It’s time to head back through the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia and back home to the Old North State.
The plan was to leave Lexington early enough that we could catch Meghann just after she’d finished working the quilt show in Mebane NC and packing up all of the kit in the trailer that was to make the journey back to her shoppe in Fayetteville.
That’d allow her to take Mom on the final leg back home to Fayetteville and I’d stop by RDU to return the hire car ahead of time and have Nicholas collect me at Terminal 1 in the Traverse and then we’d figure out something for dinner.
But first things first…we had a fairly long stint on the motorways retracing our path through the mountains.
This time, we managed to make it through the toll booths without incident and didn’t see any Excitable Nigerian Chaps so that was a bit of good fortune! 🙂
Fortunately, this was relatively uneventful other than a massive bunch of cars at the petrol station in Princeton WV going in many random directions and having to take occasional evasive action in Wytheville VA when we got on the I-77/I-81 wrong-way concurrency motorway and we had idiots ahead of us doing a few brake checks.
I’d finally broken down in Princeton and gotten an expensive bottle of washer fluid and some Pringles to munch upon as Mom was over at the Starbucks getting her caffeine fix. The windscreen was showing the results of the onslaught of bugs and enough was enough…we do have a reputation for quality photography to maintain. Not that the fluid really did a great job on the accumulated layers of bug guts but it was the best we could do.
The pit stop completed, we were back on the motorway for the final run across the border where we’d see a familiar tri-coloured flag amongst the fairly impressive amount of traffic that was heading toward the NC mountains as part of the Helene relief effort.
We made it back to Pilot Mountain and then I discovered that I-74 now has a wonderful bypass to the east of downtown Winston-Salem to US-421 and then finally we were back on I-40 for the run to Mebane.
The satnav was a bit goofy when it came to navigating our way to the community centre where the quilt show was held but ultimately we did meet up with Meghann in the car park and Mom made her way to the Corolla which then headed off for Fayetteville.
That lasted all of a couple of minutes when Mom realised I still had her debit card from the final petrol pit stop in West Virginia and had Meghann turn round to retrieve it.
Oops!
So yeah…the plan had mostly worked and it was time to part ways after a wonderful five-day journey to Illinois and back.
Or so we thought… 😉
