Do Elephants Lay Eggs?

For a day with an itinerary reading “ribs, Cardinals game” today we managed to cobble together a full slate of St. Louis-iciousness – and one that again left us both thoroughly exhausted. Again we found ourselves walking more than we expected, although we didn’t come anywhere near the 12 miles (Lindsay did the math) that we’d covered in Chicago. And, mercifully, it didn’t rain.

After the Morning After

 North Carolina comes through again. Having trudged through 200 miles of fog yesterday all through Virginia – your remember Virginia: my least-favorite state due to its questionable politics, overeager state troopers, those ugly-named suburbs of DC, and Shenandoah National Fog Park – I awoke today to a Virginia invasion across its southern border. In other words, Wildcat Rock was still enveloped quite thickly in fog. In fact, after turning out all the car lights last night the fog still seemed to glow even though there weren't any signs of civilization for miles. Spooky.

With no Plan B, I just kept on going down the Blue Ridge Parkway, knowing that the forecast called for “AM clouds / PM sun” and that the road would be rising higher than in Virginia, which might put me above the fog. Apparently I also had the sun on my side, as it burned off all of the fog by the time I stopped in Boone (yes, a real place name – as is “Gooch Gap”) at 9:00. Of course, by that point I had reached the one stretch of the Parkway that I was able to drive last year so there was nothing new to see. I was even there at the same time of day.

A Thoroughfare for Freedom Beat

This is a public service announcement to all Canadian taxpayers: Your government has been stealing from you.

You pay the equivalent of over $4.50 a gallon for gasoline, much of it taxes, yet you have the highway infrastructure of a third world country. Either your government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse (more than even the US government), or the Trans-Canada Highway (which, as far as I can tell is not yet complete) is being built across the most hostile terrain ever encountered by road makers. I’m skeptical about the latter, since they manage to make roads out of ice every year. So boreal forest can’t be that tough to build on.

Yet there I was, paying $63 for a tank of gas when I’d never before paid more than $50, and yet every local road I took until mercifully limping onto the big 104 was as unpaved as unpaved could be. I’d call them dirt roads, but dirt would have been a welcome alternative to the ridiculousness I encountered.

The World’s Your Oyster Shell, But What’s that Funny Smell

Whenever I’m on these adventures, as I think of something I want to remember to mention in that night’s entry, I use the iPhone Notes app to write myself… well, a note, as the thought hits me. The stuff left from last summer’s note includes “open space, self-determination, no deadlines, only chance.” Today, I only wrote down one word: “Punished.”

Snow & Opulence

Really only one thing happened today: The Appalachian mountains became larger, closer, and more picturesque; going from this:

 to this.

In Eli We Trust

“Caution: mountain weather changes rapidly.” If you spend enough time perusing any National Park Service webpage you’re bound to come across this warning. I know what it usually means – that storm you see way off in the distance will be on you much sooner than you think and it will be more severe than you expect, so be prepared. In general, I do come prepared for such eventualities, entering parks with a full tank of gas, an emergency blanket (Thanks, Zach’s Bar Mitzvah), something to start a fire, and enough food to last the rest of my trip. But there’s one thing that I have never brought and today it finally came back to bite me: A backup plan.