And home again

Yesterday was the return to New York.  We filled our last morning with my Dad with a trip to the Natural Science Center, which afforded unexpected opportunities to see lemurs, tigers, and a very fashionable giant anteater.  Jane will have to post those pictures since she was more patient about staking out the best shots.  Waiting for our flight at RDU, I was overcome by the end-of-vacation melancholy and nostalgia for the vacation.  I do love my home state and it was fun driving all over it. I especially loved being there with Jane and finding out there there  things that we want to come back again to do.  (Nantahala, Penland, More time in Asheville, and the Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro are all on the list.) The return home is always bumpy. 

Here is a shot of the jellies and sauces that we acquired.  Left to right, we have fig jam made by Katy, cinnamon flavored syrup, black bear jelly, bread and butter pickles from a farm stand outside Blowing Rock, lemon tahini from a market in Boylan Heights, Raleigh, frog jam and blackberry jelly from the farm stand.

Savoring the final moments

The Greenville Drive beat the Greensboro Grasshopper 8-4.  It was sad to watch the home team lose, but it was a great game with lots of exciting moments.  The night we were there was Eighties Music Night AND Fireworks Night, which meant a dramatic presentation to a soundtrack that included several Huey Lewis and the News tracks.  Jane declared Guilford the Grasshopper the best mascot we had seen and I had to agree. He was accommodating to grown ups who like ball park mascots, flirtatious with the fans without being creepy, and businesslike about fan encounters without seeming jaded.  If you can say that about a person in a giant grasshopper suit.

Game changer

The barbecue at the Hoppers Stadium features both the Eastern and Piedmont style barbecue. And they ship. How did we not know about this?

Last game of the vacation

After stopping in Lexington to sample the BBQ Center we are watching the Greensboro Grasshoppers play the Greenville Drive. The Drive is ahead 4-2 but the Hoppers are holding their own.

BBQ Center, Lexington

Anyone who talks about North Carolina barbecue for more than 30 seconds will reference the Lexington style, and anyone mentioning Lexington will make note of BBQ Center, a pork valhalla with red vinyl booths.

The pork comes finely or coarsely chopped or sliced, presauced only. This leads to a differential from the top to bottom of your tray, with the top lightly spritzed with a vinegar/pepper/tomato dip but the underpieces simply smokey and moist. My coarse chopped tray was downright juicy.

The slaw is red, which means mixed with ketchup. I'm not a fan but it's a little healthier than mayo and it matches the pork well. This actually is the only place we had hushpuppies and not cornbread. They were oblong, crispy and a little sweet but of medium density.

If one had the stamina, the place offered hardcore milkshakes and banana splits.

Local color

The vegetarian won the hot wing eating contest.

If only it were true

Jane is writing a post about going to 12 Bones today. I will just add this detail about the sign hanging in the bathroom... right next to a fun house mirror that makes everyone look remarkably svelte.

12 Bones

If I had a barbecue joint, I would want it to be like 12 Bones, tucked down in the arts warehouse district of Asheville. In a departure from other NC joints, it features both ribs and smoked butts, and the latter are truly pulled, not chopped. The ribs come with a choice of four rub preparations and fell off the bone. The collards were perfect. Also, Diet CheerWine in the fountain. I'm ready to move in.

Tourist lineup

Asheville Tourists

First, there are at least 15 microbrews available at McCormick Stadium. Also, veggie burgers, it being Asheville, and Bojangles chicken sandwiches. AND a staffer will bring it to you in your seat.

So far the Tourists are trailing the Greenville Drive 2-0 in the 3rd. And their ballpark cuisine is crushing Hickory. In fairness the announcer and effects crew are not up to par. But the Tourists have not one but two mascots: Mr. Moon and Ted E. Tourist, a bear.

Between Games

We've been hanging out in the hills around Boone for a couple days with Claudia's dad. It's ridiculously serene. You could go tubing or rafting or hiking or fight the hordes of kids at Grandfather Mountain or the Tweetsie Railroad... or you could do what we did, which was to sit in the rocking chairs on Robert's porch, gaze out over the valley, and drink wine.

We have not honestly watched as much baseball nor eaten as much barbecue as one might expect so far on the trip, but we're heading into the home stretch over the next three days: Baseball in Asheville and Greensboro, and the possibility for as many as three barbecue meals.

Crawdads Recap

The Crawdads neatly pincered the Shorebirds last night, 8-1, for the benefit of a sparse audience. It's a nice park tucked into a hill on the edge of town, with a clever announcer and sound effects staff. Visiting players, based on their names, were portrayed as Nicki Minaj, Austin Powers, Jefferson Davis and, for one named Planeta, either Neptune or Uranus. We'll be delicate and say Neptune. They even have their own theme song.

The ballpark food was straightfoward hotdogs and burgers with the requisite popcorn, pretzels and peanuts. Sundaes were available in helmets, but only those of major league teams. The Crawdad Cafe offers sit-down dining along the right field side. Beer, as in Durham, included local selections on draft. With $3 parking, $8 seats a row behind home plate, and half-price Mondays for seniors (Claudia's Uncle Carl), it was a very cost-effective evening.

Between-innings entertainment included giant hamburger relays, musical chairs, bug-catching, water balloon batting and dizzy running. Conrad the Crawdad lounged around in brightly colored boxers and a jersey. We accosted him for photos and got a bonus of damp, reeking, sweaty costume handshake. It might be a good idea to dryclean the mascot soon.

The Crawdads are a low-A affiliate of the Rangers and at the top of their division. Each team had a pair of errors by the end of the night but the crustaceans had some strong batters and solid if minimally varied pitching.

Bottom line: I might eat first but I'd definitely spend an evening with the 'dads anytime.

Conrad the Crawdad

Watching the Crawdads

Uncle Carl

Staunch Obama fan, occasional Crawdads attendee.

Hickory Crawdads

Finally! A ballgame! The Crawdads vs the Delmarva Shorebirds, with our host Uncle Carl.

Rained out

We waited 2 hours for the rain to let up in Durham. It didn't. We got to see spectacular lightning flash across the sky, have our photo taken with Wool E Bull and drink some beer, so we got a few of the necessities in. The old ballpark where Annie Savoy passed batting advice to Crash Davis is nearby but the new stadium is at the heart of a revived downtown Durham, complete with its own mini-Williamsburg filled with earnest, bearded hipsters talking about making sourdough bread over PBRs.

Today is Sunday. No baseball on the schedule and many barbecue places are closed. Time to regroup.

Check

No baseball game but we ate ballpark food, drank beer, and got our picture taken with the Bull's mascot, Wool E. Bull.

Rainbow after an hour of rain delay. This is a good sign, right? Setting aside the lightning.

Looks like rain

They just announced a delay in start time and covered the field with a protective covering. Clouds rolling in.

At the Bullpark

We're hoping rain won't delay a promising evening of Durham Bulls vs Rochester Red Wings. We've acquired free drink cozies, Natty Green beer (Greensboro) and the decadent Carolina Dog, topped with pulled pork and slaw. Excellent.

I am showing Jane favorite childhood places, and the idea is that we will together develop a new expertise in treasured North Carolina pastimes together.  But the truth of the matter is that the North Carolina institution that Jane is the most rapturous about to date is... Harris Teeter grocery store.

Skylight Inn, Whirligigs and a Dearth of Mudcats

We've been cooling our heels for the past couple days at the beach. Cooling being the operative word because it's been the only place with any relief from the 90+ degree heat. On the beach there's been a constant stiff wind from the south, rendering the air pleasant although the waves were decidedly strong. Today we headed inland after a stop at the Carolina Aquarium in Kure Beach -- they have some nice box turtles, rays, juvenile loggerheads, an assortment of sharks -- and started the serious part of the trip. It is hard to get from the southern beaches to the town of Ayden. It probably took 2.5 hours of winding country roads lined with tobacco and corn and soybean fields. Eventually we reached barbecue valhalla: The Skyline Inn.
 
The capitol-worthy cupola gives you a sense of the barbecue greatness in store, as does the permeating smell of wood smoke. Inside the furnishings are straightforward wooden tables and plastic coverings, and you order over the thwacking of a staffer armed with two cleavers systematically hacking a side of pork into teaspoon-sized hunks, stopping periodically to mix lighter and darker meat with the bits of crispy skin. We split a medium tray. That meant a smallish cardboard boat stuffed with a mound of meat, topped with a slab of cornbread, topped with another small boat of coleslaw, slid over to us on a square of waxed paper. We self-served a couple of iced teas and started in. 

The pork was flat-out incredible: tender, juicy, smoky, flecked with crunchy bits of skin the consistency of gravel, but pork-flavored. Skylight Inn offers three sauces at the table: one bottle of Texas Pete and two bottles of house-made vinegar-and-pepper sauces. We started as purists but eventually added squeezes of the sauce and found that it both cut and enhanced the richness of the pork. So did the slaw: ground green cabbage with a light, sweet mayo-based dressing. The cornbread was the oddest of the bunch. Honestly, it was like someone baked a slab of polenta under a heavy brick. It was dense, chewy and decidedly corn-flavored, but it was neither a bread for topping with corn nor a hush-puppy-like side dish.

Sated, we rolled westward to Wilson, home of the whirligigs. This outside art installation by WW2 vet Vollis Simpson stands in a pasture on his property. You don't exactly walk around the art so much as stand on the other side of the fence and see what you can. But he's assembled huge, 20-foot-high, wind-powered sculptures that twisted and whirred in the oncoming breeze.

They're being moved to a city park next year, apparently. The man himself was heading out from his shop as we stood admiring his work and gave us a friendly nod. Eventually we realized that we were standing under tall metal sculptures in the face of an oncoming thunderstorm, and the rain started pounding as soon as we got back into the car.

The plan for tonight had been to make the first of several ballgames: the Carolina Mudcats vs. the Lynchburg Hillcats. Instead we looked at the weather map (how many marriages, relationships, vacations, etc have been saved by the availability of GPS and the internet from the car?) and realized it was likely going to be rained out. We headed for Raleigh instead and installed ourselves on some friends' sofa and our laundry in their washer. The heat wave is over, and tomorrow night we have tickets for the Bulls.

About that rental car

The tagline says that we rented a car, but mad props must be extended to my Dad and his girlfriend Susan who drove from Greensboro to RDU in caravan formation to loan us my Dad's Subaru.

Teaser

No real North Carolina barbecue yet, but these pulled pork nachos piled high with mango, barbecue sauce and sour cream got us in the mood.  We've had a blissful two nights in Wrightsville Beach, but tomorrow the time has come to time to get down to the business at hand with the Carolina Mudcats and a stop at Ayden's Skylight Inn.

On being from North Carolina

When we first started making plans for this trip, North Carolina's amendment to enshrine marriage in the state constitution as exclusively between one man and one woman was just a twinkle in the eye of a right-wing state legislator.  As we followed the polls in advance of May 8, we started to realize that we would likely be patronizing a lot of  businesses in counties which had explicitly voted to prevent us from having convenient things like hospital visitation rights should we ever live there together.  Jane made mordant jokes about future vacation plans: "Next year, Myanmar!" When the amendment actually passed, there was some soul searching on my part about what it means to love a state that, despite a tradition of relative moderation and civility, had joined all the other southern states in explicitly enshrining discrimination in its constitution. The election was followed by more troubling actions by the state legislature and by religious figures from close to where my mother grew up, see here, here, and here.  With everything going on, I was at a loss to explain to Jane the emotional and sentimental connection to the state.  The truth is that North Carolina is a  tremendously complex place, largely rural, often conservative, but also the home of important social and cultural movements that align with my political values and that I believe have moved our country forward, see here for one.    My own relationship with where I came from is also somewhat contradictory.  I feel rooted in the university community in Greensboro in which I grew up, but also have ties to small towns throughout the state where my family is.  And I love my friends who grew up here and stay here, because this is where they want to be. Living in New York, which is full of people who came from somewhere else, I love being from somewhere, and feeling connected to a place with characteristics, with culture.  North Carolina is the place that made me who I am, and it barbecue and iconic minor league baseball teams to boot.  So here we are.

On Nutrition

One thing you might know about barbecue, particularly the North Carolina style, is that it involves the chopped-up bits of more or less the whole pig. That includes the lean loin and the fatty shoulder, the tender ham and the crisp skin. Juicy is a euphemism for cholesterol-laden. None of this is a surprise. However, I've been working hard at weight loss over the past couple months (6 lbs and counting) and the idea of going whole-hog (excuse the pun) with a mountain of pork a hush puppies has gotten less appealing than it was a few months ago. And yet, here we are. To be in NC and not have barbecue would be like being in San Diego and not having a margarita the size of your head. Sure, you can go, but what's the point?

On top of that, there are the ballparks, bristling with beer and hot dogs. (Side note: My favorite ballpark pastime is "Unlikely Stadium Food," which involves calling out, vendor style, the aforementioned. "Pot roast! Get your hot pot roast!" or "Omelettes! Made-to-order omelettes!" I digress. The point is, this trip is a caloric minefield. We've settled on a strategy for damage control: visits to representative institutions in the eastern, piedmont and mountain traditions of barbecue, and salads wherever else we can manage. I had two today and went swimming. If I can escape this vacation weight-neutral we'll call it a win.