48stateroadtrip.com

Two-thirds there! So I crossed the border at night on a busy, curvy interstate and so while the welcome sign was huge and well-lit, I didn’t bother to get a photo. Maybe I’ll do a make-up some other time when I cross into Tennessee. It is, however, notable that the sign did not read “Tennesseein’ is Tennebelievin'”. Maybe the one coming up from Alabama will.

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It costs $55 to give yourself a tour of the Biltmore Estate (a house). Let me type that out in words so you don’t think that’s a sticky keyboard issue: fiffty-five dollars. I didn’t realize this before going in to buy my ticket.

Me: I’d like to see the house.

Woman: That’ll be $55.

Me: U.S.?

Woman: [pretends not to hear]

Let me bash the Biltmore Estate more before putting the price in context. Thanks.

• While its original owner was a Vanderbilt, his first name was not Cornelius.
• He was a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt — all the money spent to build the place was inherited.
• His two older brothers inherited the family business — the guy who built this house didn’t even have a job.
• The house was lived in for thirty (30) years before it was opened to the public, at which point it was no longer lived in.
• It was opened to the public because the family couldn’t afford to keep the house.
• Therefore, it served as a house for 30 years and as a tourist building to be walked through for 80 years.
• Some of the rooms weren’t finished until long after the house became a tourist-building.
• In spite of this, everything in the house makes out as if (a) this Vanderbilt family was important and (b) their time in the house was significant.
• The estate employs 1,900 people. It’s a non-house house with a bunch of grass around it. 1,900 employees.
• Despite the $55 cost to enter the house, you’re not allowed to take photographs anywhere inside.
• Excluding driving time, parking time, and time spent walking from the parking lot to the immediate house area, I saw everything I needed to in about an hour.

It’s The Biggest “House” in the Country, which screams of unfamiliarity with restraint. The interior maybe isn’t as tacky as Marble House in Newport or Hearst Castle (although Wm. Randolph Hearst at least did some stuff to increase *his* inherited wealth) — but then, it’s the gaudy, expensive stuff in those houses that makes them worth seeing. This one just seemed like someone’s outsized ego that, once it came down to interior decoration, couldn’t be matched by his bank account.

Big house.

Relatively normal-sized garden.

So, just to help better illustrate how ridiculous $55 for this house is, here’s a comparison of the prices of various attractions I’ve visited on this trip (and a couple other popular sites I haven’t visited).

The most remarkable thing about the place, IMHO, was that it was fairly *packed* with people, despite my being there on a bad-weather weekday. Is there really nothing better to do in this part of the country? OH man.

Or, in short: bad value.

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North Carolina strikes me as a lovely place to live, but kind of an odd place to visit. Heading west from the Outer Banks, I figured Ft. Raleigh sounded interesting enough. I always wondered about those Croatoan people, so — right. Here’s what there is to see at Ft. Raleigh:

And a fine location for Frisbee golf, too!

Yeah, well, I suppose I knew it was a lost colony. From there, headed west to Durham, where they have the REI. Having finally tired of my GPS’s incompetencies, I took it back. I’m starting to see a lot of upside to REI. I had that thing misguiding me throughout the country for 2.5 months, but REI had no problem taking it back. Go REI!

For dinner, met up with my ol’ Clarion buddy Alex in Carrboro, where we had some great detox food at the co-op.

Then I drove out to Statesville where I found a surprisingly clean hotel, with breakfast, for $29.99+tax. Go Statesville!

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Because you’ve been wondering.

Most colonials wore similar shades.

I didn’t buy the hat. The one I’m wearing was $36. The plainer ones are $25 and the fancy ones are $65. I also didn’t pay to rent a costume for the day. Yes, I’m very lame. (Yes, this is from Williamsburg.)

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Rest assured, I didn’t not wreck at Cape Hatteras. Just about melted down when it turned out that the Parks Service, in their infinite wisdom, closes down all their campgrounds on the cape (four or five of them) on October 12th though. Real handy. Y’know, a lot of Parks sites keep their campgrounds open during the off-season. Bring in a couple port-a-potties, turn the water off, and lower the price by $5, but otherwise: open. And these are sites that, like, get snow and crap. Or you could just allow beach camping.

And thus started my hate affair with North Carolina.

But hey, how ’bout these lighthouses! They weren’t closed, no sir! Not till the next day, at which point, yes, they were to have been closed (or so the rangers said).

You’re right: these are not lighthouses.

Bodie Island lighthouse. It’s only a mile from the water (the *ocean* water). Maybe it was built to protect the ships that were working their ways up the swamps.

The Hatteras Lighthouse. They have signs that point you to where this one *used* to be. You can still see its old foundation. It’s next to the water.

Top of the lighthouse.

Inside the lighthouse. How trite.

I think moving a lighthouse away from the water is worse than de-clawing a feral cat. I mean, it’s still a house with a light in it, but it’s not a lighthouse any more. My only remaining hope is that global warming kicks in for real so that poor suffering lighthouses like Hatteras and Bodie can glimpse the water again.

BTW, Hatteras is the tallest lighthouse in the US (if you can call it a lighthouse) and the “tallest brick lighthouse” in the world. The black-and-white is cool, IMHO.

Otherwise, Cape Hatteras National Seashore is just another shoreline. Not nearly as dramatic as Big Sur or Oregon Coast — and I was a little underwhelmed by *those*. There are a few touristy towns there — I’m not sure why a tourist would hang out in Avon, North Carolina, though. Maybe the beaches are nice in summer. There were guys who were surf fishing, which looked like it could be cool, although they didn’t look like tourists. And I didn’t see any ships get wrecked while I was there — but at least it didn’t cost me $55 to get in.

Without NPS campgrounds, I ended up paying $50 to stay at a motel run by a gas station. There were private campgrounds available, but they all looked like they were ruled by feral cats. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As it turned out, the gas station was also ruled by feral cats.

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If you’re an aviation fan, Kill Devil Hills is holy ground and a must-see location. If you’re not, it’s a field of grass with a mound at one end. The Wright Brothers chose the location because it was windy and sandy. I’m so ambivalent toward this state right now it’s palpable. I liked the Wright Brothers stuff. It’s cool to see where Orville landed and to try and picture what the scene might have looked like. Except I’m always seeing people who are sepia toned.

It was definitely windy there. The sand is now covered with grass, but sort of only barely.

Tha’s right, bro, you numba one!

The mound from which they did their glider tests in ’01.

The rail they launched from.

Per the signs at the historical site, it took the world a few years to realize the importance of the event. As I become ever more luddite-ish, I’m guessing I’ll start having mixed feelings about it myself.

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A blurry welcome to all!

My parents lived here a while back, so my most basic thoughts about North Carolina all have to do with 1963. As such, it’s been strange to drive around the state and not see any cars with fins on them. If it weren’t for watching Mad Men before going to bed every night, there’d be no 1960s in my life *at all* right now. Disappointing. Ah, well.

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Maybe I’m over-selling the blog post.

I thought Williamsburg was absurd, fun, totally absurd, and worth a day. It’s wacky to walk around with a bunch of other tourists and then have all these ren-fair types also there talking about the revolution currently underway. I stood in line (for ten minutes!) so I could sit in an originaly, 18th-century house wherein two guys dressed up as British colonels talked about what it was like to currently be under house arrest, how they were being gawked at by locals, and how surprised they were to see the entire Continental Army amassing in town, including that short French fellow. I should have gone to the event called “Loyalist Travail”: a Loyalist doctor and his family are harassed by citizens as they try to slip out of town. I bet that one was rich.

Ah, but it was fun and absurd. Just absurd. I miss it already. It was sad walking back over that bridge into the lousy, freakish 21st century. Age of Enlightenment, *that’s* the epoch for me. Oh well.

All of Virginia and only four cells for felons!

I feel like I need to go back to Williamsburg — I could do it so much better next time around. Again, oh well.

As you cross the bridge from the Visitors Center to town, you travel back in time!

So imagine my surprise when, despite being in 1781, I had to walk under an underpass with cars flying by overhead. I suspected witchcraft.

The Continental Army had arrived Friday night. Seriously. If I’d been there Thursday, these tents wouldn’t have been around. Sunday night, they “marched off to Yorktown”.

The governor’s palace. I think the governor was on his way back to London, though.

The county courthouse. The most common offense was skipping church.

General Washington surveys the… tourists. If you look lost, he’ll offer to help, but will probably end up just pointing somewhere and saying “that way”.

The capitol. This is where the House of Burgesses met, when it pleased the governor. And then once they got rid of the governor, it’s where whatever the Va representative government called itself at the time met.

Boom!

The short French fellow (Rochambeau), I think.

One of the coolest things about the experience is that, if you want to, you can avoid introductory sessions and not read much and instead just walk around town and try to figure out what’s going on, why there are soldiers camped out on the lawn, why there’s a guy dressed up like Washington running around on a horse, why there aren’t (m)any redcoats around. There are also other interesting details you can pick up on if you want to — there was a guy with a team of oxen and a cart with what looked like a coffin in it. He paraded it around for most of the morning, but in the afternoon, he made his delivery — to the jailhouse. Absurd and fun.

The only problem I had with Williamsburg is that it took me a while to figure out what the game was. It’s a cool game, though. I’d like to go there again some day.

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As for Jamestown — I’d always wondered why they decided to start their town in a malarial, bug-infested swamp. Now having been there — it’s not only a bug-infested swamp, but it’s a bug-infested swamp with no fresh water sources. Crazy. They founded the colony there because the river was deep enough close to shore that they could tie the ships on to trees. Walking the plankway over the swamp to Fort James, there were clouds of bugs — clouds, like you couldn’t breathe without inhaling bugs. Right: crazy.

There’s not a whole lot to see there (I just went to the Parks Service part — I figured I’d seen a solid display of “living history” at Williamsburg) given that the town was basically abandoned in the 18th century when Williamsburg became the capital. Actually — it’s kind of nice to have this abandoned, broken, archaeological site around and in such proximity to Williamsburg. Two sides of the same coin, interesting contrast, etc.

The graveyard inside of Ft. James at Jamestown.

John Smith, looking longingly back to England.

John Smith seemed like an interesting character. Was a prisoner of war in Russia while serving in the Hungarian army, then escaped prison and returned to Hungary before becoming the guy that sort of led the Jamestown expedition and then colony. Apparently also sort of a jerk, although the display wasn’t very specific about that.

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Slept in Williamsburg. Sat around in the hotel in Williamsburg trying to get my PhD apps to their next phase. And, between bouts of sitting around, fixed my truck’s camper shell, which had shifted back an inch and a half about 20 states earlier.

The ratchet set was the real hero.

But on the plus side, the canopy doesn’t look all jacked up any more.

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Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be Old Kentucky Home, but I’m not probably going to be visiting any old mansions when I’m in Kentuck, ergo this.

I keep going back and forth between thinking I’m doing too much on this trip and thinking I’m not doing enough. Day 85 turned into the latter, so I decided to compensate by driving to dots on the Rand McNally road atlas. The first was Scotchtown, Patrick Henry’s home northwest of Richmond. It was fine. You have to take a tour to go in. I was the only one on the tour when it started — which would have been great, since it probably could have wrapped up in 20 minutes that way and there was nothing in that house that deserved more than 20 minutes of observation. But then some older couple joined in while we were in the dining room and then I had to hear all about where the cabinets were made and discussions of southern Virginia “famous families” that I’d never heard of.

I get the sense that Southern Virginia is like Utah — there are “prominent families” that everyone wants to say they know or are related to. It’s not my favorite part of Utah, either.

The tour guide leads the other tour participants toward the kitchen, where they will be killed and eaten.

The actual house. When Patrick Henry’s wife went crazy, he made her live in the basement until she died.

Here’s the rest of what I got out of the tour:

• Patrick Henry had 17 children.
• He was the first governor of Virginia (I’m not sure in what sense this is true — he was certainly not the colony’s first governor).
• He didn’t collect much stuff.
• When the slaves brought food into the house from the kitchen, they were required to whistle the whole way because if they were whistling, then they couldn’t be picking food off the plates and eating it.
• At one time the house was occupied by a goat-tending hobo whom the neighborhood children feared.
• He didn’t like to write — he was an orator. Patrick Henry, I mean. Possibly also the hobo — we don’t have any of *his* writings, either.

Of course, I had to go to *Williamsburg* to learn that Patrick gave his Liberty-or-Death speech at a church in Williamsburg. Or was it Richmond? Eh. It was definitely a church.

Then I went to the Shirley plantation, which is south of Richmond on the James River. It was owned by one of Virginia’s prominent families. The tour guide was good-looking, but a little too urbanized and professional to be giving tours of some plantation home. I think she’s under-employed. If I still had jobs to give out at Toshiba, I might’ve inquired as to her math skills. Ah well.

That’s not the main house on the left there. It’s the kitchen, I think. The main house had bad lighting and wasn’t all that exciting anyway.

Cotton!

Supposedly this is the world’s oldest plantation that has been in continuous operation. It’s owned by the Hill-Carter family. Surely you’ve heard of them. It’s in its eleventh generation of ownership. The current heir lives in the top story. He’s used to having tourists take tours of the main story — that’s how he’s always known the home. When any woman in the family gets proposed to, she’s supposed to test the diamond by cutting something into the living room window. Etc.

It was a great day for being outside. Warm, but not hot, clear skies, gentle breeze. If Virginia were always like that, it’d be a hard place to not want to live, I figure.

Endut.

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