Every day (and blog entry) needs to start with breakfast, and today's breakfast of champions was brought to us by the good people of Waffle House, where the coffee is bottomless and the music is played at deafening levels. The price was good and so was the location, only 20 metres from our hotel rooms, so all in all not a bad breakfast experience.
Once our bellies were full of waffles and bacon we set off again for the Blue Ridge Parkway, today the views were less than spectacular, in fact they were non-existent, it was a little foggy to say the least. We did not heed the signs that read to avoid the parkway in heavy fog so we plowed onto our first stop, which the guide book informed us would be a good walk, after seeing how long it was we decided against the walk, and continued on to our next stop at the Mabry Flour Mill where the coffee was bad and the average age of the visitors was about 83.
After pulling away from Mabry, it started to get really foggy I could only see about 3 metres in front of the car, so we all thought it would be a good idea to pay attention to the signs and actually pull off the parkway to get some lunch. The first town we came to was a little place called Mount Airy, and I could hear the banjos.
Sam saw a sign for a £3.99 cookout so we plugged this into the GPS and away we went. This was an unusual but very tasty experience, on the menu they had a variety of BBQ items, 48 different milkshakes and something called hush puppies. Amy asked one of the locals what these were, at first she was looked at like a crazy person but after some gentle persuasion he confirmed that they were like little balls of fried bread, they were not that great, the BBQ meat however was fantastic.
As the parkway was still out of action we took the interstate to our next port of call, Boone, and another night at a camping ground, not Yogi Bear this time but KOA, and this time we didn't have the place to ourselves. The day was still young so to fill in the remainder it was decided we would have some retail therapy at the local outlet mall, before heading out for a fancy dinner at The Gamekeeper, apparently in the top 50 restaurants in the USA.
The shopping went by without a hitch however on the drive to the Gamekeeper we hit a bit of a snag, the return of the mist, and this time the visibility was down to about 1 metre. At one point we didn't think we were going to make it to the restaurant on time, but after a prayer was said in the back of the car the fog parted (or it might have been that we drove out of it). The Gamekeeper lived up to its billing as a great restaurant, with it's slightly eclectic dishes, I can now tick rattlesnake off my 'to eat' list.
After a fantastic meal we drove back to the campground (which felt a bit weird going back to the super budget accommodation after such a fancy meal) under a clear sky, we were hoping that it would stay that way for tomorrows continued adventure along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Beer of the day: 4 Loco watermelon - terrible, tasted like bad watermelon perfume. Took 4 of us to drink one can.
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