NC Day One and Two

After a failed attempt to get the hot water heater going the night before I went to the basement in the morning and found that it was as simple as moving the circuit breaker for the hot water heater into the full off position and then moving it to on. Ten hours of sleep after a long travel day helps.

It was a cloudy morning, so after a leisurely morning we headed out to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Laura (that's the 'my wife' from previous posts)was interested in going to West Virginia, so after some time on the Parkway we exited at Highway 21 and headed toward Independence Virginia.

We finally made it to West Virginia but the picture Laura tried to take of the Welcome sign didn't turn out well. Along the way we didn't see any interesting places to eat. Everything was fast food chain restaurants. We decided to detour to Bramwell since they'd had an Ocktoberfest the previous day. Still no food, but a nice visitor center and interesting train cars that they hope to turn into a restaurant. One of the few remaining tobacco storage train cars is there. We ended up eating a snack we had brought along and continued on our loop back to Boone. As my wife put it in her journal, "After 3,298,546 winding turns we made our way to Bristol, TN, and eventually back to Boone and a dense fog. This is also the day we were suppose to go to Kentucky, too, but after 11 hours that didn't happen and we didn't care if we got there this trip."

The next morning was foggy again. So we decided to spend time seeing the shops in and around Boone. Found the Farmer's Supplies store and it was great, only it isn't supplies any longer. It was in the old building with tin ceilings and brick walls and some of the old storage bins and cupboards. However, it was now an arts and crafts gallery, with very good prices. We then found great food at Mike's Inland Seafood and after lunch headed to Linville Cave. Since it was still raining out we figured exploring a cave was just the thing.

The tour was interesting and the guide was both informative and had a sense of humor. He referred to different formations as "dread rocks," "mother-in-law's nose," etc. He also pointed out that flow stone takes 125 years to grow one cubic inch, so one wall was more than 6 million years old. About mid-way through the tour there was a stream with fish in it and at one point the guide mentioned that they had dropped a cable down more than 250 feet into the water and had not found the bottom. A little further on the guide had us experience total darkness. We were 2,500 feet under ground and he turned out all the lights. Talk about dark. He told the story of a couple of explorers who lost their lights, this is before the permanent ones were installed, and it took them two days to find thier way out. They stayed with the stream and just kept working their way up stream to the get to the entrance.

After the cave tour we took a walk to Linville Falls, since it wasn't raining and the sun was trying to come out. The falls drops 90 feet and the gorge created by the river is the deepest east of the Grand Canyon. Some of the trees were just starting to turn, but I think we were just a bit too early to see the true fall colors.