Old Salem

We camped for the night at Occoneechee State Park (N36 37 29.8, W78 31 49.0).  It is on Buggs Island Lake, which it turns out, is another dammed up lake by the Corps of Engineers.  They really like damming up rivers in the USA, and almost all the lakes around here were produced by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the early part of the 20th century.  I didn't realize that this lake had a whole bunch of Corps of Engineers campsites, otherwise we would have gone to one of these, because they are cheap, and we get sites at half price because Doreen, being a US citizen has a seniors pass for all US Government recreation areas.  As it was, we really got soaked ($34) for the State Park (they charged $5 extra for Tanner!!)  They did have a deal of firewood, however, so we stocked up on that, and the temperature was nice for siting out around the campfire.

10 November, Thursday

This was a pretty uneventful day.  We spent the day wandering through country roads in southern Virginia, working our way westward.  There are many many paved roads going in all directions in these parts, and you really see the country side if you meander along these two lane roads.  Tonight we did go to a Corps of Engineers campsite.  However, it was a cloudy day today with a few sprinkles, and when we got to this site, on Philpott Lake, at Goose Point (N36 48 15.1, W80 03 11.3) there was a really cold wind blowing in off the lake.  It was a pretty lake (another Army Corp of Engineers production) with the autumn leaves in full colour as you can see in this picture:

But, as you can see in this picture, every campsite has a wind barrier around the fire pit (you can see it right behind Tanner):

This should have been a warning about things to come!  The wind whistled through here all night, and we didn't even bother to have a campfire.  The temperature during the night wasn't all that cold - 39F (we've had temperatures down as far as 28F other nights), but with the cold wind off the water it felt really cold.  But they had electricity at this campsite even though it was almost all closed up for the winter (not even bathroom facilities open), so we could run our electric heater and keep the place cozy warm.

11 Novemeber Fri

We've been doing this for 4 weeks now!  Today we traveled south and went through Winston Salem, so we stopped at Old Salem, which has pretty much preserved all the old buildings of the Moravian colony.  Most of the buildings are over 200 years old - here are a couple of examples - this was the tavern (where we parked the motorhome, of course) - it was actually a hotel with a barn for the horses next door :

Here's another old barn:

We continued on down I-40 and I-77 (pretty hard to make any time around these parts without traveling on Interstates!), to Lake Norman State Park in North Carolina - a lake produced by the Army Corps of Engineers, of course.  These lake look sort of like spiders, with arms going in every direction, because when they dam up a river the water goes in every direction in every low spot across the countryside.  This park had the characteristic that there were no level campsites - not that it would have been difficult to make level sites, just that the guy who designed it was someone sitting behind a desk who had never camped in his life.  We need to keep the motorhome level, because it is very hard on the refrigerator if it is not kept level, and it's life will be shortened.  We used all our leveling blocks and got it as level as we could.  It was a much warmer evening this time, and we enjoyed our campfire.