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.