April 16, 2006

April 16, 2006

Wytheville to Front Royal, Virginia

YEAR 2 DAY 303

 

Happy Easter

 

Today was sunny and warm.

I noticed that the young women here in small town Virginia dress like Daisy Duke in The Dukes Of Hazzard. I kid you not ! And the Virginia accents are worse than Tennessee's or North Carolina's. Yesterday while I was having a propane tank refilled, the young man refilling the propane was having a one sided conversation with me. He talked, and I stood there looking stupidly at him. I never understood a single word he said. "But he always had some mighty fine wine." HA HA HA SNORT HA ! And why do so many people around here have less than 5 teeth in their mouth ? Once again, I'm not kidding !

This morning I did yesterday's and today's preventive maintenance, then we prepared for departure from Flying J's RV overnight parking area. We drove around to their RV islands to dump the shower holding tank and refill the fresh water. Their fresh water spigot wouldn't work, but at least we left with an empty shower holding tank. We were planning to be at a serviced campground for tonight, but my anxiety level is very high right now, and I didn't want to take any chances. If circumstances forced us to stay somewhere overnight without services I didn't want any problem with full waste holding tanks, and we fill the shower holding tank quite quickly.

We left Flying J continuing north on Interstate 81. Our tension levels are high, and we sniped at one another a lot today. At least Interstate driving is easy. Traffic was quite heavy today, so Joanne didn't drive at all. I encountered a real jerk on the road, a young punk, near a city. The worst highway drivers are urbanites who get on and off highways and freeways in and around a city, who really don't have the skills or the experience to be good highway drivers. They lack an understanding of how much space large trucks and RV's need to slow down, stop, or change lanes. And they're usually still young enough to be egocentric ... as in "the world revolves around me" !

We stopped for lunch at a road side rest area. As we were getting back into the truck to resume driving after lunch, Lorri phoned. She had read my blog, and was calling to express her concern about our "accident" the other day. She commended us for having the bravery to continue on after what happened. Well ... the alternative wasto remain forever living on the Cherokee Nation Reservation in North Carolina. No thanks ! HA HA HA !

Joanne wanted to stop fairly early today, to make a nice Easter dinner. She picked 2 campgrounds in northern Virginia out of our campground guides, and phoned them repeatedly during the day. There was never an answer. Not surprising, since today is Easter. We went to the first one, Battle Of Cedar Creek Campground in Middletown. We seem to be in the midst of civil war territory. As a matter of fact, I saw a decal on a truck today proclaiming allegiance to "the union", the "north" side of the civil war. Geeez, guys, it was 250 years ago, get over it ! The campground was a dump. We didn't stay. We drove a bit further to North Fork Resort near Front Royal, Virginia. It's a large, very lovely campground on the banks of the Shenandoah River. We registered, got set up in our site, and went for a walk to shake off some stress. We checked out their "family center" facility, and their restroom / shower / laundromat facility. I did today's accounting, then took Bo for an obedience training walk while Joanne started supper preparations. We had purchased a spicy Cajun shrimp and rice stuffed chicken at Poché 's in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, specifically for Easter dinner. It's a bit of a scaled down version of the world famous Louisiana specialty "turducken". Poché 's is one of the handful of places in Louisiana, or the world, that prepares turducken. I started work on today's journal entry, then began working on downloading and processing the 58 photos I took over the last few days in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

We had a great Easter dinner, including a bottle of California wine we bought in Arizona for New Year's Eve. I took Bo for a walk just as it began to rain lightly. There was much thunder and lightning, threatening a storm, but it never materialized. I finished all the photos. I don't like having that many photos to deal with all at once, but we've been without electricity for the last 4 days, and I didn't want to download and process the photos using the laptop on battery power.

DSK