{"id":10045,"date":"2021-04-28T09:27:03","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T13:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=10045"},"modified":"2021-04-28T09:27:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T13:27:06","slug":"tn7-hop-8-wake-forest-nc-to-dumfries-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/28\/tn7-hop-8-wake-forest-nc-to-dumfries-va\/","title":{"rendered":"TN7 Hop 8: Wake Forest NC to Dumfries VA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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TN7 Hop 8<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

230 miles via NC 96, I-85, I-95 and VA 234. Cumulative tow miles: 1459. Truck miles: 321. Cumulative truck miles: 2095. The extra truck miles were primarily due to the lunch I had with Mary Markunas, an old friend that I had not seen for over 40 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was a very pleasant trip in beautiful weather, mostly on I-85 which is now on my list of favorite roads: flat, smooth and little truck traffic. However the trip was marred by two unpleasant incidents. The first was a violent disagreement between the GPS and Google. The Google route was 223 miles and took me to I-85 via US 1. The GPS’s preferred route was 274 miles and I didn’t even bothet to look at the details as that was unnecessarily long. So I started on the Google route and the GPS route was soon down under 240 miles. However, it was insistent that I not go on US 1. It advised me at least 20 times to turn or do a U-turn. The last time I encountered this kind of GPS obstinancy – in 2017, south of Buffalo – it was correctly detecting a low bridge on the route. This made me very nervous so I eventually caved in and took NC 96 to I-85 rather than US 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am going to have to take a close look at that US 1 segment and see if the GPS was right to object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second unpleasant incident occurred about 40 miles from Dumfries on I-95. I let a large tow truck merge onto the road in front of me and it thanked me by immediately propelling a large stone into my windshield, cracking it. At first it was just a star but but the time I got to Dumfries it was a full-fledged crack. I will have to get the windshield replaced, either in Dumfries or when I get to MA. The crack is on the passenger side to it doesn’t interfere with my vision of the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should also mention that before I left Wake Forest I had to climb onto the roof to reposition a piece of slide weather stripping that had slipped out of place. I discovered, on the roof, a large number of scrapes in the rubber roofing material. At some point on this trip I must have encountered some low-hanging branches. These scrapes are minor, but I will have to spend an afternoon patching them sometime this summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the first two “dings” on the trip. Not bad, really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My home in Wake Forest was the Holly Point Campground, part of the state-run Falls Lake State Recreation Area<\/a>. I usually favor commercial campgrounds as I am never sure what I am going to find in a state campground. In this case the surprise was a pleasant one: the sites were HUGE and very secluded – lots of space between the sites. Although I didn’t use them, the campground also has a very nice bathhouse and beach on the lake. This is a very nice campground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The beach in the morning<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I did embarrass myself, though. I had picked a site which looked to be larger that most (before I knew how large the other sites were) and, surprisingly, was one of the very few pull-through sites in the campground. But did I take advantage of it? No, I did not. First, I passed the entrance and rather than back up to the entrance decided to back into the site. Then I decided that I was oriented incorrectly, with the utilities on the wrong side (I wasn’t), so I turned around and backed in from the other end. Only to discover that I was now incorrectly oriented. So I pulled out, turned around again and backed in from the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took me about 30 minutes to get positioned in a pull-through site. After 8 years on the road I should have done much better. Embarrassing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The embarrassing pull-through<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I had redemption of sorts in Dumfries – I backed into a fairly difficult site on a single try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman that I had lunch with on Monday – Mary Markunas – was married for many years to one of my best college friends and had two lovely daughters with him. He died young, but after they divorced. I have many fond memories of the times my first wife and I had with them, including a wonderful week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina which included my one-and-only flounder gigging <\/a>expedition with Bob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I lost touch with them after they moved to NC and hadn’t spoken to her in 40 years. But since I was going to be near Chapel Hill – where they lived when I lost touch – I thought I would see if she might still be in the area. Surprisingly, I found a telephone number for her almost immediately and, even more surprisingly, she answered on the first ring. We agreed to meet for lunch at the Umstead Hotel<\/a> in Cary. When I looked at the menu for the restaurant there I nearly threw a shoe – EXPENSIVE! But we dined on the patio at the bar which, though still pricey, was not outrageously so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had a lovely 2.5-hour lunch and pretty much caught up on each other’s lives. I would call it totally successful and satisfying except that I got a sunburned face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A winter in Florida with 2 softball games every week and no sunburn, but a lunch in NC does me in. Go figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

230 miles via NC 96, I-85, I-95 and VA 234. Cumulative tow miles: 1459. Truck miles: 321. Cumulative truck miles: 2095. The extra truck miles were primarily due to the lunch I had with Mary Markunas, an old friend that I had not seen for over 40 years. This was a very pleasant trip in … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,4,7,5,98,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nc","category-places","category-routes","category-rvparks","category-tn7","category-places-va"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-2C1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10045"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10052,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10045\/revisions\/10052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}