April 2023
Seeing Le Mis was on Melinda’s to do list- not really a bucket list item, but something she wanted to experience. When the tour came through our area it was obvious that the time was right- and it was only 75 miles away, so it would be a nice evening out, a date night. Easy peasy.
Except we hadn’t taken Tess out since February and we were overdue for some trailer time. So why not make an adventure out of it? We opened up our Harvest Host app and picked out some places we thought it would be fun to stay, loaded up Tess and set off for our grueling 75 mile adventure.
Our first stop was to meet a friend and do some hiking up Pilot Mountain, in Mt Airy NC. While it looks like the remnants of an ancient volcano, Pilot Mountain is actually a quartzite monadnock that rises to a peak 2,421 feet and is a pretty good hike from the bottom. After a solid day of hiking we backtracked a little west to the Yadkin Valley wince country and spent a rainy evening enjoying some fine Stony Knoll wine while looking out over another beautiful vineyard.
Since we have a lot of time to make it to our next Harvest Host- a mere 22 miles away, we head into Winston Salem and stop in at the Reynolda House & Gardens followed by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts (SECCA). We then leisurely go through town to our next camp, at the museum parking lot for Old Salem, an 18th century Moravian town that was one of the founding towns of Winston-Salem. Given our proximity to a main street we expected it to be much noisier than it was, it was really a great place to boondock. But before turning in we went and explored some of the art district and met the creator of the Art-O-Mat, a clever way of reusing old cigarette vending machines to sell small original artworks from local artists. I’ve seen them around locally for decades, so it was kind of neat to meet the inventor. A nice dinner followed by some good local beers at the Lesser Known Beer Company and we called it a night.
The next morning was picture time- on Sunday Old Salem is closed, so we were able to take Tess down the cobblestone streets, then down a road just a few blocks to the scallop shell shaped Shell Station (say that 3 times fast) which is a novelty style building from the 1930’s and seemed to be perfect place to get a picture of Tess- it’s very reminiscent of the Route 66 style, even though it’s nowhere close.
Our final Harvest Host for the trip was at Circle W Alpaca Farm. The owners were friendly and the alpacas were fun… sort of? They say alpacas don’t spit, or don’t spit often, but since I got hit twice I beg to differ! But they were mostly sweet and fun. Then we cleaned up, had a wonderful night of theater- Le Mis was fantastic!
