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Travel Vacation

The Backroads of South Carolina

On our recent cruise, we traveled into South Carolina to get to the port in Charleston. It’s common for us to use our GPS to navigate our trips and this one was no different. While it is more desirable to take as many major roads as possible, GPS software will usually take you through some less traveled areas in an attempt to find a shorter and/or faster route.  It is not unusual to see a GPS take you off of the main road even for a short period of time in the name of taking you the shorter route when it would have been faster just to leave you on the main road.  If you are like me, these shorter routes usually lead through neighborhoods or narrow roads with anything from speed bumps to school zones that seems designed to slow you down.  So, I was suspicious on this trip when we were told to turn off a major interstate and directed down a two lane highway.  My wife looked at an overall map and assured me that staying on the interstate would take us a more roundabout route than this South Carolina shortcut.

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Travel Vacation

SOS from the USS Sunshine

Overnight on the third evening of our cruise to the Bahamas, my wife was awakened by my voice coming from the bathroom of our cabin.  “Can someone come help me!” was the plea that she heard.  I wasn’t yelling, but I was speaking in a voice louder than what I usually use. She got up, came to the bathroom, and opened the door.  Looking into the bathroom from our cabin, there was a shower to the left, the sink and a toilet to the right and a grab bar mounted on the wall across from the door.  I was tugging on the grab bar like I was trying to open a locked door.  She spoke to me waking me up.  I don’t remember ever being a sleepwalker before this night.  But there is an explanation for what I was saying.

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Travel Vacation

Guidance from the GPS

My wife and I recently went on vacation to Ashville, North Carolina.  On our way home, we planned to drop by and visit our daughter who lives in Waverly, Tennessee.  Our daughter lives a little over an hour away from us.  It had been a couple of weeks since we had seen her.  We had talked about going with her to a new restaurant she had discovered in that area for some time.  Stopping by to eat would be a good excuse stop and see her.  The fact that it was just an excuse for visiting was made more obvious by the fact that the place we planned to eat was closed on that day, but we still stopped, finding another new local restaurant to try.

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Travel Vacation

Ashville Food Tour

We recently took a vacation to Ashville, North Carolina.  My sister had been there a few weeks before we went and recommended that we take a food tour. She said it was a fun way to experience a variety of local restaurants in a short period of time.  My wife made arrangements for our food tour weeks before our trip.

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Restaurants Travel True Stories

The Best Fried Chicken in Lexington, Kentucky

My youngest daughter Mary spent the last year in graduate school at the University of Kentucky.  My wife and I went with her on an apartment hunting trip a year ago.  We were able to find a reasonably priced apartment that wasn’t far from campus.  The apartment complex was gated which gave us a sense of security about where she was moving.  She was also within walking distance of a couple of candy shops.  There was one literally a couple of doors down from her apartment building.  The other one was around the corner and would have been a bit of a stretch for walking.  But Mary likes to walk, and it would have been reasonable for her.  That candy shop is a strip mall that has several other stores including a Save A Lot grocery store.  A sign outside of this grocery declared that it had the “Best Fried Chicken in Lexington”.  We thought this was a bold statement for a relatively low-profile grocery store that might otherwise go unnoticed.  It also seemed unlikely that in Kentucky, a place that people associate with Kentucky Fried Chicken, one of the highest profile chicken restaurants in the world, a discount grocery store chain would have the best chicken you could get in town.  There had to be some place better.  Because of the pandemic, family never made any trips just to visit so we never got a chance to try it out.

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Travel Vacation

Searching for Stinky Gringo

Several years ago, my wife saw a bottle of pre-mixed margaritas called Stinky Gringo.  She asked the store clerk if it was any good.  Their response was, “Oh yeah! But don’t plan on going anywhere after you drink it.  It’s strong!”  We tried it out and liked it.  It has about twice the alcohol content of most pre-mixed margaritas.  A lot of margaritas that come pre-mixed along with the standard ones you get at Mexican restaurants taste like lime Kool-Aid. But you can taste the tequila in this one.  It has become the go-to margarita at the Wheeler house.

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Printer's Drawer Travel Vacation

Printer’s Drawer – The Alamo

My mother-in-law moved to San Antonio, Texas a few years before my kids were born.  My wife and I have made several trips there both before and after our children were born.  Our first attempt at a trip was cut short when we were rear ended by a drunk driver in Little Rock, Arkansas just after midnight on a Friday the 13th.  The details of that trip can be seen in my Arkansas Stories blog post. This includes details of a race riot, an annoying “helper” on the side of the road, a nightclub at the airport Holiday Inn and a ride in a wrecker.

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Printer's Drawer Travel Vacation

Printer’s Drawer – Vegas Dice

In October of 2003, I had an opportunity with work to go to a packaging show in Las Vegas. My wife’s birthday is in October, so I arranged to have her go with me as a birthday gift.  At the writing of this post, this is the only time either of us has been to Las Vegas.  The show was scheduled from Monday through Wednesday of that week, but we only planned to stay in Vegas through Tuesday.  We would arrive in town early enough on Sunday to do some things before the packaging show began.  We would also have some flexibility with the schedule on the show since we were there looking for some solutions for specific packaging problems at work. There was a guy from work who went on the trip with us. When we were doing most of the sightseeing, gambling, and eating activities, we all went.  My wife stayed at the hotel and gambled any time that we went to the packaging show.  

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Printer's Drawer Travel Vacation

Printer’s Drawer – St. Louis Arch

Most people going on a vacation to St. Louis in the summer would include a trip to see the Cardinals play baseball.  Before we had children, my wife and I decided to take a trip there.  We decided to intentionally go on a week when the Cardinals were out of town. We felt this would reduce the size of the crowds anywhere that we wanted to go, especially downtown.  The trip included a visit to the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the St. Louis Zoo.  We were pleasantly surprised that the zoo has free admission. At the end of our zoo trip, we thought we had seen everything but realized that we had not seen the primate house.  Fortunately, we went back and saw the most enjoyable part of the trip.  The chimps were swinging from bar to bar in a circle in the large cage in the middle of the room.  As the crowd cheered them, they continued to go faster and faster.  We almost missed the whole reason to go to the zoo.

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Printer's Drawer Travel

Printer’s Drawer – Penny from Honeymoon

When my wife and I were planning our wedding back in 1985, she found an ad in the back of a bride magazine advertising a place with honeymoon cabins in the mountains of North Carolina.  This was the place we decided to spend our honeymoon.  The place was called Mountain Brook and they had a several cabins in a compound in Sylva, North Carolina.  At the time, they only rented to honeymooners. Each cabin had a living room, kitchen, and bedroom.  There were no televisions in the cabins. They had a separate building that you could schedule to use that had a steam room and hot tub.  The living room had a fireplace and they had wood for you to burn.  They also provided charcoal for the grills at each cabin.  There were also trails through the woods around the site for hiking.  We were close enough to take daytrips into the Smokies and Gatlinburg.  The cabins also provided plenty of privacy.  We enjoyed our stay at Mountain Brook.