A Really Sad Trailer

Not for The Notebook.

After our incredibly big time at Dollywood, we headed for a visit with Amanda’s dad in Hickory, North Carolina.  We planned on stopping in for dinner and a quick tour of the factory he runs.  Luckily, before dinner, we got a peek into the life of a trailer dweller. 

In kind of a weird story, Amanda’s dad is renting a trailer from someone he knows.  He is basically house-sitting for a pittance instead of living in an apartment or something for more than a pittance.  He is basically content anywhere, so he seems OK with the situation (plus, if he wasn’t he’d just leave).  The man who owns the trailer left all of his stuff inside of it, including this incredible shrine to all things hillbilly:

Amanda’s father, who is college educated and a very intelligent, non-hill-dwelling man, lives with this cabinet in full view.  Just awesome. Awesome. 

Not only is this thing in his house or half-house, but the rest of the house looks like this:

Drab, brown, dreary and completely deflating.  I cannot believe that the man has not yet murdered himself.  Luckily for everyone, Mr. Stotzer is somehow content there and remains alive and well, no worse for wear.  A consummate professional.  And also and excellent fellow.

Once we got the tour (including the second bedroom that is filled with all of the junk that the owner left in the place) and I had sampled the back-relief apparatus we were on our way into town for some dinner:

That was weird and a little uncomfortable, but no big deal.  Less weird and more comfortable was dinner here:

The reason we went to this place?  Amanda’s longing for and loving of the spinach dip appetizer:

That picture sucks, but Amanda loves that stuff.  Loves it.  I found it not lovable, but who cares?  I didn’t order it.

What I did order was some real southern fried chicken:

It was great.  I could have dealt with a little less of the peppery white country gravy, but the chicken was completely sterling.  Crunchy batter (even under that pool of gravy), super moist chicken, excellent spices in the batter, very good smashed potatoes and some excellent conversation made the dinner a rousing success. 

The teeny pile of greens on the plate?  Gross.

After dinner, we headed to Cold Stone Creamery for some standard ice cream, then headed back to our hotel for some more conversation and Celtics’ game watching.  Hooray.

The next day, we visited the plastic roll factory briefly and headed back onto the road, in the rain (surprise).  Into Virginia we went.

Our first stop in VA: lunch.  Using a little book we bought pre-trip, we found this place:

I’ll let you guess where in Virginia this place is located.

It was a dumpy restaurant that looked like it served only elderly folks, which I’m fine with.  I ordered my standard lunch plate:

Turkey club.  Kaboom.  Passable.  The best part of The Roanoker?  This sign above a old person:

I had no idea what a Dorking Hen was at the time.  I’ve since learned that it is not a plodding, unathletic, kind of overweight social outcast chicken, but instead, a regular old boring breed of boring chicken.  Color me disappointed with Wikipedia.

Once I had scarfed down the kind of dry sandwich and kind of crappy French fries (FREEDOM FRIES!), we got down to some business.  It was finally time to hand in the vehicle we had been driving around the country packed with our stuff.  A few days earlier, I had set up an appointment with the good folks here:

I walked in, chatted with some salesman fellow and found out that long ago, he went to my high school.  I went to a tiny private school in Dover, New Hampshire, so finding an alumnus from the seventies, when the school was even tinier, is kind of rare, especially when they live in a radon town in random Virginia.

Small world weirdness aside, we got down to business.  That business turned out to be super easy, as I signed something, handed over two keys, we inspected the car for thirteen seconds and we were on our way.  I cried a lot, said my goodbyes to the Ford Motor Companies finest creation ever and we hopped into the rental car we had gotten a few miles away from the dealership.

I will tell you about the rental car shortly.

Once the car vanished from our lives forever, we got down to some lunch.  We found a place by name alone using our GPS and headed inside:

What a dumpy place.  The benches were from the early fourteen hundreds and were held together with some green shaded duct tape.  It smelled a little off, but sometimes these are the places that prove the old “don’t judge a book” adage true.  We ordered despite our uneasiness with the place:

A cheeseburger with bacon (and a free old-timey sword shaped food spear) and some rippled potato chips.  not too bad at all.  The bacon was very good, nice and thick, and the rest of the plate was pretty standard.  I think I enjoyed it a little bit more because I was worried about food-borne illness prior to receiving the plate.  Once my fears were quelled by the look of the food, my rock bottom expectations were exceeded and thus, it was kind of yummy. 

*Aside* – Everyone.  Please.  Learn to manage expectations.  Especially if you are a contractor.  Do not tell someone that you will have something finished in one day, then take seven.  Instead, make up reasons that it will take well over a week, then pleasantly surprise your customer by finishing in only a week.  If you’re not managing people’s expectation, in any walk of life, you are a dummy. - *Aside Over*

Here’s where we ate:

I saved this image for last because it contains photographic proof f the car that we rented.  Here’s how we ended up with this pile of essword:

A few days previous, I booked a car rental online.  I rented a small SUV, as we needed a bunch of cargo room for all of our junk.  I figured that since we had crammed all of our stuff into one small SUV (Mercury Mariner) renting a similarly sized SUV would serve our purposes well one the remainder of our trip up the East Coast.

The morning of the car swap, we headed to the car rental company (at a super small airport) and I walked in to get the keys to what I had reserved.  Luckily for us, what I had reserved was not yet available, nor did it look like what I had reserved would become available anytime soon.  The clerk explained that the customer who was using it currently had not yet returned it.  Hooray.

I explained our situation after he offered to give us a large sedan, and he said he had one car that might be sufficient for our needs. 

The car pictured above is a Chevrolet HHR.  It is, perhaps, the worst car ever made.  It is ugly (in my opinion), terrible with gas mileage, uncomfortable, assembled from poor quality materials and was a huge embarrassment to drive.  I felt like an overweight mother of three behind the wheel of that thing.  How that thing is ever sold to anyone other than a rental car company eludes me. 

I really, really, hate the hell out of the Chevrolet HHR, very, very much.  It’s no small wonder that Chevrolet went into the tank with that abortion of an automobile.  I really don’t like Chevrolet or anything that they do.  I hope they go under completely.  Jerks.

This pretty much marked the end of our trip as far as we were concerned.  I will have a post or two more, but not much.  Heads up.