After being relatively wet, August in northern Illinois has turned relatively cool to end its days. A few days ago, we took a walk at the unusually green (for August) Spring Valley here in the northwest suburbs.
August flowers, Illinois edition.
Earlier this month, an enormous rainstorm blew through southern Wisconsin, doing damage in Milwaukee and elsewhere, including Waukesha County. Too much water too fast, and not nearly enough space in the Fox River channel that runs through the city and county of Waukesha. In the city, the river made a raging, dangerous rise not far from the picturesque downtown. If that area had flooded, that would have been in the news cycle for a little while anyway, but it looks like most of the damage was in more rural parts of the county. Regardless, it represents a lot of property damage.
“In Menomonee Falls, a crew was spotted pulling a car out of a massive sinkhole,” local TV News reported. “The once-raging waters this weekend washed away the road in an industrial area on Campbell Drive, leaving just a cliff. In the crater, the car had been trapped. The driver was fine. Inside the sinkhole, drainage pipes seemed to be tossed around like Lincoln Logs.”
About two weeks earlier, on a nearly hot, clear day, we took a walk along the Fox, accessed a block or so away from downtown’s main streets. The river was flowing vigorously, but without a hint of the rampage to come (and why would there be?). This is the same Fox River that runs west of metro Chicago and to the Illinois River, and not the one that runs into Green Bay. Just to keep things interesting, there are apparently two other Fox Rivers in Illinois as well.
Across the way, a gazebo.
Every town over 5,000 has to have a gazebo, according to Wisconsin law. Wisconsin is almost alone in its gazebo mandates, with most other states having repealed theirs in the 1960s and ’70s – though some counties in other states still mandate the structures.
An artful pedestrian bridge.
More river, and also bears. Bronze bears.
Hope the river didn’t take them away, but I’d think the figures would be anchored pretty well.
The other day I wondered how long it would take to count a million dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes a million times. That’s one of the dream images from “Minnie the Moocher.” Not just a dream, but an opium dream. After all, no sooner does Minnie learn to kick the gong around, does a vivid dream of wealth begin, all shiny and metallic, ending with:
She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes
And sat around and counted them all a million times
Let’s say half the dollar value is nickels, half dimes. That would be 5 million dimes and 10 million nickels. So 15 million individual coins. Let’s also say it takes a second to count each, just to keep it simple. That would be 15 million seconds, or 0.475 years (roughly, I shaved off a few places). Counting them a million times would thus be (roughly) 475,000 years.
Of course, if it’s an opium dream, the niceties of time and such don’t apply. Still, it sounds like a hellish task of a Sisyphean kind. But maybe it would be a heavenly task, if you have no sense of the passage of time.
I didn’t sit down to figure all that out until I was at my desk, but the question came out of nowhere during a short interstate drive just before the end of July, up in the southeast corner of Wisconsin. One destination that day, a Sunday, was downtown Waukesha, an outer suburb of Milwaukee, but a place with a distinct history of its own, where people came to take the waters once upon a time.
We spent some time near the five-pointed intersection of Main, Broadway and Grand, focal point of a handsome streetscape.
Now this is a set of buildings.
The Almont Building, whose original name was the Robinson Block.
“The core of the downtown, prior to 1856, consisted of freestanding wooden frame buildings, but a new era began after a massive fire nearly destroyed this northern section of Main Street,” the Waukesha County Historical Society & Museum says. “The Robinson Block was built in 1857 with fireproofing in mind and is the first Five Points building to use Waukesha limestone.”
The Nickell Building, as it looked recently, and long ago.
“Built by Addison J. Nickell, local businessman and jeweler, the first floor housed the U.S. Post Office from 1902-1914,” notes the WCHS&M. “The work of Waukesha architect C.C. Anderson, this Queen Anne displays a projecting oriel and corner turret capped by a domed roof: both are covered by pressed metal.”
Being mid-day, one bit of business to take care of: lunch. We soon found the friendly joint called Joey’s Diner.
Joey likes Betty.
Joey’s is next to an Italian restaurant, similarly casual, that I think was owned by the same fellow. He was everywhere at once all the time — running a restaurant is nothing if not busy, and he seemed to be running two — but toward the end of our meal, asked how it was. I answered enthusiastically to the positive about my simple but also delicious hamburger. He responded by giving us a slice of chocolate cake, on the house. Thanks, Joey.
The street has other (many other) examples of places found here and nowhere else.
Been a while since I’d seen a joke shop. Closed.
The last one might have been Uncle Fun in Chicago, which closed some years ago. Too bad about that, but at least Jest For Fun Joke Shop, which has been at this Waukesha location more than 40 years, is keeping the retail tradition alive.
Just how many places in the United States are named after the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, or as it’s spelled everywhere in América del Norte, Montezuma? Turning to the USGS, I find an answer: a lot. The survey lists 83 U.S. place names using the word Montezuma. There are cities, towns and populated places; water features like streams, creeks and bays; summits, peaks, ridges and a slough and a cliff and a cut-off; a county in Colorado and a mining district in Nevada; and much more. Included was the one we visited a few Sundays ago, Montezuma: Indiana.
I was looking at a fine paper map, a guide to the county’s covered bridges and the routes necessary to see them, and I saw on it the town of Montezuma. With the name like that, who wouldn’t want to go for a look? Then I found that it had its own historic bridge, but not a covered one. So we made our way west from Rockville along the likes of Strawberry Road and US 36 to Montezuma.
The town (pop. 1,000 or so) is at the western edge of Parke County, along the east bank of the Wabash River. It doesn’t look like downtown, deserted on a hot Sunday, has been discovered by tourists or hipsters yet.
Full of intriguing detail, these buildings, but none more than a sign for a hotel and boarding house. Along the classic model – people living in rooms upstairs, taking most meals in a room next to a kitchen? Or is it an SRO hotel (rare enough) with a vending machine in the lobby?
On the southern edge of town is a former B&O Railroad bridge, now a pedestrian and bicycle crossing.
Crossing the Wabash River from Montezuma takes you to Vermillion County, Indiana, which hugs the left bank of the Wabash for a long way.
Graffiti on iron. Daring, or foolhardy, since there’s a gap — between the edge of the walking bridge and the iron support features of the bridge — large enough for a careless graffiti artist to take a quick plunge to the river below.
Looking out to the river.
Looking back at Montezuma.
The B&O is as storied a railroad in North America as you can get – a pioneering commercial line sprouting from Baltimore into the Midwestern interior, eventually. Host in 1828 to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, at the railroad’s groundbreaking ceremony. Critical infrastructure for the Union war effort some decades later. Powerful regional RR in the Gilded Age. Famed as one of the four Monopoly RRs.
I don’t know whether it was a relic or a replica, but there it was, something we’ve all heard about, seen in drawings and as the stuff of metaphors: a dunce cap. I’d never actually seen one before that I remember, not as a physical object.
That is why you (I) visit such places as the open air museum Billie Creek Village in Parke County, Indiana. To be mildly surprised. Such as the time I encountered a can of White Star brand tomatoes with a hammer and sickle on it, or a Papua New Guinea battle shield sporting the Phantom, just to name two among many such little surprises.
The dunce cap was on one of the desks at Billie Creek’s one-room school house, used until the early 20th century, as usual for that kind of school.
Good old dunce caps. Sure, they go against the grain of modern thinking, antiquated as a one-room school, but we all can remember a few goofballs from our school days who deserved one, can’t we? As seen in a pic from the Library of Congress, dated ca. 1905, but with no information about where it might have been. Just a small school in the years before self-esteem was discovered.
The old school house at Billie Creek is one of 38 historic structures relocated from various parts of Parke County, Indiana, to about 70 acres west of Rockville on US 36. Originally opened in 1969, the place has had a series of owners and been through periods of abandonment, but since 2022 has been under management that seems to know what its doing.
That’s my thinking, anyway, since its refreshing informality perfectly suits the place. You go, you park your car, you wander in. No irritating timed tickets, no gouging entrance fee, no expensive yet mindless luxury goods and experiences that could be pretty much anywhere. Yet there is an economic model: Billie Village hosts events – one was going on when we visited around mid-day on a Sunday – and some of the buildings are also shops, and do sell luxury goods, in the sense that such handcrafts aren’t found in modern grocery or drug stores.
We supported the place by buying a few things, including (yes!) postcards. A few dozen other people were doing so by attending the event. I watched part of some sort of award ceremony as it happened at the village gazebo, and even asked one of the bystanders about what was going on, but couldn’t quite get the gist of it. The meeting seemed to be one of those Society of Creative Anachronism sorts of things, though not that specifically. Attendees wore fantasy- and history-adjacent costumes, mostly with that homemade vibe. One of those outings for adults who didn’t get enough playing pretend when they were kids, I guess. All well and good.
I hope that economic model keeps the place open, because one recipe for a good couple of hours on a hot weekend in July is visiting curious old buildings. Such as a couple of relocated churches.
One Catholic.
The other Baptist.
An early Parke County cabin.
The home of an Indiana governor, one Joseph A. Wright (d. 1867), in office 1849-57. A Rockville native son.
Here he is, just outside his house, in dour Hoosier mode.
As the Covered Bridge Capital of the Galaxy (or some slogan like that for Parke County), it’s no surprise that covered bridges can also been seen at Billie Creek.
A barn, weathered yet handsome.
Craft goods were for sale inside. So were books by a local author who was there, hawking them. He told me about the books, some sort of fantasy series, and I was curious enough about them to listen to him, but not enough to buy one, which I think left him a bit miffed. Such is the writer’s lot.
Behind the barn, goats.
I wasn’t able to test the notion that goats eat tin cans. But I already knew the answer: it’s a ridiculous myth, as this item in Goat Owner tells us.
George W. Batman, that is, who died in 1897, so he never lived to see his surname put to the other uses we all know so well. Variants of his name include Bateman, Battman and Baitman, meaning that Batman really isn’t that odd. Except it does look odd on that large stone, but only because of recent conditioning by a particularly successful fictional character. George W. happens to repose at Rockville Cemetery in Rockville, Indiana, and I happened to visit early one Sunday morning in late July.
A pleasant graveyard, founded in 1824 — same year as the town itself — and well marked by upright stones, but not overly landscaped.
A few memorials reach upward, but not that far.
A few mausoleums denote formerly big fish in the small pond that is Rockville, seat of Parke County.
Mostly modest stones populate the cemetery, presumably for regular folks of the past.
It isn’t too often that you see veterans of the War of 1812 (but not never).
Numerically speaking, there just weren’t that many compared to later, greater wars, and probably many of their graves aren’t marked as such. Nathan was near the other Adamsons, and indeed two of them (per Find-A-Grave) are his children.
Not too many blocks from the cemetery is the Parke County Courthouse. We encountered it on Saturday afternoon, soon after arriving in Rockville (pop. about 2,600), when temps were about as high as they would be that day. Sweaty 90s.
The courthouse is a grand Second Empire pile with some Beaux Arts added to the mix, completed in 1882, during the golden age of U.S. courthouses. Designed by T.J. and Brentwood Tolan, a father and son team. They did a lot of courthouses.
The giant dartboard isn’t something you see too often on courthouse grounds. Could it be the Dartboard of Justice? That’s how sentencing is done for crimes that call for one to 20 years in the jug; a toss by the judge, or the jury foreman.
No, a small street festival was being set up at that moment, though not up and running yet. It was too hot for that anyway. But not for a quick look at some of the buildings ringing the courthouse, most in good shape and mostly tenanted.
G&M Variety has the soul of a five-and-dime, but a more accurate classification these days would be a five-and-ten dollar store: a step above a dollar store, the love child of a convenience store and a standard grocery store, with a souvenir shop added to the mix. Roaming around its aisles was pleasant, for a look at the sometimes unusual merchandise, and the AC.
Drinks on sale that made me recollect sodas from my mid-60s childhood.
Frostie! Nehi! Triple XXX! Dang? We didn’t have Dang. Butterscotch root beer?
Pangs of nostalgia weren’t enough for me to spend $2.49 for an ordinary-sized soda, though I was a little thirsty.
More courthouse square.
The Old Jail Inn & Drunk Tank, now a B&B.
I returned to the square on Sunday morning, after the cemetery, for a further look when it wasn’t so hot.
Memorial Presbyterian Church and its freestanding bell tower.
It isn’t a Presbyterian church any more — its cross conspicuous in its absence — though a Presbyterian congregation meets there sometimes. These days it counts as an event space, with music performances, recitals, meetings, and other gatherings there, according to Billie Creek Village, more about which later.
It’s one thing to admire the artistry of a Parke County, Indiana, wooden bridge standing at its entrance, or below near the edge of the creek. Another to wander in and surround yourself with all that wood, from roof –
– to floor.
Your eyes spend a few seconds being useless as they adjust, the boards creak and the wood doesn’t exactly smell strongly one way or the other, as it might have when the bridge was new, but even now there’s a faint woody odor, maybe more enhanced after a rain. No recent rain for us, just plodding over dry boards cut well over a century ago.
Being summer, there was a distinct contrast between the brightness outside and the shadows inside a covered bridge. My camera doesn’t interpret the light pouring from the other side of the bridge in quite the way my eyes did. Even so, the camera captured that distinct contrast in its own digital-image way.
Except for those times its image was closer to the eyes’.
Also inside the bridges: graffiti, of course. The oldest extant covered bridge in Parke County reportedly dates from 1856. I imagine the oldest graffito – what would they use, chalk? – dates from ca. 1856.
The usual collection of declarations of love, puerile insults, political statements, enigmatic phrases and random nonsense.
And the whack-a-mole efforts to suppress it.
Klong. That’s my favorite from this round of graffiti spotting. An idiosyncratic item.
A dictionary meaning is canal in Thai. An alternate spelling of that, anyway. Or a Swedish homegoods retailer – reminds me of Ikea, but clearly more upmarket. Hard to know the mind of a graffitist, but I’ll bet it’s neither of those.
Even though you see enough corn driving through the Midwest, it’s still a little hard to imagine 5.1 million acres of corn (or anything else). Yet that’s how much corn – maize, Zea mays – was planted in Indiana alone in 2024, according to the Indiana Corn Marketing Council, with 5.05 million acres harvested. Even after being in the thick of a summer crop, the thought of that much boggles the mind.
We didn’t go to Parke County, Indiana, in late July to admire the corn, though I did take a moment to make a few higher-than-an-elephant’s-eye corn pictures. You don’t have to go nearly that far to find corn. We came for the covered bridges, spending a Saturday night in the county seat of Rockville, Indiana, and out looking for bridges on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. To get to them, you have to take to the small roads crisscrossing the area, some paved, some not, but all pretty high quality.
Roads lead to bridges, such as Sim Smith Bridge, vintage 1883, which crosses Leatherwood Creek. “Locally, this bridge has the reputation as haunted,” says a guide map I picked up. Uh-huh.
West-central Indiana is well-watered, a welter of creeks feeding the Wabash River. Covered wooden bridges cross many of them, each of more than a century old. Cedar is the main material. I’d guess being well-watered was good for the farmers here in the late 19th century, except for one thing: they complicated shipping one’s crop to buyers, either to animal feed processors or human-food makers. So, bridges.
Mecca Bridge, near Mecca, Indiana, across the Big Raccoon Creek. 1873.
Crooks Bridge, across Little Raccoon Creek. Competed in 1856.
Neet Bridge, 1904, also across Little Raccoon Creek.
Local organizations count 31 historic bridges in Parke County, each with a name and known origin. Local organizations promote historic bridge tourism, as well they should, including a give-away paper guide (Parke County Guide) that other guides should aspire to, so detailed and useful is it. But I can also report that even on a summer weekend, when it was hot but not dangerously so, or especially humid, overtourism hasn’t spoiled the place. Most of the time, at the half-dozen or so bridges we visited on a weekend, we were alone. Even the bridges that still carried auto traffic had little, so that walking across each on foot was never an issue.
An carpenter (and lawyer) named J.A. Britton (d. 1929) built many of the bridges in Parke County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, presumably as the organizer of a small construction crew, but also with the sort of hands-on approach that had him laboring alongside the other men. I like to think so, anyway, but whatever the arrangement, bridge building was his business, and he built them to last. Some are still vehicle bridges. Others are pedestrian bridges. Most are in situ, with a few moved to parks or other places.
Parke County was enough of a market for a few decades that J.A. Britton had a competitor, J.J. Daniels, who left behind some structures as well, such as the Neet and Mecca bridges.
Most of the Parke County bridges are Burr Arch Truss bridges, following a design that combines a truss and an arch, invented by a bridge builder back east in the early 19th century, one Theodore Burr. Seems like the design works really well for this kind of bridge.
Not all the bridges are out in the corn-planted countryside. Bridgeton Bridge, crossing Big Raccoon Creek, is in the small town of Bridgeton, Indiana, which includes a former mill rising over the creek, now retail. Unlike the others we saw, it dates from 2006, a faithful replica of an earlier bridge destroyed by wanker arsonists.
Over a waterfall, for that extra picturesqueness.
The view from the bridge.
The creek below was deep enough to allow teenagers, some boys but also at least one girl, to jump off the modern vehicle bridge next to the wooden bridge as a matter of fun, not grievous injury, because while we were around, we saw and heard them doing so. Good to see kids out having fun that didn’t involve small electronic boxes, by gar.
The Buc-ee’s imperium marches on. On my way to Tennessee that first day, I stopped at the location near Smiths Grove, Kentucky, to visit its gleaming facilities. Business was reasonably brisk that Monday, but nothing like the bedlam on the Sunday, nearly two weeks later (on the trip’s last day), when I stopped on the way back home at the same place, for the same reason.
South Carolina
Had a pleasant walk down a non-tourist street on a Sunday in Myrtle Beach. Not a lot going on. The late afternoon light had a nice glow.
Myrtle Beach International Airport used to be Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, which began as Myrtle Beach General Bombing and Gunnery Range in 1942 for use by the U.S. Army Air Corps. It closed in 1993.
One legacy of the base is a cluster of military memorials near the perimeter of the airport – at a place called Warbird Park, which is fully accessible to casual visitors – that includes something you don’t see all the time.
It is one memorial among many.
As well as some of the aircraft that used the air base.
Found at a MB beach shop among the clothes and beach equipment. Nothing says Myrtle Beach better than skulls, no?
An automated, Fotomat-style ice store in north Georgia. They’re not as common up north, with the closest of this brand to me (I checked) in Aurora, Illinois.
Twice the Ice is the brand name. Quick facts: there are about 3,300 Twice the Ice locations so far in the United States and elsewhere – water and ice “vending machines,” according to one page on the company web site. Another page on the same site puts it at over 4,000 locations, which just means part of the site isn’t being updated. Whatever the exact number, there are a lot, and most if not all are franchised, representing about 1,000 franchisees.
It’s automation we call all get behind. I don’t think the machines are putting ice handlers and baggers at local gas stations and grocery stores out of work, since who holds that specific job?
So far as I know, “Ice is Civilization” is not the company motto. But it could be. It was said with such conviction by Allie Fox in The Mosquito Coast.
Of course, by the end of the book and movie both, he was howl-at-the-moon mad. So maybe some other slogan. Then again, that line is one of the few things – besides the fact that Allie Fox goes nuts chasing Utopia – that I remember from either the book or the movie after about 35 years. So it’s pretty memorable.
After gassing up at a station in north Georgia, I parked away from the pumps near the edge of the property to fiddle with my phone for a few minutes. Just outside the car window, kudzu lurked.
Which got closer.
And closer. Man, it grows fast.
Not really, but I did see all that kudzu at the edge of the gas station property. Kudzu. Who hasn’t seen the walls of it down South?
“In news media and scientific accounts and on some government websites, kudzu is typically said to cover seven million to nine million acres across the United States,” Smithsonian magazine reported in 2015. “But scientists reassessing kudzu’s spread have found that it’s nothing like that. In the latest careful sampling, the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland, an area about the size of a small county and about one-sixth the size of Atlanta.
“That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent of the South’s 200 million acres of forest. By way of comparison, the same report estimates that Asian privet had invaded some 3.2 million acres — 14 times kudzu’s territory. Invasive roses had covered more than three times as much forestland as kudzu.”
Yet kudzu is regarded as a particularly intractable invasive species. How is that? It grows well in highly visible places. Such as next to a gas station parking lot. Smithsonian notes: “Those roadside plantings — isolated from grazing, impractical to manage, their shoots shimmying up the trunks of second-growth trees — looked like monsters.”
Along Georgia 60 in Chattahoochee NF, Smokey Bear is still at his job.
One thing leads to another online, and Smokey eventually lead me to “Smokey the Bear Sutra.” Only takes a few minutes to read, and it’s a trip. Just like the song “Elvis is Everywhere,” there’s a founding document of a religion in the distant future, one that asserts that humans should never have given up worshiping bears.
Had a bizarre dream last night, which isn’t really unusual, since that’s the way of dreams often enough – but this one – let’s call it rich and strange. And lengthy. It kept going and going, involving an alt version of downtown Chicago, and alt version of the company I worked for in the late 1980s, though no one that I knew was there; a vaguely menacing, nighttime scene always, though it wasn’t a nightmare; a message that had to be relayed, somehow; a fictional character – a very famous fictional character – spoken of as if real, who eventually showed up after a funeral, laughing; and details that made me think, that’s too much of a detail. For a dream. Is this a dream? One detail involved a chipmunk peaking out of a hole in the sidewalk, or maybe the street; another was a globe that I could see but not get close enough to read well, though I really wanted to. But I did notice that the United States, on this globe, included British Columbia and maybe the Yukon Territory, and I woke up thinking that maybe that 54° 40′ or Fight business led to a real war, in which the U.S. prevailed.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this rich and strange dream is that fully an hour and a half after I woke on this bright summer morning in the northwest suburbs, in the waking world I know and inhabit, I was able to write the above description.
Tennessee
When passing eastward through Tennessee during my most recent interstate drive, I spent a little time in Knoxville, as mentioned, mostly to see the Sunsphere. To get to the tower from the free parking lot, I walked along part of World’s Fair Park Dr., with these colorful pastel houses visible on a small rise nearby. I was reminded of Rainbow Row in Charleston.
On the way back, I popped into the Knoxville Museum of Art.
For a brutalist building, a nice bit of work by Edward Larrabee Barnes (d. 2004). If it blackens and streaks in the future, as such buildings tend to do when exposed to urban air, its appearance might morph into something merely ugly. But it looks like it’s been kept clean enough since its construction in 1990. As a museum, KMA has a lot to recommend it, such as air conditioning, free admission and a not-too-vast collection specializing in something you aren’t going to see elsewhere, namely East Tennessee art.
Such as a piece by artist Patrick Deason. Ah, the optimism. Unless he’s being sarcastic.
The museum also has a porch with a nice view of downtown Knoxville.
On my return westward through Tennessee, I made a point of passing through Dayton, site of the Scopes Trial, now 100 years ago. There is a museum devoted to the trial in the handsome and nicely restored 1890s Rhea County Courthouse, though I arrived after it had closed for the day.
I look at pictures taken during the trial, and wonder how this multitude sat through it all, in an un-air-conditioned building. Guess like my grandma, as late as her last summer in 1970, they were used to it.
Before I got there, I heard a fellow on the radio discussing the (then) upcoming festival that Dayton was planning in honor of the centennial, as a bigger version of an annual event held in July. He might have been the organizer, I forget.
He pointed out that for many years Daytonites mostly wanted to forget about the trial – especially after the movie Inherit the Wind (1960) depicted the residents of Hillsboro, stand-ins for them, as fundamentalist bumpkins, at a time when the actual event was still in living memory. Which is nothing that Mencken didn’t do in 1925. Now the trial and Mencken and the movie are all part of that nebulous thing most people experience as the undifferentiated Past, and the townspeople have largely embraced the trial, according to the man on the radio. As well they should. It’s what Dayton, Tenn., has that no place else does.
On the courthouse square, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow square off in bronze. Bryan College paid for the former, the Freedom From Religion Foundation the latter.
North Carolina
I was stuck momentarily in traffic near the military installation formerly known as Fort Bragg and then known as Fort Liberty and now known again as Fort Bragg. The traffic sign hasn’t caught up with the latest flip-flop.
I stopped for lunch in Laurinburg, NC, at a storefront Chinese restaurant. Across the street, a tuxedo shop flew the Royal Banner of Scotland. Not something I’ve ever seen aflutter in the U.S. or anywhere, for that matter. But there is a school called St. Andrews University nearby, so maybe it’s not such a stretch. Make that was — the school closed just this May.
Wiki tells us: “As the personal banner of the Monarch, use of the Royal Banner of Scotland is restricted under the Act of the Parliament of Scotland 1672 cap. 47 and the Lyon King of Arms Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vict. c. 17), and any unauthorised use of such is an offence under the Act.” That has no bearing on its use in North Carolina, I’d say, considering how the Revolution turned out.
In New Bern, NC, this was a bit of a mystery at first.
Until I figured it out. A place for dogs to leave messages.
I’m no Guy Fieri, but I don’t really need to be to find road food. Besides, he has a staff. I just have Google Maps and my experience and instincts, which sometimes fail me, but more often guide me to cheap, local and delicious. That and word-of-mouth recommendations have led me to a lot of tasty dishes over the years.
On my recent Southern jaunt, I arrived in Sumter, SC, around lunchtime, and found my way to Korner Shack II. Not that you could tell the name from the sign over the cinder block shack.
I’d happened on a Southern chicken joint, true to that tradition, take out only, and during the few minutes I waited for my order as people came and went — for it was a popular place — I noted I was the palest customer. I ordered a box of chicken livers and fries that I ate partly in a nearby park, and partly in my room that evening. Mildly spiced and well fried, the boxed livers reminded me of the satisfying livers that a Chicago-area Harold’s Chicken would serve. Korner Shack sold me one of the best meals of the trip.
Back in Myrtle Beach, Yuriko and I breakfasted one morning at Winna’s Kitchen, who offers patrons some sunny advice on the wall.
That, and really good food. I had the Whistler – “crispy sausage or bacon, sharp coastal cheddar, a fried egg & lemony-dressed arugula on a homemade bun,” the menu said. With a side of grits.
Superb. Even the buttery grits. At home I usually douse my grits with honey, but butter will do. Experience has taught me that restaurants aren’t always good with grits, but when they are, they can be really good. Winna’s served up some of those really good grits, complementing its really good breakfast sando, though not quite as memorable as the cheese grits I enjoyed at a place in Mexico Beach, Florida, that I believe was washed away by a hurricane some years after I visited in the 2000s.
Also in Myrtle Beach: seafood in bulk.
Not the best I’ve ever had, and a little expensive, but satisfying – especially Yuriko’s desire for seafood during a visit anywhere near the sea, true to her Japanese upbringing.
Didn’t have barbecue in MB, but I liked this sign.
Didn’t eat here either. Call it Schrödinger’s restaurant.
I found barbecue in Georgia. Specifically, Dahlonega. North Georgia Barbecue Co. is a stone’s throw from the Gold Museum and its best advertisement is out front of the restaurant. Good eats inside.
While it’s well and good to support local joints, I’m not a snob when it comes to fast food on the road. Otherwise, how would I know the joy of Mos Burger or have experience with how different cultures interpret something as distinctively American as fast food?
Not long after arriving in Athens, Ga., I spotted a place I associate with Texas. I took a drive-thru order back to the room.
I checked, and the large majority of Whataburger locations are indeed in Texas, but there are others in 16 other states, including 35 in Georgia.
Finally, an old friend among Nashville places: Brown’s Diner.
My friends Stephanie and Wendall treated me to a wonderful homemade meal at their house, so later I treated them to a meal at Brown’s, deep in the heart of Nashville. It is a storied place nearly 100 years old, though expanded since I knew it. I enjoyed a fair number of burgers at Brown’s in the 1980s, but not since, and was a little surprised that it has survived to the present, but glad. I had a Brown’s burger and it all came back to me; and I understood the joint’s longevity.
