Yesterday morning I was all set for a causal, take it easy day. I had a great view of the beach as Myrtle Beach with plenty of time to go to my next destination of “some place” near Jacksonville, NC. I followed my new “normal” routine of picking a destination within 150 miles in the general direction of intended travel. Jacksonville sounded interesting, and could be reached via a smaller highway along the coast. I then used Expedia and others to check on what sort of hotels are available, looking for something in an interesting place and “reasonably” priced – or just reasonably priced, or sometimes in a good place but not so reasonably priced. I don’t have a good approach for the selection criteria – but once selected I call the hotel directly. I attempt to avoid all of the booking agencies because they are almost always wrong about almost everything having to do with the specific properties, such as availability of washing machines, the room selections, availability of restaurants, etc. They are quite willing to give information, but it is not dependable. I try to call the hotel.

On this day I called a hotel and actually got into a conversation with the person on the phone. We chatted for a bit, he offered me a good price because I sounded like a “nice guy,” I accepted and offered to bring a bottle of wine to share with him because he sounded like a nice guy. This was certainly the first time on this trip that I even vaguely contemplated doing anything like that. He said that the trip should take a little over two hours and that I could check in whenever I want because the room was open. That sounded perfect, a late start, and early arrival and time to check out the area.

However…. my GPS decided that it would be another good day for a long sight-seeing trip rather than a direct line to our destination. (I now consider the lady in the dash board my traveling companion even though she gets a little bossy at times.) Instead of taking the two hour trip on the main drag, or the slightly slower ride along the coast, “she” decided that we should go on the six hour drive further into the center of North Carolina, approaching the destination from the west instead of from the south. It is difficult to determine which route has been selected because the GPS just shows the next intersection, not the entire route. Paper maps show the big view, but not the details at the intersection scale. When starting in the middle of a congested city with unknown roads going in a lot of directions it is difficult to know how to best get untangled on onto the correct route. Unfortunately, in larger metropolitan situations by the time you get on the open road you have traveled so far that the route choices are blurred. In any case, we went west before going north and finally back to the east.

I was sort of happy to be going on the “less traveled” path because it gave me a chance to see the “real” county side, and what I saw reminded me a lot of the early parts of my trip – lots of abandoned store fronts, run down or abandoned homes and poverty. Interestingly, this wasn’t nearly as uniformly distributed as in the earlier parts of my travels. This time there were big, fancy, well cared for homes with the columns and long driveways that I think about with the south, surrounded by very large agricultural lands, and then run down houses and broken towns. I couldn’t help but think that this must have reflected the situation in the early 1800’s or earlier. Land owners in big houses, field hands in small shacks, small towns barely hanging on. It wasn’t all like that, clearly there had been a time in the recent past where the economy was better and the average home newer and “modern” with vibrant towns.

I started looking for wine about 50 miles from my destination in the hopes of finding a bottle of chilled wine that would remain chilled until my arrival. That was much easier said than done. I tried grocery stores, but most don’t carry alcohol at all. Those that do have a tiny wine selection of cheap wines, perhaps suitable for cooking. Nothing that I would want to bring as a gift. The liqueur stores have hard liqueur, but no wine or beer. You have to sleuth out a “wine store.” I finally found one, and it was well stocked with nice wines – even chilled chardonnay. It wasn’t cheap, but suitable as a gift.

I finally pulled into the “hotel” at around 4:30 pm – tired but happy to stop driving. The hotel was not at all what I had expected.

When I got there a guy ran off into the woods, returning a few seconds later to tell me that Robbie would be there in a minute or so. Soon a guy with a 10″ goatee, short cropped hair, and working clothes emerged from the forest on a riding lawnmower. He looked like a “good old boy” if ever there was one – but he was smiling broadly when greeting me. He said that they had been working on keeping the 21 acre property under control, a constant battle in this part of the world. Robbie welcomed me, informed me about a few “house rules” such as where to park, taking shoes off before entering the house, watching out for fire ants and things like that. He then told me about some of the history of the house, where some of the construction wood came from, pointed out 300 year old wood beams, and much more.

I am probably getting much of the detail wrong, but my understanding is that he grew up in southern California, became a realtor in the Miami area selling the mega-mansions that spoke of a few posts back, got fed up with that, purchased the house that is now his “hotel” over twenty years ago to turn it into a retail store, finally got sick of that and went into the hotel business. It must have been some store. Apparently some of the old stock remains, five foot tall giraffes, nice floor and table lamps, unusual wall art and all sorts of interesting things.

It is difficult to sort out which part of this hotel are associated with which hotel rooms because there it is almost all common areas separate by walls and things but no doors. For example, I have a bed room and bath with a door – that is clearly “my” space. But then there is an associated “living room” filled with nice leather sofas, a round table with chairs, end tables and things – it is a living room connected by an open passage to a full up, modern kitchen. The kitchen is a common space, is “my” living room?? And then there are two other apartments similarly situated, and similarly open onto the kitchen. It is difficult to know where one space ends and another begins. I guess that it is the point. There is a young lady staying somewhere in the house, but I have no idea where so I am hesitant to go poking around looking a things – it wouldn’t do to walk in on her.

We finally sat down in “my” living room to share a little wine – and the stories started flowing! I guess he decided that I was a kindred “progressive” liberal and he could talk openly about his political views. Everything he said made perfectly good sense to me, we are definitely on the same wavelength. He said he wore the beard, short hair and clothes as part of his “disguise” in order to be accepted by the locals. He wants to do what he can to moderate the current political unrest and is taking the approach of working from within – not exactly to disrupt, but instead to change opinions by informing them of things they might not be aware of. His opinion is that they would make better decisions if they had better information, but it is difficult to get that here.

We talked about churches (he told me that there are something like 65,000 DIFFERENT Christian denominations, all of which claim to be the one true path to Jesus), we talked about politics, we talked about Trump and his supporters, we talked about how the locals don’t really care about the politics or truth – they care about being “on the team.” He agreed with my assessment of the collapse of the economy, suggesting that perhaps it all started with “Ping Pong Diplomacy” under President Nixon.

Robbie then brought up an interesting project that he has been trying to get off the ground. I don’t recall exactly what he called it, but it is something like HRTP (Hippies Return To Politics). His thought is that the hippies abandoned their political passion in the late 1970’s, and need to return to help right the wrongs by reminding everyone of the need for rational, considered, and fearless truth seeking. He wants to bring small groups of divergent people to work on local problems – but without politics or religion allowed in the discussions. His main rule would be that if any brings up politics or religion, they are not allowed in the group. Just facts, just logic, just finding ways to solve problems – period. I think this is a great idea. In fact, I think it is exactly what my wife was doing so well in our home town. She seemed to be the glue where local people of various political and religious persuasions could come together to solve local problems, whether it be keep the prisons out of our community or building a beautiful new library. We should be able to figure out how to do that – just focus on the actual problem at hand, forget all of the other stuff. Perhaps we can then learn to know, and respect, each other.

This was one of those stopping places that I was hoping to find on my trip. I have had a few interesting people, and have had some interesting conversations, but this is the first that was long enough, and private enough, that we could actually get down to sharing thoughts, insights and experiences.