BARBECUE & A QUILTING ADVENTURE; NEARLY MADE IT TO MAINE! (Cheri)

One of the hardest things for me to leave when we moved from the Monterey Peninsula was Gail Abeloe's Back Porch Fabrics.  I tried to talk her into selling the shop to me, but she said she was just having too much fun to quit yet.

Today was the first day of the All Carolinas Shop Hop, so we took it as an excuse to head out on a jaunt, to a quilt shop and more.

This shop isn't typical for North Carolina, but it certainly provides some contrast!

After wandering down this lane, we parked in front of this lovely barn, about 30 miles from home, in Cool Springs.  While I shopped, Mark made friends with the shopkeepers' donkeys and took pictures:

I first ran into these shopkeepers when they did a presentation for one of three quilt guilds that I belong to here in Winston-Salem.  (This quilt guild is the one that meets monthly in the Flow Club of the Winston-Salem Dash.  I wish I could upload a picture, because the room has a fantastic sepia-toned mural of historic baseball players.)

They talked about how they had moved to their current home after running a fabric shop in the Charlotte for many years.  One is quite tall, the other not so much so, and thought that they might be life partners.  When I told the sisters this today, they got a laugh.  "A different kind of life partners," they said!

The shop itself is in a metal building near the red barn.  The ladies use it as a studio most of the time, preparing for off-site sales, but are well-arranged for on-site sales, too.

There are 82 quilt shops that participate in two-month long Shop Hop, through both North and South Carolina. 

Mark took a picture of some other ladies that had made it to this shop before I did, and asked them if they had made it to all of the shops the previous year.  He was just making humorous conversation, but it turns three of them had.  We will be spending about four weeks on the road seeing a lot of them, but we definitely won't be coming close to that achievement.

After I shared some of my money with the ladies - shop owners, not "Hoppers" - we headed a couple of miles down the road to try some barbecue chicken that we had read about in Our State magazine. 

So far we haven't a lot of restaurants here that we will come back to, but Keaton's Barbecue is a must for when we are in the area.  The chicken is fried before being dipped into secret-recipe barbecue sauce.

There are quite a few videos about Keaton's on the internet, but I like this one the best.  It's fuzzy and old, but the original cook is a hoot, and he has since passed on.

(I had to come back to update this post when I realized that Jane and Michael Stern reviewed Keaton's in their book Road Food, which Mark gave me as an early Christmas present.  Score on the book, and score for you if you follow its recommendations around the country!)

After lunch I realized that we were within half an hour of Salisbury, NC, so ice cream was a must.

"Barn quilts" are a thing in North Carolina.  You see a sample on the left in this picture, taken at the Quilter's Gallery:

They are everywhere here, but we'd never seen quilter's cubes like this one in front of a church between Cool Springs and Salisbury:

We stop fairly frequently in Salisbury, due to the aforementioned ice cream.  If you find yourself there, definitely stop at Spanky's Deli & Homemade Ice Cream:

Before going to Spanky's, we stopped at the South Main Book Company.  Salisbury is a town that is struggling to thrive.  I was embarrassed because the moment we walked in the front door, I said "Oh!" . . . and the owner was right there.

Everything about the South Main Book Company is something you would like to have in your own hometown, and we will definitely be spending more time there.  I always like to buy at least one book in each indie bookstore that we visit, even if we could get it at the library. 

This time we bought two, including Wastelands, by Corban Addison.  It is nonfiction, about the fight in Northeastern North Carolina over environmental pollution caused by hog farming.  The author, an attorney and four-time novelist, often writes adventure, and reviews say that every bit of his experience shows in the writing of this book.

You may want to order Wastelands from the South Main Book Company.  At minimum, you would enjoy reading more about the store here.

This is a long post!  I was going to mention some lyrical names of towns that we passed through, but that will be another day.  North Carolina has many pretty, many head-scratching names.  I'll just say that, if we had taken country highway 601 rather than country highway 801 back home, we would have passed through both Maine and Jerusalem . . . North Carolina.