Blue Ridge Parkway
Coffee, but no bagels. Pack luggage. Check out. Try and look casual and calm when signing off the bill!
Uber’d to the airport. Uber works so well in the USA and our driver was great. Dropped us by the elevator to the rental car desks and we headed straight to the garage…
I’m not sure when, but the car categories got utterly foobarred at some point. I booked a Luxury (class H) which used to mean fully loaded sedan, all the toys, leather seats and decent grunt. At some point this became a ****ing Honda. A two year old Accura??? WTAF?
You can swap vehicle on the app – options were a Toyota RAV4 or a Lincoln Nautilus…. I went with the latter.
https://www.lincoln.com/luxury-suvs/nautilus/
Seemed okay – supported apple car play, comfortable… get it onto the highway and you realise it’s crap. The rav 4 would have been better, but dull and a country mile from “luxury”.
Hey-Ho.
We followed I41 for a couple of hundred miles… the plan was to cover the 350+ miles swiftly and intercept the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. Overnight and then follow the BRP all the way to its end in the Smokey Mountains.
Loads of uninspiring tarmac. 20 miles if switchback roads and a detour due to a collapsed bridge and we arrived in Blowing Rock.
Blowing Rock was just a pin on the map. A motel stop before the scenic drive, but it’s really a destination in its own right and in hindsight deserves longer than an overnight stay
Our hotel/motel is the Hemlock Inn. Bags of faults, but tonnes of character. Never seen so many pillows on a bed!
Room is comfortable but quirky. The town is the same. 1400 residents. Has Scottish Highland Games, an English restaurant (that serves scotch eggs!), shops which sell brasses and Toby mugs!
The Mellow Mushroom was our dinner choice for tonight. A pizza place with some interesting draft beers.
Great pizza. When they describe it as 8 slices, they mean 16 normal slices!
We dropped by a grocery store to pick up some sodas and water for the room and had an early night.