Cajun country

Although I lived in New Orleans for four years of medical school, I never made my way out into the swamps and bayous and backroads of southern Louisiana.  On this trip I wanted a true Cajun experience.

"Cajun" is a bastardization of "Acadian".  The Acadians were French settlers in Nova Scotia, Canada, who were kicked out by the British in 1755 when they were unwilling to swear allegiance to the crown.  After some time many of them were resettled in Louisiana and established a unique culture there - distinctive food, music, and language.  When I was a lad many of them spoke only a version of French.  Today everybody speaks English, but with an accent all their own.

Driving from New Orleans on Thanksgiving Eve, we got caught in the mother of all traffic jams around Baton Rouge.  Two hours to go 20 miles, which made it dark when we pulled into our campground, Poche's Fishing Camp in Breaux Bridge.

What a lovely spot it turned out to be!  A hundred nice campsites around a series of huge manmade lakes.  Great white egrets, mother and child, standing on an island in the center of the lake our motorhome overlooked.  Magnificent sunsets across the water.

The next day - Thanksgiving - the owners, who also run a restaurant, grocery, and specialty meat market a couple of miles away, asked some of their camping customers, including us, over to their house on the property for Thanksgiving lunch - deep fried turkey and all the trimmings.  This was to be a recurring theme - the friendliness, courtesy, and just plain niceness of the people here in southern Louisiana is amazing.

Cajun country is a different kind of place, foodwise.  Poche's meat market sold pork stomach, rabbit, alligator meat, boudin sausage, tasso ham, and a bunch of other specialties.  We bought some of the latter, which is the smokiest and most heavily seasoned ham I've ever tasted.

We stayed at the campground for six days and did a lot of tourist stuff.  We visited Shadows on the Teche, a plantation house.  We went to a restored Cajun village in Lafayette and watched a film about Acadian history.  We ate several po-boy sandwiches, all good, but none as delicious as the ones we had at the New Orleans Sandwich Company in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  We ate dinner at Prejean's, which features traditional Cajun music every night.  Their menu was spectacular, with at least twenty fascinating dishes listed.  The food that emerged, however, was tasty but not exceptional.  But whether we were blown away or disappointed by food or attraction, the experience was almost universally outstanding, because of the sweetness of the local people we were dealing with.  Incidentally, while most of the country folks have strong accents, many of the younger ones don't - especially in the city of Lafayette.  In fact, Nancy insulted our waiter at Prejean's restaurant by saying, "You sound like a Yankee!"

On the last full day in Breaux Bridge, we signed up for a swamp tour.  Believe it or not, it was bitterly cold when we arrived at 11 AM, and people had warned us that we wouldn't see much wildlife this time of year.  Our leader, Bryan Champagne, is a full blooded Cajun who's been doing these tours for fifteen years.  The eighteen of us took seats in a boat with an outboard motor, and before long we were in an almost surreal world, surrounded by cypress trees laden with Spanish moss.  Deep in the swamp Bryan spotted an alligator, only its head visible.  Bryan climbed out of the boat and began nudging the beast with an oar, causing it to thrash about spectacularly.

Surprisingly, there were lots of birds - great white egrets, magnificent great blue herons, cormorants, and others.  It was a great experience.

We all considered ourselves very lucky to have seen a wild alligator up close, but that afternoon, back at Poche's Fishing Camp, Nancy learned from our camp manager that Bryan isn't popular with the other swamp tour leaders - not only because he's financially successful, but because he feeds the alligators to make sure his customers have a good shot at seeing one - which they consider cheating.

The next morning we headed west toward San Antonio.  I had seen a lot of billboards advertising boudin and cracklins, which I had never tried, so before crossing the Texas border, we stopped at a truck stop and bought a boudin ball and cracklins.  Man, that's some good eating.  Cracklins are deep fried pork skin and pork fat, seasoned with cajun spices and sugar.  Boudin is a spicy Cajun sausage that includes rice, and a boudin ball is a tennis-ball-sized sphere of boudin that is deep fried.  In other words, health food.  We liked both so much that it's a good thing we didn't discover them earlier.

New Orleans

Our campground in New Orleans was the French Quarter RV Park, an upscale gated enclave surrounded by tall brick walls, two blocks from the Quarter. The clientele ran the gamut from million dollar Prevost coaches to a converted red schoolbus a Danish tour group had bought in Canada.

Nancy and I leashed up our dogs, and the four of us set off for the Quarter, walking past low income housing projects to get there.  I went to medical school at LSU in New Orleans and lived for two of those years in the Quarter.  It's always fun wandering the streets, checking out shops, people watching, and listening to street music.  I love the architecture and the energy of the city.  Even though all the businesses are tourist-oriented, there's still a charm there.

That evening I made a pilgrimage deep in the French Quarter to Paul Prudhomme's K-Paul's Restaurant, dragging Nancy along.  I got heavily into Cajun cooking some years back, using Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen as holy writ.  We enjoyed our dinners but it wasn't the knockout we were hoping for.

The next day, after the traditional bad beignets and cafe au lait at the French Market cafe, we talked with a lady in a welcome center about the possibility of driving out to tour the Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by Katrina back in 2005.  She was living not too far from that area at the time, and her home had been damaged, so she was a great source of information.

We drove through the Ninth Ward, which is a poor, mostly black area.  The homes didn't look quite as bad as I expected, the worst flood damage being interior, apparently.  There were a couple of streets with rows of pretty multicolored new homes, all elevated on posts, so a great deal of rebuilding is going on.

Nancy, our pop culture guru, told me that a few years ago Brad Pitt started a foundation that has been constructing a bunch of energy-efficient homes in the Ninth Ward, using his wealth to good purpose, and we wanted to get a look at a few of them.  We saw a very modern two story structure on eight foot posts that looked a little out of place in the neighborhood, and Nancy felt that this was the style Brad was going for.

We got out of the pickup and started walking up the street.  A young black guy - maybe 16 years old or so - emerged from the house and offered us three pralines for $5.  Nancy paid him and asked him if this was where Brad Pitt was building houses.  He told us that in fact this was the first home that Brad had built, and that he had met Brad.  "Nice guy?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, real nice.  And Angelina come along, too."

"How did she look?" I asked.  "Was she hot, or a little too old for you?"

"Hot," he said, sheepishly.

We asked him how high the water got in the neighborhood.  A hard looking white woman on the upstairs porch of Brad's first house called down, "Got up to 22 feet here.  A house in the neighborhood floated up off its foundation.  There was people in the trees waiting to be rescued."

The young praline salesman said, "My grandmother" - he indicated an elegant elderly black woman also up on the porch - "was trapped on the roof of her house for twelve hours.  Brad built that first house for her."

I asked if they felt that the levees had been fixed enough that they felt safe.  The grandmother said, "We sure hope so.  Have to trust in the Lord."

From the Ninth Ward we drove out along the levee and stopped at the Museum of the Battle of New Orleans, at the site where Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the War of 1812.  The ranger there helped us to understand how Katrina's storm surge had caused the flooding.

For our last night in New Orleans, we decided to walk to Antoine's and eat at its beautiful bar.  That's a walk of almost a mile, and since a few sprinkles had fallen, we took an umbrella.  About halfway there, the heavens opened and the Quarter flooded big time.  By the time we reached Antoine's, our shoes and clothes were soaked, and we didn't feel presentable.  So we returned to our campground, took warm showers, and Nancy made BLT's.  Can't eat any better than that.

Tallulah

I grew up on a farm outside Tallulah, a fairly prosperous middle-class farming community in northeastern Louisiana, and when I was about sixteen years old, we moved into a house my folks had built within the city limits.  I received my grammar and high school education in Tallulah.  The town's population then was evenly divided between black and white residents, with a railroad track the dividing line between the two.  That was during the segregation era, when there were separate drinking fountains, restaurants, and schools for white and black.  When my parents died, Nancy and I put my family home up for sale; that was in 1999, and I hadn't been back since. 

All my coming-of-age memories are from Tallulah, so I was really curious as to how it had changed in the years since I saw it last. 

We drove the twenty miles from Vicksburg and parked beside the house in which I spent my high school years.  Under the carport was a crowd of black people.  Some of them didn't look friendly.  Two dogs were with them - a Doberman and a pit bull mix.  There were four or five cars in the driveway, and things weren't neat and tidy.  Nancy and I walked over to the group, and I said, "How are y'all?  I grew up in this house, and twelve years ago we sold it to a minister."

An elderly man sitting in a chair and holding a cane smiled and said, "That's me!"  He told us that he had had a stroke a few months before, but even though his speech was not back to normal, he had missed only one week of preaching.  He and his wife had had ten children, nine of them still alive, and a bunch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  "Go get your mama," he told one of his sons.  A nice looking, sweet, somewhat younger woman came out in a nursing uniform.  "It was so nice of y'all to pay for the heater that went out when we bought the house," she said.  She asked for our address so they could keep in touch.  They seemed genuinely delighted that we had stopped by to say hello.

I asked the old gentleman, "How are things in Tallulah these days?"  "Not so good," he said.  "No jobs for the young people."  I didn't feel comfortable inquiring about current race relations.

As we walked away, he said, "God bless you, and have a safe trip."  I told them that we were headed for New Orleans.  Lot of sin in New Orleans, I pointed out, but Nancy assured them that we were going there for the food, not the sin.

I didn't see any white people in my old neighborhood.  We drove to the end of the street, to what had once been a nursing home.  It had become living quarters for migrant Latino farm workers.

We passed the long building within which I had attended both Tallulah Elementary School and Tallulah High School.  An impressive edifice at one time, it was now deserted and run down.

We next went to the Methodist church I attended as a boy, and I hoped to have a look at the elevator whose construction my mother had helped organize and which bore her name on a plaque.  No one was there; it didn't look well kept up.  I began to wonder if perhaps all the white people had fled the area.

Downtown Tallulah was never Rodeo Drive, but the main street had always had thriving businesses throughout its length.  Now only a few shops remained open.  Most of the storefronts were delapidated; some were boarded up.  It was a depressing sight.

It was obvious that the downtown area - and in fact everything on one side of the bayou that flows through town - was pretty much exclusively black now.  I said to Nancy, let's go over on the other side of the bayou, where the upscale homes have always been.  It wasn't long before we realized that the only people we saw walking in that area were black as well.  Unfortunately, the upkeep of those residences appeared to be deteriorating.  Further out, there were a few areas that were still largely white-dominated, as far as we could tell.  Tallulah is not much better integrated now than it was when I was a boy, and the people are poorer.  That makes me sad.

Wikipedia tells me that the total population hasn't changed much since I lived there - still about 10,000 - but the racial demographics of Tallulah are now 75% black and 25% white.  This is classic white flight, southern small town variety.

So the town of my childhood memories is gone.  It surely won't make a comeback during my lifetime.  Almost all the people I knew there have died or moved.  It's unsettlling.

The Natchez Trace

In order to get our inverter working again, we drove to Inverter Service Center in White House, Tennessee, over two hundred miles to the west, but sort of along the path we wanted to take.

A technician named Bobby met us when we pulled into their parking lot.  A serious young man, he was friendly but unsmiling.  We showed him where the inverter had been installed by the dealership after we bought the motorhome.  It's under our bed, which is hinged to allow access for storage.  He removed the inverter, took it to his workbench, and later called us over and said, "See those little blue dots?  That means that some moisture got into the unit, and Magnum will not warranty any inverter that shows evidence of moisture.  I have no idea how that could happen, where it's installed."  I thought about telling him that I sometimes wet the bed, but decided that he might not know I was joking. 
 
After sleeping on it, I suggested to Bobby that he re-install the inverter but disconnect the external A/C power supply, and we would replace the unit when we get back to California.  The logic is boring, so I won't go into it, except to say that the inverter was still functional on battery power but blew up whenever alternating current hit it.  Bobby thought that would work, and reinstalled the unit.  When I asked what we owed them, Bobby said, "Nothing.  We didn't fix it."  That was a new one on me.  I guess they do things a little differently in Tennessee.

White House, it turned out, is a suburb of Nashville.  The Natchez Trace, a 440 mile long highway that parallels the ancient trail between Nashville and Natchez, is part of the National Park system, and I'd always wanted to drive it.  It's two lanes all the way, with no shoulders and a 50 mph limit.  There are tall trees on both sides for almost the entire length, and the grass bordering the road looks manicured.  It's beautiful and restful and there was almost no traffic.

We had gone about a hundred miles on the trace and were rounding a left hand curve when something caught my eye in our left hand mirror - the side of the pickup truck we were towing.  When the road straightened out, the tow seemed to track okay, but aside from slow speed sharp turning maneuvers in parking lots, the pickup had never been visible in the rear view mirrors before.  I wanted to pull off and make sure everything was okay, but I had to wait for the next turnout, which was about five miles away.

The tow mechanism consists of two swivel arms that attach to a tow plate on the pickup.  One of those arms had come loose and was in two disconnected pieces.  Luckily the one remaining arm had kept the pickup from flying into the woods.

So the steady stream of motorhome glitches continued.  I called the nearest RV repair facility, which by coincidence carried the same brand of tow bars.  It turned out that the screw that holds the metal rod in place had either unscrewed or stripped, and the manufacturer honored the warranty in this case.  After a couple of hours we were on our way, with a brand new tow bar in place.

We continued our drive on the Natchez Trace and after entering Mississippi pulled in to a rest stop and took our dogs for a walk.  There was a man sitting in a car, a good old boy minding his own business, and Nancy, as is her habit, walked over and said hello.  In a strong country Mississippi accent he said that he was waiting to meet a man from Alabama who was bringing a coon hound that he might buy.  There was, in fact, going to be a coon dog competition in a couple of days which he wanted to participate in.  Each hound was expected to locate a raccoon, tree it, and bay in a proper manner, and it would be scored according to rules which he didn't enumerate.  I asked if it was too late to enter Tammy Faye and Sophia, and he said, no, the deadline wasn't until the following day, they would be welcome.

I told him that I had grown up in Tallulah, Louisiana but had never tasted raccoon and asked him if they did actually eat coons.  He said yes, indeed, you skin it and cut off the head and paws and then add spices and boil it for several hours with a couple of water changes.  It's important to remove four glands in the armpits and groin before cooking, or it'll smell too bad to eat.  If prepared properly, it's just like squirrel or chicken.  I told him I planned to shoot a raccoon when we got back to California and prepare it according to his recipe.

After almost 400 miles on the Natchez Trace, we cut across to Vicksburg, which is about twenty miles from my ancestral home, and we made camp at the Walmart there.

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

One of my favorite memories as a young boy was the time my family went tent camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  I especially enjoyed riding the white water of one of its many streams on an air mattress.  So I was anxious to visit the park again. 

We decided to make Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a town just a few miles to the west of the park, our tour headquarters.  On the map it looked like just an average burg, and about the only thing of substance we knew about it was that Dollywood, Dolly Parton's amusement park, was there. 

A couple of miles away from our campground, at around 4 PM, the traffic got heavy.  Los Angeles rush hour heavy.  As we crawled along, we took notice of some interesting establishments along the way.  A Titanic museum.  Hatfield and McCoy Dinner Theater.  Jurassic Jungle Boat Ride.  Christ in the Smokies.  An Elvis Museum.  Every fast food restaurant and amusement ride and outlet store ever franchised.  Mile after mile of that stuff.  In short, the greatest collection of entrepreneurial tackiness and bad taste I've ever seen.  Don't miss it if you get the chance.

After pulling into our campground, I plugged our electrical cable into the pedestal's 50 amp service.  There was a little flash, and the pedestal's circuit breaker was tripped.  That knocked out our TV and most of our wall outlets.  It turned out that our inverter (the component that takes house battery power and converts it into 120 volt, 60 cycle house current) had blown.  This meant that we had no television service - an obviously unacceptable situation for the little woman and myself, especially since there were two important football games coming up that weekend.  I came up with a temporary television fix by plugging an extension cord into the one working outlet in the living area. 

Our campground was a nice one, and with a discount offer we couldn't refuse, and a working TV set, we ended up staying there for five days. 

Every morning Nancy drove down to Krispy Kreme and brought back coffee and a doughnut for each of us.  We're still dealing with guilt over the calorie load.  Nancy said that the store was full of divorced women battling the heartbreak of obesity and talking about their divorces. 

The day after our arrival, a Saturday, we drove into the national park and headed toward Gatlinburg.  We couldn't understand why traffic was so horrible until we realized that this was the Veterans Day three day weekend.  Inside the park, it wasn't so crowded, and it was wonderful riding alongside the mountain streams that border many of the roads.  We went for a nice long walk with Tammy Faye and Sophia on the only trail where dogs are allowed.  Later in the day we saw a sign for an 11 mile scenic wildlife drive and turned onto that road, not realizing that it was one lane and filled with tourists who would stop at every rumor of bird or mammal, blocking everyone behind them.  There were times when we didn't move for five or ten minutes, and when we got a look at what everybody was stopping for, it was a few deer or a coyote.  Heck, we could have seen the same show on our front lawn back home.  It took us an hour and a half to complete the circuit.

Nancy has complained for months about her purse.  She dumps everything into it and has trouble quickly finding keys, cards, her phone, her camera, and everything else - because it has no divisions inside.  I told her that I wanted her to buy a great new purse that will make it easy to organize, expense no object.  In Pigeon Forge we passed a Handbag Superstore, and she found the purse of her dreams, at a price closer to K-Mart than Coach.  I'm a lucky man.

After a weekend during which I watched, on our motorhome TV, Stanford lose to Oregon and the 49ers beat the New York Giants, we drove back to the national park and stopped in Gatlinburg, which is a slightly upscale version of Pigeon Forge.  It has all sorts of attractions - Ripley's Believe It or Not, Guiness Book of World Records, and so on.  It also has some cute restaurants.  We had Shrimp Po-Boys at New Orleans Sandwich Company that were so good I don't think we'll find their match when we get down to the Big Easy.  The bread was remarkable, with a thin crunchy crust, and our waitress said it was an old family recipe brought from New Orleans and baked to their specs by a local grocery store. 

Just down the street we visited a working still and had a moonshine tasting.  We bought a Mason jar of Apple Pie moonshine, which was the least disgusting version.  For those fans of the TV show Justified, as we are, Apple Pie was also the moonshine flavor Mags used to poison somebody.  The price was outrageous, of course, as is the case with most tourist traps.

We enjoyed Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and the Smokies - but the traffic was so overwhelming that we probably won't be back anytime soon.

Biltmore

I mentioned the Biltmore Estate, the family home of George Vanderbilt, in the last blog entry.  You've all seen pictures of it.  It's a massive multi-towered, multi-gargoyled chateau that looks as if it was dropped here from medieval Europe.  The largest private home ever built in the US, it's the eastern counterpart to Hearst Castle, and was first occupied in 1895, about 30 years earlier than Hearst Castle.

We toured the house's interior late one afternoon, and almost had it to ourselves.  Naturally, the rooms were enormous and impressive.  Most of the furnishings were original, so it was easy to imagine me, Nancy, Tammy Faye, and Sophia as house guests of the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century.  Easy for me, anyway.  We were told that a month would be considered a short stay; most guests remained at the estate for several months.

The next morning Nancy and I hiked along a three or four mile path behind our campground that climbed steeply up to the mountain ridge.  We want to do more of that as the trip proceeds.

Later we returned to the Biltmore and walked through its gardens, after which we drove a mile or so to a commercial complex on the estate which consisted of a hotel, restaurants, gift shops, a museum (which was showing Tiffany lamps), and the Biltmore Estate winery.  The winery has a free tasting room for most of their wines, plus a premium counter for their best bottles.  Our pourer at the premium counter was very familiar with Santa Cruz and in fact she and her husband have rented a house in Carmel for a month this winter.  She mentioned having enjoyed going to the Bonny Doon tasting room up in the Santa Cruz mountains.  We told her that a different winery - Beauregard - had taken over the tasting room.  She let out a scream, which I thought was overreacting.  Then I looked around, and a somewhat inebriated elderly gentleman was lying on his back on the floor, having misjudged the interface between butt and chair bottom.  I sympathized; we've all been there.  After being hauled to his feet, he was able to exit the premises under his own power, with all the dignity he deserved.

Biltmore Estates has some really nice wines, at very reasonable prices.  We especially liked their Pinot Noir and Sangiovese.  They have a French winemaker.  Almost all their red wine grapes, and some of their whites, are grown in California and transported, unpressed, to North Carolina for processing.  They do grow a lot of white varietals on the estate, and all their sparkling wines are locally grown.  Based on limited experience, we liked the North Carolina wines better than the Virginia ones, and bought a mixed case, more red than white.

We wanted an Asheville dining experience and made reservations at the Corner Kitchen in Biltmore Village, which advertises itself as featuring innovative Southern cuisine.  It's a converted residence, with a few tables in each of several rooms.  We both enjoyed their great soups.  I ordered pecan-crusted river trout and Nancy had a couple of pretty good appetizers.  I came away convinced that you can dine very well in Asheville.

As we were leaving, we noticed pictures of Barack Obama on the restaurant wall.  The owner told us that a year earlier he had gotten a call one night from the Secret Service saying that the president and first lady would be arriving in twenty minutes for dinner, for a reservation made earlier under a different name.  The president was friendly and gracious.  His main course was mahi-mahi with cocoanut rice; Michelle's was a pork chop with molasses sauce.  They had wine with dinner and tipped generously.  We Americans love stories of the rich and famous.

The next morning we left Asheville and headed toward the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Mama Gerties had turned out to be our favorite campground so far.  And Asheville left us with a very favorable impression, as a place where a couple slightly past their prime could live quite comfortably if circumstances led them to that part of the world.

Asheville, NC

A nice ride along the upper Blue Ridge Parkway - overcast, no snow, fall colors fading but pretty views, very few cars - and we pulled into Mama Gertie's Campground outside Asheville. This part of North Carolina is absolutely beautiful this time of year, even though the foliage isn't as spectacular as it must have been a few weeks ago.

Asheville was one of several cities in America that we targeted before our trip as a possible future place to live, if we ever left Santa Cruz. It's in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, so it doesn't get as hot in the summer as most of the south. It has the reputation of being extremely liberal compared to most of the old South. There are several colleges there, and an impressive concert schedule. It sounded promising.

We began by taking a trolley tour of the city. Our driver was a foghorn-voice fellow whose night job is bass player in a bluegrass band. The first place we visited was Montford, an elegant big money neighborhood with mansions and estates everywhere, several magnificent hotels, and a fascinating history.

Thomas Wolfe grew up there and wrote his great book Look Homeward Angel about life in the area. It is said that half the citizens were outraged at how they were depicted, and the other half were disappointed that they weren't included. There's a big Thomas Wolfe museum in Montford.

The trolley took us by Highland Hospital. F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda died there in 1948 when the psychiatric hospital in which she was confined burned to the ground.

We passed the Montford house in which William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey trial, lived. Nancy asked our tour guide if evolution is taught in the schools locally. He laughed and said, yes, of course – but that creationism is also a part of the curriculum.

Downtown Asheville has some nice neighborhoods and a lot of interesting restaurants. We hopped off and had sandwiches at Paul Boudreaux's Bar-B-Que for lunch. Our waiter was part of a band that had played a couple of times at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz. Almost every day on our trip we've encountered somebody who has been to Santa Cruz and remembers it fondly.

Another Asheville neighborhood is Biltmore Village, a community that grew up near the famous Biltmore Estate, built by George Vanderbilt in 1895, the largest private residence in the US, an attraction that we planned to visit during our stay. That concluded our trolley tour. It was a good introduction to Asheville.

Back at Mama Gertie's campground, with time pressure off, Nancy and I enjoyed wandering among the RV's and talking with our fellow travelers, especially those with dogs. I don't know if it was the beauty of the campground or the nice weather or the southern ambiance or simply our more relaxed outlook, but we found ourselves making friends more easily than elsewhere. We went to a pizza joint with an older (read, our age) couple from Texas – he a former park ranger, and we had a younger couple (by a few years) – he a retired HP programmer - over for appetizers and chocolate martinis and talk deep into the night.   Nancy and I are sliding comfortably into the trailer park lifestyle.  My southern accent is coming back, y'all.

Thomas Jefferson

The Elks Lodge in Waynesboro, VA has two electrical hookups for RV's, and the only cost to us was whatever contribution we chose to make to the lodge.  We grabbed one of the sites and stayed there for two days in order to explore the area.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president, designed and built his home - Monticello - outside nearby Charlottesville, VA in a neoclassical Renaissance style.  It's quite beautiful.  It includes a number of rooms that are at least partially octagonal and it is topped by a dome.  Most of the bricks and some of the furnishings are original.  All through the place are examples of Jefferson's creativity - a dumbwaiter for wine bottles, an articulated gadget that made copies of all his writings as he made them, a pendulum clock with faces visible from both inside and outside the building, and many others.

Although he was philosophically opposed to slavery, Jefferson owned a large number of enslaved individuals, presumably because he could see no practical alternative for getting the estate's work done.  The Hemmings family was the leading slave clan during his time there, and you may remember the controversy about the possibility that he was intimately involved with Sally Hemmings, who became pregnant and presumably delivered his child.  Since Jefferson's wife had died many years earlier, Thomas gets a hall pass from me if he did indeed have carnal knowledge of Sally Hemmings, assuming that there was honest affection between the parties.  For whatever that's worth.

After the formal tour, Nancy and I explored the extensive basement level, which is where the slaves lived and worked, including kitchen duties.  We walked the lovely grounds and visited Jefferson's grave. 

Jefferson also founded the University of Virginia, which is visible from Monticello, and designed most of its architecture.  I couldn't help wondering how it was that there were so many truly great men among our founding fathers and so few today in government who are even competent. 

Incidentally, Jefferson, having spent some years in France, was probably the leading American wine connoisseur of his time.  He tried unsuccessfully to establish a vineyard near Monticello, but some of that acreage is currently being used to grow grapes, and there are twenty or so boutique wineries in the Wayesboro/Charlottesville area today, with new ones springing up all the time as if it were California.  Virginia is the fifth leading producer of wine in the US, trailing California, Washington, Oregon, and New York.  We did a wine tasting at Jefferson Winery nearby and bought a bottle of Meritage.  Viognier and Cabernet Franc seem to be featured more and Cabernet Sauvignon less than out west.  Our impression of Virginia wines - based on limited evaluation - is that they tend to have good noses but lack virility in the area of taste at this point and are somewhat overpriced compared to the West Coast product.  Still, it's exciting to see another state making serious wines.

Snowstorm

Partly because our motorhome was delivered to us almost two months later than promised, we had been under some degree of time pressure ever since we drove away from Ben Lomond.  We had to be in Pennsylvania in October to help Nancy's parents move to a senior facility, and we hoped - and tragically failed - to meet friends in Maine.  With Ren and Dottie squared away in their new digs, we suddenly had a lot more freedom to slow down, to explore, to be observers of the American way of life in its regional variety, to interact with our fellow citizens.

But first we needed to deal with our leveling jacks, which continued to perform unreliably, and we made an appointment with a repair facility at an RV dealership in southern Pennsylvania.  On the way there, snow began to fall.  By the time we reached the repair shop Saturday morning, visibility wasn't very good, and snow was already accumulating on the ground.

A technician reset the leveling reference point and pronounced us cured.  With the weather looking worse and worse, we decided to stay overnight at the adjacent campground run by the dealership.  So we turned on our electric fireplace and curled up on the sofa with Sophia and Tammy Faye and watched television as the snow continued to fall and the temperatures dropped.  Nancy and I had both dreamed of evenings like this - freezing cold outside, warm and cozy inside the motorhome.  Heaven!

We awoke to a winter wonderland, with four or five inches of snow on the ground.  The sun was out and the world was beautiful.  Our dogs had never seen snow before but seemed to enjoy walking and playing and peeing in it.  News reports said that this was abnormally early for an East Coast snow storm, and that hundreds of thousands of residents of New England and Pennsylvania were without power.  Nancy's sister Julie was one of them.

We located a sports bar - Buffalo Wild Wings - nearby and drank beer and ate disgusting and delicious tailgate-type food while watching the 49ers whup Cleveland.

Heading toward Asheville, North Carolina, we took the scenic route.  We entered the Shenandoah National Park and drove almost the entire length of Skyline Drive, a magnificent road that runs in Virginia along the ridge of the Shenandoah Mountains.  There was still wonderful foliage color, and with snow covering the landscape, and jawdropping views of the hills and valleys below, it was one of the prettiest drives I could ever remember.  And we had time to enjoy the scenery - speed limit was 35 mph for the entire hundred miles or so. 

I wanted to visit Monticello, the home designed by Thomas Jefferson, so we stopped for the night in Waynesboro, Virginia, at an Elks Lodge.  You may recall that I am a proud member of that proud fraternal organization.

Ren and Dottie

Nancy's parents, Ren and Dottie, 92 and 89 years old, had decided some months earlier to move into a senior citizen's facility in Downeytown, PA, in order to have meals provided, a safer bathroom, and 24-hour front desk availability in case of emergency.  Nancy and I wanted to help them move.  A couple of weeks ago, in a previous episode of this blog, we did some preliminary assistance, though to be honest we did more visiting than packing at that time.

From Massachusetts we headed toward Pennsylvania, but stopped off at a motorhome repair facility in Sewell, New Jersey, to take care of the mechanical issues that had arisen in our coach.  While they worked on our unit, Nancy and I and the dogs drove the pickup truck to Atlantic City.  When Nancy was a child, she and her family went there on vacation, and one of her favorite memories was watching the famous diving horses, ridden by young women, who leaped from a high platform into a relatively shallow pool beside the boardwalk. 

Our first stop was the Borgata Hotel, supposedly the newest and fanciest casino in Atlantic City.  We parked in their garage, intending to leave Tammy Faye and Sophia in our pickup while we explored the hotel and its restaurants and gaming rooms for a little while.  As we were walking toward the entrance, a security guard drove up and informed us that the hotel did not allow dogs to be left in vehicles.  So we left.  Our critters may well have saved us a fair amount of coin.

We ended up strolling the boardwalk on a rainy afternoon.  It's lined by casinos, gift shops, restaurants, and every kind of tourist trap you can imagine.  This was offseason and many of the booths and stores were closed.  But it was fun, especially since one of our favorite TV shows is Boardwalk Empire.

Upon returning to the repair shop, the malfunctioning furnace turned out to be due to spider webs, we were told.  The steps were repaired, so that we no longer had to physically pull ourselves up to floor level.  The biggest problem they worked on was the leveling mechanism, and they appeared to fix that as well, by replacing the front leveling jacks.  So as we drove away we felt that we had a new motorhome again.

Once again we stayed in the Walmart parking lot near both Ren and Dottie's old apartment and their new one.  This time we - Nancy's brother Rennie, his daughter Melissa, Nancy's sister Julie, Nancy, and I - worked hard, packing and transporting boxes to the new place and preparing things for the moving company that was scheduled to transport the furniture. 

Ren, a former engineer, drew a detailed floor plan of the new apartment and placed numbered furniture diagrams where each would go.  He attached a numbered label - 1 to 52 - to each piece of furniture so that the movers would know where to place it. Those pieces which didn't fit in the new apartment got a "B" label so that the movers would put them in basement storage.   According to the movers, this was a unique plan - but a good one.  And it worked well.

We the grunts spent several more days carrying over the remaining items and helping to arrange things in Ren and Dottie's new home - unpacking the boxes and putting their contents away.  I hung pictures and tried to make sure that all the pathways were as clear as possible, for safety's sake.  Nancy did a great job of organizing her mother's clothing and supplies.  Melissa cleaned the old apartment so that the security deposit would be returned.  Moving to a new place is always exhausting, but all in all, not a bad job.  We're glad we could help.

After an emotional farewell, Nancy and I returned to our motorhome and made plans to head south, toward the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.