Carolina on my mind

Current location: Fayetteville, NC

Current weather: Sunny 71

Miles traveled today: 403.2

Total miles traveled: 892.5

Today we woke up to a rainy/foggy morning, and being in the mountains with a low cloud deck the travel was a bit difficult at times. Our hotel last night sat up on a fairly steep hill. I'm glad we never stayed at this hotel before with the trailer because I don't think we would have made it up. This is a view from the parking lot of the hotel to give you an idea of the hill we were on.

Driving a few miles down the road was the tunnel that connects West Virginia to Virginia. This always brings back memories of my childhood going to the outer banks. My sister and I would try and hold our breath the entire length of the tunnel. I would always cheat and my sister would hold her breath until her face was bright red. My secret plan was for her to kill some of her brain cells so I could once again be the smartest child.

We then reached the pot of gold of our almost 900 mile rainbow. Our towers were all taken down for us on this trip...others will not be so easy. We had four of these bad boys to load up in our trailer and tie down. The sites were about 1.5 hours apart and it only took us about 3 hours of total "work" time to get them loaded. On our way out from our first farm we had our first wildlife encounter. This is our snapping turtle friend and when we got out of the truck to take its picture, it wasn't happy with us at all. We tried to get him to move out of the driveway but he wouldn't budge, so we just straddled him with the truck.

We then went to Mt. Olive, NC, the pickle capital of the world for some lunch. It was about this time that I became pretty bummed that we were only an hour from the beach and it was such a nice day, but we still had work to be done. We then drove to our next site and packed up the towers, where we almost had a disaster. As I was cutting the ground rods with the saw sparks caught some of the dry grass on fire. We were able to stomp it out pretty fast, but if ten more seconds would have passed the entire north side of the lagoon would have been on fire. The winds were about 20mph and dry grass was everywhere. My heart was beating pretty fast after that scare. We then hit the dusty trail back to our hotel.

Next up...Chillicothe, OH