Classic - Day 128

What a delightful day. As a microcosm, this day held a lot of what I have really enjoyed during this trip - a classic "Road Trip" day.
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I started out early from Charlotte, NC and headed to Gaffney, SC to start the Cherokee Foothills scenic drive. I haven't had a great scenic drive in a while, and I didn't hold out hopes for this one. The book described it to be more historic than scenic as it was a path travelled by the namesake Indians and was subsequently followed by armies, traders and bootleggers.

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But I was wrong, the drive was great. It was supposed to take about 3 hours, and I usually beat the estimated time. It took me 5 hours. I was thrown off schedule early when I met John A. Robertson at my first stop. He is a ranger at the Cowpens National Battlefield, site of a Historic victory for the American Patriots; his real passion is the Revolutionary War. He's a buff. This is a long post, and the next long paragraph is about him and his passion, so skip it if you have no interest in the Rev. War.

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Mr. Robertson spent many years working on genealogy, but a few years ago, feeling his work was complete, he moved his attentions to the Revolutionary War. An early adopter of technology, he has designed a series of web pages to organize, share and request information about the war. He has an online page (http://gaz.jrshelby.com/) that shows all the sites of the war that he knows about. Many of them have a comment of "incomplete". These are sites where he is looking for more information, and he provides a simple sheet to fill out that describes the basic information he is looking for. One city marked as incomplete is Haddonfield. Perhaps someone (buz) can help out and send in the answers he is looking for. And he welcomes any other support anyone has to offer. The fill-out sheet exists somewhere, but I couldn't quickly find it, so John, if you use the card created by my sister and get to this blog page, feel free to add the link to the sheet in a comment. BTW, his other main pages are (http://lib.jrshelby.com/ and http://jrshelby.com/). Needless to say an interesting guy and a wealth of knowledge. The actual park was fine, but not as interesting as John. He dared me that I wouldn't find a more interesting spot to visit during the day, and I believed him at the time, but we were both wrong.

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I continued along the byway, SC Route 11, enjoying the scenery as it headed into the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. After skipping a few possibilities, I took the detour to Caesar's Head, a mountaintop overlook. The actual head looked more like Bart's Grandpa Simpson than Caesar, but it was a twisty drive that ended with a beautiful overlook.

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Back on Route 11, I took advantage of the local crops. Perhaps I should have waited for Georgia, but I bought a satchel of fresh peaches and a bag of boiled peanuts. The peaches were just picked and aren't ripe yet, so I will enjoy them in the future. And the peanuts were great at first, but once they cooled down, they seemed a bit soggy to me. I prefer roasted and crunch to boiled and mushy, but it was a unique experience.

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After that, it was just an enjoyable drive to Lake Hartwell - pretty, but not worth writing home about. I was then going to head for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but when I looked it up on the map, I noticed a little town called Murphy, NC. It showed it had camping, so I figured I might spend another night under the stars.

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Sake (my GPS) said Murphy was only 95 miles away, but said it would take 3 hours. Sake was right this time. The winding roads that lead to Murphy were slow and twisty. I didn't see the camping, so I am stashed tonight at the Murphy Best Western. Nice place.

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Murphy, NC is beautiful. It's a bit head turning to see my name on the town, schools, restaurants, hardware stores, and dump. But when not rubbernecking, I enjoyed getting lost in my namesake town set in the Blue Ridge foothills.

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I asked the clerk at the hotel for a good place to eat, an act that has become second nature to me. But her breathless, drooling yet emphatic response of "Doyle's!" caught me by surprise. Usually the clerks ask, "What are you in the mood for" or "We have a Bennigan's". But there was something about this response that was different. I stammered, "Really? It's good?". She could only nod and suck back the saliva creeping down her lower lip.

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I parked in the gravel lot, and sauntered in. I could get a table if I waited, but I could sit at the wine bar alone if I wanted to sit right away. Mondayfreakingnight, and a line...I sat at the wine bar, and was lucky for it. The line grew longer as I perused the wine list and selected a glass of Gewurztraminer from Germany, but the hostess said it was a bit on the sweet side and pointed me to a Sauvignon Blanc that was crisp and delicious.

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Only when the bread arrived did I begin to understand that I had fallen into an exquisite fine dining experience, one of the best I've had on the entire Road Trip. The bread came with freshly whipped homemade butter and a hummus thingy. I ripped off a piece of the (I'd guess just baked) bread and buttered it and it was great...but the butter wasn't needed. The next piece was just the bread and it tasted as good. The third nugget of bread was dipped into the hummus thingy, as well as every piece thereafter. It was a curry hummus, very freshly made, with chunks of garlic, and a few other tangy spices.

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My eyes opened, the National Parks book closed, and I began to take the menu seriously. Because I had recently had beef, I went with the Seafood Linguine plate at the recommendation of the hostess, who still tried to convince me to have the steak...perhaps I should have heeded her, but the pasta worked. The garden salad came first and by now, I knew to take the house dressing which was a curry ginger sauce that I had to lick off the plate. The garden part of the salad consisted of mushrooms, tomatoes and carrots grown by the chef. I even tasted the tomato, and have a new found appreciation.

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The seafood pasta arrived and it was decadent. The abundant muscles and shrimp were perfectly cooked. My only disappointment was that there were only 3 giant scallops that were better than perfect. Scallops are so easy to ruin, and so hard to get right; when they are perfect, it is a treasure. The sauce must have been half butter or more. It separated from the garlic cream sauce in the same way as when you put a pat of butter into hot clam chowder. It was a dipping sauce for the seafood as well as an excellent sop for more of the homemade bread.
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(BTW the service was excellent also, and because the wine bar was also a station for the staff, I constantly was chatting with the employees passing through.)

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I was full. I asked for the check. Jean sat down.

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Jean escaped New Orleans just one day before Katrina and has made a home of Murphy. She's now in charge of the homeless shelter here, the only one in a hundred miles. She convinced me to re-open the check and order the creme brulee for desert, to which I added a snifter of Warre's port. I'm not much of a desert person, but it was as good as the rest of the meal. What a great restaurant...if anyone is ever within striking distance of Murphy, NC come to Doyle's and enjoy this for yourself.

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If I hadn't already decided on the Phoenix area, Murphy, NC could win me over. Tomorrow I hope to do the camp-out thing, so we'll see about another blog post, hope this one leaves you as full as me.

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Addendum: I received this message from John Robertson after he checked out the comments, so I figured I'd add it to the main message:

Scott.

I tried to post this as a comment to your blog, but it hasn't appeared, so I must have done something wrong.

Anyway, I was able to expand the Haddonfield page extensively. It was a very busy spot during the RW.

See

http://gaz.jrshelby.com/whatsnew.htm (it won't be at the top of the list for long).

http://gaz.jrshelby.com/haddonfield.htm

http://gaz.jrshelby.com/m.htm#mantuacreek (I can't understand why anyone would say that any part of Mantua Creek was "near Haddonfield".

I have been adding these "Incomplete" pages as quickly as I can, because when I have them all up, I want to make yet another serious effort to recruit someone with interests similar to mine but focusing on New Jersey and New York. It those states were covered along with SC, it could be as much as half or more of the total.

Only a week or so, I gave an informal refutation to someone emailing the park that NJ had more actions than did any other state. I have no interest in bragging rights, but my work has turned up noticeably more for SC than any other colony, followed by NY then by NJ. Working with Haddonfield, I could see that someone (or several) in NJ have done the detailed searching there that some of us have done for the Carolinas. I think that I initially had 2 actions mentioning Haddonfield, and these expanded into 8. When we have had an opportunity to research all the NJ sites, the whole question of "bragging rights" may require revisiting (at least, on my part).

John