#24 Coveys Great Adventure - May 2016 – Charleston, Milledgeville, Birmingham, Murphy, Blue Ridge Parkway, Fayetteville Blowing Springs, Morgantown-

May 2016 – Charleston, Milledgeville, Birmingham, Murphy, Blue Ridge Parkway, Fayetteville Blowing Springs, Morgantown

Yes, it has been a very busy month. We took advantage of the Kendrick’s generosity and stayed another week in their lovely site at the Hilton Head Island Motorcoach Resort. It was really tough to put aside the luxuries of resort living, but we finally pulled in the slides and hit the road on May 9^th headed to Charleston, SC.

Lake Aire's greeter

Lake Aire RV Park is in Hollywood, about 17 miles from downtown Charleston. The park left a bit to be desired, especially after spending two weeks in HHIMR! Charlie had suggested that we stay at the James Island State Park campground, but our Passport America discount made Lake Aire slightly less expensive. Well, Charlie was right. We drove through the James Island campground and it was much, much nicer than Lake Aire. Plus, the traffic in Charleston is pretty bad and any money we saved just wasn’t worth it. Next time we’ll take his advice.

We enjoyed Charleston. The downtown historic district is quite attractive. Unlike many Southern cities, it survived the Civil War intact and has many lovely Ante Bellum houses and neighborhoods. A horse-drawn carriage tour is a great way to see the historic district. Our driver/guide turned out to be a southern history buff and raconteur of considerable skill. She has been giving these tours for almost 20 years and there wasn’t a building that we passed that she didn’t know intimately. We also enjoyed Market Street which has (wait for it) a large market. We left a few dollars to prop up the local economy. 

Of course we had to take the tour boat to Fort Sumter where the opening shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861. The National Park Service has done a good job preserving the fort and presenting what sounded like a pretty balanced account of the reasons behind the secession movement, the backgrounds of several of the key players and the events leading up to the attack itself. It turned out to be a pretty somber experience, especially in the context of the bloody years that followed. After three nights at Lake Aire it was time to head east.

Why Milledgeville, GA? We were looking for a place to stay to break up the next leg of out trip. Birmingham, AL, is too far from Charleston to drive in one day unless you leave at o-dark hundred and flog it down the interstates. As you know by now that isn’t how we like to travel, so we looked for a spot roughly half way between the two cities and Kayeanne spotted Milledgeville on the map. Scenic Mountain RV Park got great reviews and had reasonable rates so we made a reservation. The park exceeded our expectations and the town turned out to be pretty interesting.

Milledgeville was the original capital of Georgia from statehood until the end of the War. The local historical society offers guided tours of the town and we signed up. Our guide, Joe, was born and raised nearby and graduated from Georgia Military College which took over the capital buildings when the seat of government moved to Atlanta. Joe knows more about the local history than anyone could possibly want to know, but we had a good time.

The reason we headed back to Alabama was that I had a senior moment on the way to Florida a couple of months ago and forgot all about the Barber Motorsport Museum in Leeds, AL, just east of Birmingham. BMM is the largest motorcycle collection in the country, housed in a world class facility next to a race track I’d love to ride someday. BMM owns over 1,000 bikes and displays roughly 700 at any time. The museum also houses one of the most complete Lotus race car collections in the world. The bike and automobile collections are constantly growing and a new exhibition building is nearing completion.

One of the highlights for me was the John Surtees exhibit. Surtees is the only man to win world championships on motorcycles and in Formula One race cars. He went on to build F1 cars and win another world championship as a constructor.

One morning Kayeanne dropped me at Barber and headed off to Birmingham for the day. To say that Barber has motorcycles is to say that dogs have fur. Walking in the front door the first thing you see are four columns of bikes stretching five stories high. And then it gets better. Old bikes, new bikes, significant bikes, common bikes, legendary successes and spectacular failures sit side by side with the most prosaic bikes designed solely for cheap transportation. What impressed me was how many were not restored at all, but were in original, albeit

Moto-crack: 1974 Ducati 750SS

very good, condition. Every bike there looked like it would start and run, some even leaked oil. Six hours later I emerged into the sunshine, still dazzled by the sheer magnitude of the collection. I’d gladly return to see the expanded exhibits that the new building will deliver. Unfortunately my camera quit shortly after I arrived, because I forgot to charge it. Urrrgh!

Kelly Ingram Park

While I was at the Barber Museum, Kayeanne visited Kelly Ingram Park in the Civil Rights District where the Freedom Marches took place in 1963.  She noted, "A collection of sculptures interpret the events that took place during this turbulent period.  Although the Civil Rights Institute was closed because it was Monday, you can use your cell phone to take an audio tour through the entire district.  As you punch in the numbers listed on the trail plaques, you are given a detailed description of each historical event.  It's very well-done and informative, and well worth your time if you're in the area."

After our detour to Birmingham it was time to head north. Rather than return to the coast, we decided to travel through Appalachia and the Pocono’s, then across NY to New England. Our first stop was Murphy, NC, about 100 miles west of Asheville at Persimmon Creek Campground. PCC is built into an organic farm that grows mushrooms, raises chickens for the eggs and breeds Nubian goats. The owners live on site and do it all themselves.

The campground is very small, only a dozen spaces for RVs and about 20 tent sites. We bought shitake mushrooms and very fresh eggs from our hosts and both were delicious, we should have bought more before we left.

Murphy turned out to be a neat town. It is a summer destination for hiking, rafting and off roading, but we were a little early in the season, so it wasn’t crowded. The Downtown Bakery serves great sandwiches on freshly baked  bread and didn’t mind us hanging out to use the internet. Ingles Supermarket was a pleasant surprise, one of the nicest we’ve shopped in a while.

We both wanted to visit the Blue Ridge Parkway so the next stop was Doughton Park campground near Sparta, NC. This is an older, tight campground with no hookups in really gorgeous country. It took some maneuvering to get into our space, but it was worth it.

The BRP is one of the best uses of tax funds I have seen, right up there with the Kennedy Space Center. It winds almost 500 miles through some of the most scenic country in the US, each vista seemingly better than the last. It is well maintained, clean, quiet and commercial vehicles are banned. It has got to be one of the great motorcycle roads in the country.

One day we went 60 miles south on the Parkway to the Parkway Craft Center located in the Moses Cone Manor House. Cone Manor is the 20-room mansion that the Cone family built on 3500 acres in 1901. Unfortunately the house tours were not scheduled that day, but the craft center was worth the trip. Every piece in the place was hand made by North Carolina crafts persons and were in aggregate some of the best work we have seen. Ceramics, jewelry, glass, wood, textiles, printing, drawing and painting were all presented in a very attractive gallery setting that made shopping a pleasure, something I don’t usually enjoy at all. Don’t miss it if you are in the area.

I don’t remember why we happened to pick Fayetteville, WV, as our next stop, but we decided to take a look. I spotted Rifrafters Campground on the web and it turned out to be a neat, pretty funky place built single-handedly by Randy, a former coal miner, in his “spare time” over an 8 year period. It has RV and camping sites, and a few rustic cabins on a pretty hilly 52 acre site just outside of town. Randy single-handedly cleared the land, graded the sites, put in the utilities, built most of the buildings and now cuts the grass. As you might expect, he is a real character and fascinating to talk to.

Fayetteville was interesting, but not worthy of being called “the Coolest Small Town of 2011”, as the signs around town proclaimed. Most of the services and shops are in Oak Hill, a few miles down the road. The Secret Sandwich Shop in Fayetteville did serve great fries and cheap beer and wine for a nice happy hour one afternoon. The New River Gorge Bridge is just up the road and well worth the time to visit. When built it was the longest single-span arch bridge in the world, it is now the third longest.

We tend to lose track of holidays, so Memorial Day caught us without reservations. That is a no-no unless you want to spend a couple of days hanging out in Walmart parking lots or at truck stops. Randy was sold out, so after a little frantic web work and some phone calls we found the Blowing Springs NFS campground. It’s actually in VA, way off in the sticks about 40 miles from White Sulfur Springs, WV. All sites there are first-come, so we got an early start to be sure we got there before all the sites were taken. Blowing Springs is a beautiful, primitive campground along a shallow river. Our site was huge, one of the largest we’ve ever seen, so we settled in for a couple of days.

We passed through WSS on the way to the campground and agreed that we wanted to return for a closer look. WSS is best know as the home of the Greenbrier mega-resort, but the little town itself caught our eye, too. The Greenbrier is so big that visitors have to park in remote lots and take trams to the facility. That was more hassle than we wanted to deal with, so just focused on the town. Memorial Day meant that there were food carts, craft vendors and good street music. We spent a couple of pleasant hours looking around, nibbling and enjoying the music.

Since leaving Birmingham we have been aiming for southwestern Pennsylvania and Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature design, Falling Waters. There are no campgrounds near Falling Waters, but Coopers Rock State Forest outside of Morgantown, WV, was close enough. Coopers Rock was a bit of a tight fit for a coach like ours, but we made it into site 15. Despite being way out in the woods, we were pleasantly surprised to get several OTA channels and useful cell service.

Morgantown is home to West Virginia University, but unlike other college towns we have been to and enjoyed, we didn’t see the kind of cultural impact that makes the city more vibrant and interesting. The campus was very nice, but we didn’t see that the areas around it had been much effected by it. It is almost like the two coexist but don’t have much to say to each other. Morgantown has good shopping, though, so we took advantage of that.

You may recall our visit to Taliesin West in February. We were so taken with it that we joined the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and decided to visit as many FLW buildings as we can this year. We have been looking forward to seeing Falling Waters for months. It didn’t disappoint in any way. 80 years later it is still easy to see why this one design catapulted Wright to worldwide celebrity and dramatically influenced architecture forever. He was 67 and semi-retired when he received the commission to design Falling Waters in 1935. Before his death in 1959, he and his associates went on to design over 400 buildings throughout the world. We are looking forward to visiting several other FLW sites during our travels.

More soon,

Bob