NC Mountains 2014 - Days 1 & 2

Day 1 - Friday 8/8/14      We departed at 6:24AM for our much anticipated annual trip to the N.C. Mountains. Our first stop is Tom Johnson’s RV Center and campground in Marion N.C. to attend the N.C. Bluegrass/Gospel Festival that will start next Thursday 8/14/14 and run three days. We arrived at 1PM and checked in. I had called a few days ago about getting a N.C. state inspection on the motor home when we arrived and before we set up in our site. While they were doing the inspection we ate lunch at TJ’s Café in the service center. They always have a good fish plate on Fridays for $6.00. They finished the inspection just as we were finishing up our lunch. Then we set up in our reserved site #35. We had this site in 2013 and booked it last year for 2014 when we were here. As long as we book it before October 1st of the year we can get this site for the festival the following year. This will be the 4th year we have attended the festival.

It had rained a slow drizzle for the last 2 hours of our drive. I had cleaned the motor home and car (“toad”) and they were nice and shiny when we left home but the rain fixed that. But if that is all the problems we have on a trip I won’t complain.

We drove into the town of Marion to a local (non-chain) grocery store to purchase some of their breakfast sausage. We discovered this store 3 years ago after eating breakfast at a local restaurant. We liked the sausage they served and asked the waitress where they got it, so she gave us directions to the grocery store. We found out today that it is made on Wednesday in the store and is sold out by Saturday each week. We purchased three 1 lb packages.

The rain had stopped by the time we returned to the campground so we set outside until about dark.

Day 2 - Saturday 8/9/14 After a morning walk and breakfast we drove to the Linville area to check out the RV site we had rented for 7 days after we leave here on the 17th. The site is located in Land Harbor, an area with lots of mountain vacation cottages, etc. The owner has three sites set up for Rvs. After checking out the site we decided to cancel our reservations. The streets up to the site had several low hanging small limbs that would have hit the top of our MH and then the narrow street to the RV site had a very sharp curve to the left just as we would have had to turn right into the site which was slightly uphill. I just did not feel comfortable that I could get the MH into the site without some possible problems/damage and I have put it into some fairly tight sites but nothing like this one. We will forfeit our $100 deposit but that might be cheaper than fixing possible damage. I have had a gut feeling ever since I reserved this site that something was not quite right - so my gut was right. Then we checked out another regular campground in the area as a possible replacement.

Afterwards we drove for several miles South on the Blue Ridge Parkway and then went to Black Mountain to checkout their Sourwood Festival. The temperature was 66 degrees on the parkway and in several places the fog was really bad. At the festival we listen to some of the entertainment and watched the cloggers and checked out some of the craft booths and bought some local sourwood honey before heading back to our CG just before the sky opened up again with rain and more rain.