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We have not been able to do a drive exploring the area for quite some time, but we decided we needed some ice cream, so off we went.  Every year the Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, North Carolina artists' guild has an artists' open studio tour.  Mark and I had planned to go to Asheville, NC on September 26th or 27th, so that I could go to the local, highly-recommended quilt show.  Mark, his father, and I were driving back from Fredericksburg, Texas when the alternator on the car went out.  (Image Credit: Mark Young)
A couple of years ago Mark and I stayed at a hotel near Market Square in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Happy New Year to everyone! We decided to get in one last road trip of 2023, a short drive to Salisbury, NC.  We started our Bay Area vacation yesterday at Eats on Clement Street.  Image Credit: www.eatsrestaurantsf.com
I've been encouraging Cheri to spend some time shopping so that she can replace her 20+ year-old sewing machine. She wanted to do that a few hours from home, at a place we found last year when touring North and South Carolina on a quilt "shop hop."  Even though Virginia is hardly an hour away from our house, we haven't seen much of it until recently.  No kidding, the trip was really all about ice cream, but we were lucky and also found a fixed-in-time relic that I'd been looking for almost since we moved here.  (Image Source: TripAdvisor.com)
A quickie to show you a great picture of Mark and his dad after they finished the puzzle that we all worked on over Christmas at his sister's house:  It was raining, and fairly cold outside, but not to worry. We parked just behind this truck and went inside.  So we were surprised to learn that the population of Charleston is only about 150,000. I had expected it to be roughly the size of San Francisco, which has a bit more than 800,000 residents. What I am sharing is a reflection of losing pictures from my phone, however, rather than a lack of subject matter!  I know, the picture doesn't match the title, but I had to put one of Mark and me up top, since our first date was 38 years ago today. This one was a few years ago, in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens. Soon I'll do a post on how we met, or "Why We're Living This Life."   We drove State Highway 301 yesterday, taking the longer route from the Fayetteville, NC area, east of Raleigh, towards the Virginia border. As we drove through the town of Selma, I saw a truck parked on a corner with a sign on the side that said "Old-Fashioned Ice Cream."
Mark asked "Do you want to stop?" He could have saved those five words for some other use; of course I wanted to stop! Yesterday Mark and I were traveling just north of Selma, North Carolina. As we moved into the left-hand turn lane to switch to another highway, we saw this sign on the right-hand side of the road. We made the turn, but Mark got out and got a picture for me.  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.  A teaser, to begin with . . . we are under contract to buy a new home! More about that later this week. We took a little jaunt today, to meet someone from Georgia who bought a trailer hitch from us. (We'd thought we were going to buy a fifth-wheel, but when we found the great bumper-tow that we have, with all of its windows, we decided against the fifth-wheel, leaving us with a specialized hitch that we didn't need.) We were near the historic towns of Davidson and Cornelius, where we hadn't been before, so of course we had to search out ice cream shops!  |
