonetheless. There are many trails,
but they’re not too long, so we explored a couple in the hot afternoon. Once you
get to the river, an enormous waterfall (looks man-made, as if for a dam)
greets you in all its roaring beauty, splashing on river rocks and carrying in
its current massive old trees. Butterflies line the trails here, colorful and
fragile, begging you not to step on them, while dragonflies chase each other
and make love in a sea of colorful blooms.
The rapids in Great Bend Park - Burlington, NC
Day 2: The Biltmore Estate, Asheville, NC
Some might say we are nuts to drive three and a half hours
for a place that we have seen before and for an exhibit that was only OK. I’ll
say this was our longest drive and we knew this going in, and, in the end, we
both agreed that it was all worth it. Just getting out of town and leaving it
all behind (the further we went, the more we felt like we were truly leaving
reality behind), this feeling alone, is worth every mile. Asheville greeted us
with a wishy-washy rain that hadn’t quite made up its mind whether it’ll mean
it or not. After about half an hour of annoying drizzle, it decided to hold it,
and let us have a great outdoor time. We skipped The House and we went straight
to the gardens which swallowed us in color, scent and a busy sea of bees,
butterflies, hummingbirds, and many bugs we could not even identify.
For a pandemic weekday, the place was pretty busy. I’ll have
to say that, even being mostly outside, the fact that we were watching whether
everyone that crossed our path would respect
their physical space and not infringe on everyone else’s, or had a mask or not,
or trying to keep ourselves further than 6 feet from everyone else took a lot
of energy and possibly a lot out of the simple comfort of just being there and
enjoying every second of it.
After we walked through the gardens, we drove the beautiful
Biltmore grounds to access two of the sites of the Downton Abbey exhibit. This
was my second time seeing the exhibition, and I have to say: I preferred it
when it was displayed in New York City. With that, I still consider it a must
for the true Downtown afficionado.
We packed lunch and we ate fast food on the way back, for our
meals. I wished we had time for a true picnic, but the driving was long so we
had to cut time from somewhere, and in this case, it was from lunch/ dinner
time.
Day 3: Around town in Apex, Cary, Pittsboro, NC
After the whole day of driving, outside of waiting in long
lines in the sun of Asheville, we needed a break. We needed a day of no-alarm
waking us up and catching up on some around-our-home errands and such. We also
wanted to check out a new outdoor mall, touted by one of the area magazines as “The
Best Outdoor Mall in North Carolina” – it was not all that, but it did have a
lot of shopping to offer, along with some decent restaurants. We ordered some
food to go from one of them at the end of our very short shopping spree: we
didn’t realize that some retail stores now close at 6PM because they have
reduced hours due to the pandemic.
One of the many things that will set this vacation apart from
any other is the lesson that you can no longer take for granted small, simple
things that were a given before. For example, store closings, or their limited
hours, or one-way walking marked in a store (which seems to be more of a bottleneck
than helping), or the freedom to speak with and understand someone in a really
loud place when you both wear masks and cannot hear one another and cannot read
lips, either. To say nothing about the constant watching of everyone, the constant
disinfection, and paranoia when someone without a mask breathes in your space.
Ah … we hope this too shall pass. Soon …
Day 4: Washington, NC
On our fourth day, we made it to my absolute favorite trip of
this week’s vacation! Let me tell you how I discovered this little gem of a
town: completely by accident, and thanks to playing around on Apple maps,
looking for the closest place to our home that is closest to The Ocean.
All renowned places I knew about that are on the beach or on
Eastern rivers were way too far away, so I moved my search more inland, and
started looking for a town on a canal or estuary or some such water-y
landscape. I simply poked around with an Apple map in front of me and looked
for towns, small cities, anywhere where I could find a named place on a water
that connected it with the ocean to see how long the drive would be. And I came
across Washington, NC – less than 2 and a half hours from our house. I had
never heard of it. I’ve lived in North Carolina for almost 15 years now (in two
stretches) and I never heard anyone ever speak of this town. I figured, it’d be
a small, fishing town, sleepy as all that, with no chain hotels or restaurants,
maybe a blinking stoplight and a gas station.
Well, what a huge surprise we were in for once we got there!
Doing some more research before we left, I found out that it’s not quite that small of a town after all, at 9000+ residents
which makes it twice as populous as our current hometown. It is situated on the
Pamlico river, which makes a beautiful (and rare) estuary before it flows into
the Atlantic Ocean. It is considered “a gem of the inner banks” of North Carolina
and truly, this time this was not an advertising gimmick. It is beautiful and
if you live in NC, I encourage you to see it, when you can and as always, stay
safe.
The minute we got out of our car downtown, to walk a short distance
to the Down on Main restaurant where we had ordered lunch to go, we were
hit in the face by the fishy, muddy smell of the Pamlico river. We knew we were
close to “water”. The whole downtown was under a massive renovation – all sidewalks
and streets were dug out and some areas were getting new cement poured in. Not
many passers-by were in the streets, and the fact that there were no warning
signs that streets might be closed told us that they either did not expect lots
of people to be driving the streets (pandemic, I suppose?!) or that they would
be done in a short time. Despite the limited number of people walking about,
the town seemed vibrant and busy underneath the apparent quiet: all stores and
restaurants were open, old, pre-war buildings were being renovated or upgraded
or open for business, traffic seemed pretty steady on the non-dug-out streets.
We had our lunch in the shade, on our camping chairs in
Festival Park, overlooking the Pamlico river and its personal boats and right
next door to the North Carolina Estuarium which was closed due to the pandemic.
After lunch, we walked the half mile of the waterfront walkway and then walked
through the Downtown, as much as we could because construction did prevent us
from seeing Main and Market Streets which seemed to have most of the more
interesting destinations, like art galleries, boutiques, and art stores.
It was a scorcher that day. But it was North Carolina, in a
water town, in the summer – what else could we have expected? The town, clean
and well-taken care of, exudes history and ghost stories. We would love to go
back, in better, more relaxed times, when we can spend a few nights and learn
about its history, go on a walking tour of the Historic District, and even take
a sunset cruise on the Pamlico. Lots of people talk about visiting Wilmington,
NC a lot around here, but I found Washington to be just as interesting, if not
more, to some degree: last time I visited Wilmington, I was shocked at how
deserted and derelict and lifeless it looked. Washington was at the opposite
end of that.
After Washington, we headed East to Goose Creek State Park.
We saw deer in the torrid heat, in the middle of the day as we drove around looking
for the most popular trail of this park: the Pamlico Boardwalk Trail. This is a
quarter of a mile or so wooden boardwalk over a marshy terrain. It is the most
savage, wild, intimidating terrain I have ever walked: you feel like at any
minute a snake might jump out of the water or fall on your head from the trees.
The warnings to watch for cottonmouths did not help. The cattails, small plants
that looked like water clovers, lots of blooms, as well as water-loving reeds,
willows and trees dressed in Spanish moss made up the rest of the vegetation,
while minnows, frogs, millions, it seemed, of dragonflies, some of them the size
of birds, and their friends, the butterflies, roamed about. We did apparently encounter
a ribbon snake, but we didn’t know this till we got home and he showed up in a
picture of a pink bloom. All in all, this experience was breathtaking and
singular in its beauty and wilderness for us. It looked like we reached the end
of the world after the planet was wiped out of its beauty and now, millions of
years later, everything else was trying to come back to life, fresh, young, and
vibrant.
Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, Wilson, NC
En route back from Washington, NC, we stopped at this North
Carolina oddity, the Whirligig Park in the small town of Wilson, somewhat of an
Eastern suburb of Raleigh. In fact, my husband seems to be intrigued by these
devices, we have owned one so far for our yard, and he just bought his second
one in Asheville, on this very vacation. I would recommend a visit to this park
as a testimony to human ingenuity and artistic endeavor.
Day 5: Chinqua Penn Walking Trail with friends, Reidsville,
NC
The very following day, we headed up North, to Reidsville,
NC, where we met an old friend (old because I have known her for almost 20
years now) for a picnic and a hike of the Chinqua Penn Walking Trail. We all brought
lunch and we again sat on our camping chairs in the shade, caught up a bit since
we had not seen each other for about a year now and times have surely changed
since. Not sure if we saw two or three people while we spent three hours or so there.
I am grateful for days like these, where we can stop and smell the roses a bit
and get caught up on life and escape our isolation, meet with close friends in the
safety of nature.
The Old Mill of Guilford, Oak Ridge, NC
On the way back from Chinqua Penn, we stopped by The Old Mill of Guildford next door to my old stomping grounds of Summerfield, NC where I used to live many, many moons ago. Some parts of the existing working mill date as far back as 1767. Some, newer, are as recent as the 1950’s. The mill is one of the oldest continuous gristmills in the United States. I remember living in Greensboro and our phone book, back in the day when there were such things, always having this mill on the cover. One of the things I love and cherish living in NC is the history of it. Like a slice through layered soil, you can go back centuries and try to understand …
Day 6 and 7: Errands in Durham and Apex, NC and dinner
with friends in Greensboro, NC
We closed our week in a more relaxed manner, by finishing up
some more errands that we just never get around to (like finding Eastern
European or Greek-style caviar spread) and having dinner with friends we have
not seen since last year! Again, we picked up some delicious to-go food and ate
it on their patio, distanced, but as together as these times allow us.
After putting 1230+ miles on our car, we called it a week and
our longest staycation ever. We gathered home on Sunday night tired and full to the brim with newness. Our retinas have been cleansed and we can now hopefully see clearer what's ahead. Whatever life may throw at us, we hope that we will continue to be able to adapt and create new memories in an ever-renewing universe that keeps re-inventing itself, sometimes more painful, always anew and never boring.
My husband said after this whirlwind of a week that we
behaved like we grabbed an issue of Our State magazine and we made a
point to see all the spots featured in all its articles. I could not agree
more. Surely, I would have loved to sample more of the yummy food, and to actually
stop to learn more about the history, but we can both at least say “we, too, have
been there” now – at the very least it will make for easy planning next time we
will be able to … stay a while.
Would any vacation be truly complete without a kitty in it?! This is Millie, the cat at The Old Mill of Guilford, greeting us on the porch. Click the picture to view the entire album of this whirlwind week.
