North Carolina - Day 8 - to Winston-Salem, Greensboro

Rolling View Campground, Falls Lake State Recreation Area, Durham

Thursday, 6 July 2023

On our first walk today, Dext and I stopped in the pre-dawn dark on the bridge that crossed the creek in the campground.  I was enjoying listening to the creek and the insects and the birds when Dext suddenly whipped behind me and almost pulled me over while he chased a critter.  I could just see a tail as it dropped down by the creek below the bridge - a bushy grayish tail, I thought.  But I also caught a whiff of skunk smell - and Dext caught more than a whiff.  Thank goodness that skunk was spending its time running away instead of spraying, but Dext still ended up with a vague aura of skunk about him.

He needed a bath anyway and now he really needs one.  But I've got no ability to give him one so I wiped him down a few times with wet paper towels, which seemed to help.  But what a way to start the day.  Thank goodness this is his first - and I hope only - skunk encounter.

Then, just before we left the campground I discovered stale vomit by the passenger seat.  Apparently that's what I was smelling a couple of days ago after I'd cleaned up the batch by the driver's seat.  

At least, I hope it was from that era.  I've been feeding Dext chicken and rice at each meal and it's surprisingly time consuming.  I bought and cooked chicken breasts, and now I'm hand shredding the meat for each meal.  Plus, since the meat and rice are stored in the frig, I feel like I should heat them up at least a little before giving them to Dext.  I mean, I don't want to eat cold rice so can't assume he'd like it either.  But I do all of this because I'm assured it could help prevent this vomiting I'm cleaning up, which I'm certain isn't good for him.  And so far, he hasn't seemed to throw up the chicken and rice, so I'm hoping.

Anyway, between the skunk and the vomit, we did not have an auspicious start to our drive.

today's route

At least it was a pretty, sunny day.

From the campground, we crossed the Yadkin River, where a sign told me it was part of the Yadkin-Pee Dee River Basin.  I connect the Pee Dee River with western South Carolina so I looked this up - and had to keep looking things up for a while before I finally learned that the Yadkin River, which begins just south of Boone, flows north into Virginia, then flows south and east and, part way through North Carolina, becomes the Pee Dee River.  The Pee Dee River seems to begin at the point its name stops being the Yadkin River and starts being the Pee Dee River.  

This seems weird to me.  I could understand it if the name changed with the state's boundary - you know, if South Carolinians had a different name for the same river - but all this name changing happens within North Carolina.  Well, whatever.  This system is North Carolina's second largest river basin.

Speaking of water, I heard on the radio that Joshua Trees in the Mohave Desert are dying from lack of water, from wildfires, and from development that's splitting the breeding populations.  Like so many other people, I developed a real fondness for those strange plants and would hate to see them endangered.

I continued to see signs for vineyards and wineries during the drive.  In fact, I've been seeing these signs everywhere I've gone in this state.

I woke up at 2 AM today and couldn't get back to sleep, so now I'm having trouble fighting off sleep.  Very inconvenient.

We passed quite a few smaller towns like Yadkinville and Lewisville, and then came to Winston-Salem.  I was curious about that hyphenated name and looked it up.  Salem is by far the older town, established in the 1750s and 1760s as a settlement for members of the Moravian Church.

The congregation sold land north of Salem to the county in 1849 to establish a county seat.  This town was named Winston in honor of a local hero of the Revolutionary War.  At a centennial celebration in 1876, a speaker referred to the two towns together, followed by the US Postal Service doing the same thing a few years later.  A referendum in 1913 made the hyphenated name official.

By the time of WWII, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and Hanes textiles had become the leading employers here.  Oddly, Reynolds imported so much French cigarette paper and Turkish tobacco to make Camel cigarettes that the federal government designated Winston-Salem as an official port of entry (yes, it's 200 miles inland).

I drove around town a bit because I'd understood the Home Moravian Church was there and I was curious.  This congregation was founded in 1771 and services are still held here regularly.  In fact, they've held an Easter sunrise service there since 1772, and people now come from around the world to attend.  Sadly, I wasn't able to find either the church or a parking place so Dext and I could go look.  This area of town is called Old Salem, and maybe you can see why from this photo.

This photo is deceptive, because the streets are much narrower than they look here.  In fact, I was worried about squeezing the RV between the parked cars for the little driving around I did.

One of the houses I passed had a sign saying it had been a doctor's house and was built in 1802.  Those white houses you can see in my photo aren't the usual clapboard-type construction.  This is a very old town, with buildings of old brick and rough hewn wood.

Winston-Salem was also the site of the first Krispy Kreme doughnut shop.  It opened in 1937 but is no longer at that site.  I looked.

site of the original Krispy Kreme

This really is the spot - everything I consulted said so - but the building is gone.  What surprised me was that there wasn't any kind of sign or historical marker here.  They seem to have those markers for everything else - just not doughnuts.

I also drove by a local landmark.

Mickey Coffee Pot

This coffee pot dates back to at least 1858, when it was advertising in front of the tin shop owned by the Mickey brothers here in Salem.  They were descendants of original Moravian founders of the town.  This photo too is deceptive - this pot is 7' tall, though it doesn't seem like it.

Apparently, at Halloween in 1930, a large group of local idiots tried to blow it up - but the scrap paper they used for their fuse was stationery with the printed address of a grandmother of one of the kids.  The kids were caught, they all paid to repair the pot, and it's remained unharmed ever since.

The country around this town is lovely and pastoral.  I drove the half hour or so from there to Greensboro, the second city in the Piedmont Triad.  (I didn't end up getting to High Point, the third Triad city, this trip.)

Driving into the main part of town, I passed a place called Blandwood Mansion, which was built in 1795 as a 4-room farmhouse.  When then-Gov. John Morehead bought it in the first half of the 1800s, he turned it into what's now the oldest example of the Italian Villa Style in the country.  It wouldn't have been our oldest example if preservationists hadn't saved it from from demolition in 1964.  I'm sorry that I couldn't find any uncopyrighted photos online - but it looks a lot like a LaQuinta hotel - a 2-story house in a regal shade of yellow, with a red tile roof and a 3-story tower at the entrance.  Today it and its gardens are a museum.

I passed a historical marker for someone named Lunsford Richardson and would have ignored it but happened to notice the text said he'd invented Vicks VapoRub here.  I'm a fan of that stuff when I've got a cold, so I was curious and looked it up.  In 1890, Richardson was a pharmacist, operating a drug store here in Greensboro with a partner, and spending a lot of time inventing various kinds of medicines.  Among those were cough syrups and cough drops, produced in the 1930s and still being used as Vicks products today.  Remarkable staying power for being simple medicines.

Below is the building I came to Greensboro to see: the site of the famous 1960 lunch counter sit-in.  It was by no means the first such sit-in, but it gained massive publicity nationwide and the support of then-President Eisenhower.  And it eventually worked.

site of the 1960 Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins

For more detailed information about this series of events, here's the Wikipedia page.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Greensboro-sit-ins

These days, this store is part of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which is headquartered in the building next door.  Sometime when I have more time and energy I'd like to come back and visit the museum, but today wasn't the day.  Too hot.

So there I was driving down Market Street and suddenly, with no advance warning, I came to a bridge with a small sign that said "Low Clearance - Edgeline 10' 4" - Centerline 13' 10"."  I know I can go under 11' clearance bridges but I wasn't willing to test the limits right here in Greensboro, so I waited until I could drive in the middle of the road to go under the bridge.  It would have been helpful if they'd posted a warning sign in time for me to go around, but they didn't bother.  Market Street is a main road in town so I'd have thought trucks would use it and they'd post warning signs for them.  It sure got my adrenaline going for a bit.

From there, we went on to a park I'd found online so Dext could take a walk.  We discovered an odd sort of set-up that looked like a place for little kids to ride in little cars, with intersections and road signs and stuff.  I've seen a race track for little kids, but it wasn't that.  I asked a couple of women who were standing around, but they didn't know what it was either.  So I finally asked a maintenance worker who said it was called Safety Town, and they have peddle cars for kids, and the intent is to teach them the rules of the road.  Can't start too early, in my opinion, since it's remarkable how many people seem to get licenses without a firm grasp of them.  Anyway, the man said it's only operated at specific times and is so popular that people should make reservations.

One of the things I've wanted to do while I'm in North Carolina is check out their version of barbecue.  Apparently, in the bbq world, NC's version is acknowledged to be as distinct at that in South Carolina and that in Georgia,  Today I planned to stop at a well-known local establishment called Staney's BBQ, and I did stop there.  But once there I realized all they offered was chopped beef, usually on a bun, and chicken.  No ribs.  Apparently not even any brisket that's in unchopped form.  I like chopped beef on a bun just fine, but I eat in restaurants so seldom that I didn't much want to buy something I can make for myself in the RV.  Actually, I could theoretically make ribs myself too, but that would require a decent-sized bbq grill, which I'm not carrying with me.  I've fixed ribs in the slow cooker, but that's nothing like cooking them over a fire.

So I gave Staney's a miss.  What a shame.

I passed a very large facility labeled Prepac Distribution.  I hadn't heard of this company, which seemed odd with such a large plant, so I looked them up and learned they "design, manufacture and ship" ready-to-assemble furniture for the home.  Basically, a home-grown Ikea.  Well, sort of home-grown.  Their headquarters are in British Columbia.  They must be providing a whole lot of local jobs.

The locals think the company locating here just makes sense, because nearby High Point claims the title of Furniture Capital of the World.  They say they have more than 2,000 furniture manufacturers and 150 showrooms.  That sounds like a lot, considering High Point isn't particularly large - only 114,000 residents.  On the other hand, it's less than 20 miles from Greensboro, with a population of more than 300,000, which I suppose is how those manufacturers find enough employees.  

Just a few miles from Greensboro is the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  This was the site of a Revolutionary War battle that I mentioned in my post about the Battle at Cowpens in South Carolina.  The encounter near the Guilford Courthouse here was the third battle of an odd series: in 1780 the Americans had lost many battles - the fall of Charleston and the Battle of Camden, as examples; but in October 1780, American forces surprised and decisively beat Loyalist forces (Americans who were loyal to King George) at Kings Mountain in SC; exactly one week later, American forces once again surprised and decisively beat British forces in the Battle of Cowpens, also in SC; then in March 1781, some of the same troops met here at Guilford Courthouse.  As the National Park Service phrased it: the general "who chose the ground lost the day - and the one who kept the field lost the war."  

General Nathaniel Greene and Lord Cornwallis had been pursuing and sparring with each other for months, but in March Greene had just received reinforcements and chose this area as a battleground.  The result was considered an American defeat because they were the ones who retreated at the end of the day.  But that evening, Greene discovered his losses were relatively light while those of Cornwallis were overwhelming.  Cornwallis began his own retreat, heading for Wilmington, NC, and intent on conquering Virginia.  Greene chose to let others fight Cornwallis and instead he spent his time and troops reconquering South Carolina.  Cornwallis, on the other hand, was eventually defeated and surrendered at Yorktown in VA in October 1781.  And though the war continued 2 more years, Yorktown marked the beginning of the end.

I hope I've learned enough on this trip to be forever rid of the idea that the Revolutionary War was entirely fought in the northern colonies.  On the contrary, some of the war's most decisive battles were fought in the southern colonies.

Back on the road, I passed towns like Burlington and Graham and noted once again that there seem to be lots of breweries in North Carolina.  The state has road signs directing people to breweries as well as wineries, and I've already seen a lot of both in just a few days of driving around.

Tonight's campground in Falls Lake state park was surprisingly hard to find on Google.  It turns out that the park - actually a state recreation area - has 2 main areas that are fairly widely separated from each other.  On Google I had to ask for this campground - Rolling View - by name before I could get directions.

The section my campsite was in was heavily wooded, and Dext and I found out right away that the campground is very hilly.  Today was very warm - hot by local standards (about 90°) - and very humid, so walking around the campground wasn't very pleasant.  Besides, I was really tired for some reason (maybe the weather).

We were in our campsite before 2:00 after dumping the tanks, and I cooked more chicken and rice for Dext.