One day at a Time: Fall Break Part II

SUNDAY
Sunday was jam-packed with adventure! AJ set his phone alarm for 7am, so thats when we got up. Sleeping in the car wasnt that great. My car is pretty small, and the seats dont go all the way flat, but I still slept well enough to get a few hours. AJ didnt do well either because he had a steering wheel to avoid, and hes taller. We then headed to the gas station across the street to clean up. I got changed, brushed my teeth, and washed my face in the bathroom at the gas station. Then we grabbed some coffee, shouldve gotten gas, and hit the road again.

It didnt take us long to get to Tennessee. We were driving through the mountains, it was pretty astounded, when I realized that there hasnt been an exit in a while.......and we were getting low on gas. So I watched for exits, and watched the range. My car has a feature that shows how far you can go before you run out of gas. It was very low, so we started putting the car into neutral when going down hills just to save some gas. We finally found an exit with a gas station with only 16 miles to empty. That was a close one! So after that, we got back on the interstate, and after a long stretch we saw a road sign that said "tunnel" with some exit number. And of course we wanted to see it! So we took the exit, but couldnt find the tunnel. So we just drove down some back road for a while and stumbled across this awesome old train bridge. We got out of the car and played on that for a while, got on top of the tracks, thought we heard a train coming, and booked it off the bridge.

We went as far as Knoxville in Tennessee then headed east again, toward North Carolina. In our atlas, there is some tourist attraction information and AJ stumbled across the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, which I guess is the biggest mansion in the US. So we called the 1-800 number to get some information on tours, but it was like fifty bucks to get on the grounds, so there was no way we were gonna do that. But we went to Asheville anyways to see if we could get a glimpse of the mansion from another area. We stopped at an art gallery to ask some locals if they knew of a place where we could see it without paying, but they said it was impossible. Until we were leaving. A man stopped us and said that we could see it for free, but it would be risky. Theres an area on the grounds with a fence that we could jump, but if we got caught we could get into trouble. But we decided not to take the risk.

Somewhere in North Carolina we got tired of driving on the Interstate and quickly pulled off onto a back road to see some of the countryside. We drove several miles and saw a couple of cars pulled off the side of the road. Thinking it was a lookout, we too pulled over. The countryside was amazing! The other car belonged to a couple from Nashville, AJ and I talked to the husband for a little bit about our vacationing adventures while his wife stayed in the air conditioning in the car. Then we made lunch, more PB&Js, and hit the interstate again.

We had talked about going to Hilton Head for most of the morning, but were a little unsure since it was so far away, southern South Carolina. Stacee and Steven were vacationing there for fall break and she insisted that if we are in the state that we stop in for a night. Actually, it seemed she was nearly begging me to come. They were staying in a nice condo on the beach, so of course, we talked about decided to stop in. It took a while to get there from Ashville, but we eventually arrived at around 5pm. The weather at Hilton Head was really crappy though, rainy and windy. We had some time to kill once we got there since they were out shopping, so we stopped by the visitors center, got a map, headed to the beach, which was our first stop at the Atlantic on the trip. It was windy and rainy on the beach, not very appeasing. I met a woman named Virginia near the beach though. I was wearing my "Virginia is for Lovers" shirt and she stopped me and said that her name was Virginia. She was nice. We finally met up with Stacee and Steven, went to their condo, and finally got a shower! That was a great shower, I felt so refreshed afterwards.

On our trip, AJ and I had agreed that since we were going to the east coast we had to splurge and get some seafood, go to a local seafood restaurant. So we asked Stacee and Steven if they wanted to have dinner with us. We went to a place called Tapas. Apperently when you go there, you order two things and share it with everyone else. I was really dissappointed in the quantity of the food, they were in appitizer portions. I really wanted a lot to eat considering we had been living off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for most of the trip. But the quality was magnificant! It was probably the best food Ive ever tasted, Im not even kidding. I got lobster ravioli and salmon. MMMmmmm, I can still taste it, kind of. It was kind of expensive though. Then on our way back from Tapas we decided to get some beer. Its a good thing South Carolina sells beer on Sundays, we were a little worried about that. We got a couple of six packs and headed back to the condo. We made up a drinking game with UNO cards (I won), smoked cigars on the balcony, ate some cake, then headed to the beach. The beach at night was amazing! It was low tide at that time and it seemed like hundreds of yards of wet beach from the earlier high tide. The rain had stopped and the moon had come out, it looked awesome. So we played on the beach for a while and headed back to the condo. After a while of talking on the balcony about marriage and politics and life in general, we headed to bed. We got to bed a little after midnight. I had to sleep in a tiny bunk bed, but it was better than the car.

Railway bridge