Day 6 - Back to the Past

Today is the day the Big Five reunion begins.  This meeting was on the calendar already and actually is the event the entire trip was built around.  To explain for the uninitiated the Big Five are five friends that have been hanging together since elementary school.  Unfortunately after 50+ years of friendship we have not beat the actuarial tables and Bill Belair is no longer with us so we are currently the Big Four.  We have been getting together for a golf outing for a number of years now and tonight is the night we all get together.  As I am staying with one of the Big Five just a couple of hours away and we cannot check in until 3:00 we lazed through the morning.

Very little of the ride down was on main roads so it was nice to get a sense of the area.  There were a couple of cool looking junkyards with some really old cars right at the fence line.  There was also a yard along the way that would have driven the "American Pickers" insane with desire to go in.  There were all manner of old signs, vehicles and various other machinery strewn about the property and hanging from the buildings.

More carefully kept than the junkyards were the numerous churches, mostly Baptist by denomination, that dotted the landscape sometimes in solitude and sometimes in town.  Unadorned, unlike the churches especially in Spain or Italy, they create a feeling that is different and in some ways more powerful than the glided, intricate Catholic churches. The flat facades with the single steeple reaching to the sky as a pointer towards heaven gives the observer the same sense of reaching towards God that one gets entering a Gothic cathedral and having your gaze immediately drawn skyward.

Once we decided to leave Gary's house we did a couple of errands and then hooked up to the Tesla charger while Gary and I got sandwiches.  Once lunch was finished we wandered back to the cars and set off for Southern Pines and a meeting with Roger and Vinny who arrived in due course.  Dinner eventually was completed so we gathered around the table and competed in the annual Hearts game.  It was a close one going into the last hand with one person at 83 and three of us at 90.  Roger won on the last hand after being far behind most of the game.

Afterwards we watched the last portion of the NCAA women's game between Mississippi State and UConn.  The last second shot that Mississippi State made to end UConn's winning streak of 111 games.  As this is my wife's alma mater I was sad to see that but you have to love an underdog pulling off such a win.


Charging Stops:
Charlotte - It is always fun to go back to a charger you have been to already especially when there are good places to go while you wait.