LOTS OF QUIET ON THE ROAD EAST OF RALEIGH (Cheri)

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.

Believe it or not, this is a postcard of the vacation spot in its heyday:

I found the postcard on someone else's blog.  He loved the vestiges of history the way Mark and I do.  Unfortunately he doesn't blog anymore, but I'm going to read his archives to look for more adventures.

There are also a few pictures of the resort's remnants-in-the-brush on the blogger's Flickr account.  One of his visitors said that it was still open in the '60's.  "My school bus route took us right past the motel. If I recall correctly, there was a murder there which was it’s [sic] death knell."  (Maybe I should add a "True Crime" category of blog posts?)

Anyway, Mark and I took a few days to begin our "All Carolinas Quilt Shop Hop" on Tuesday.  Over 80 quilt shops in North and South Carolina are promoting their shops this month and next, with prizes large and small available to quilters who make it to the most shops, shops in the largest number of towns, etc. 

With this trip to the Raleigh region, I've made it to 10 or 11 shops so far.  Next month we will take two to three weeks, head diagonally Hilton Head, at the south end of South Carolina's coast, and travel northward to nearly the Virginia border, getting a preview of the area for future trips and "hopping" along the quilting trail.

We had breakfast in Holly Springs, in the southern suburbs of Raleigh.

A vodka-kale mimosa???  That sounds like an experience you would drink to forget!  We didn't imbibe, and breakfast was good.

We quickly left the suburbs, onto two-lane highways through cotton and tobacco fields.  We found this cemetery, surrounded on all four sides by tobacco.

This was an old cemetery, largely "populated" by three families.  There were a number of headstones commemorating deaths during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, including two wives of one man, which happened six weeks apart.

It's sad, but artistically striking, to see headstones seemingly abandoned:

I was going to talk about our stop in Selma, primarily at a superb ice cream store - a much more cheery topic to end on than death - but the ice cream store and its owner deserve a full post, so I'll come back to that soon.