FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS

North Carolina, stretching from the Atlantic to the Smokies, certainly has beautiful and varied topography.  They also have some of the prettiest landscaped highways we’ve seen, like this one:

From the Outer Banks we made the turn West and towards home.  Our first stop was to Durham so that we could tour Duke’s campus.  One knock I will make about NC is that many of its cities have incredibly tangled roads that sprawl like dumped spaghetti, change names willy-nilly, and have confusing or non-existent signage.  We took the scoot from our rather remote campground (more on that later) and did fine until we got to Durham itself.  You’d think there’d be at least some signs pointing the way to Duke which, after all, is the principal raison d’etre for the the town.  Nope.  And all the above road and sign problems bedeviled us.  After much sweating (it was HOT) and even more cursing, we finally stumbled upon the place, only to find that it was graduation day!  On a Thursday?  Turns out it wasn’t Duke’s graduation, but rather that of every high school in the Durham area.  Thank goodness with the scoot we could squeeze by stopped traffic and park in a corner.  Duke is a beautiful campus and well worth the visit.  It’s all in stone, with courtyards and arches everywhere.

The church is stunning, and sports the most colorful organ pipes we’ve ever seen.

Well, all of that was pretty sublime.  Now for the ridiculous.  Our camp read pretty well in our AAA camp guide; on a lake, level spots, wifi.  It was pretty expensive, but there were few options in the area, and we were looking forward to getting in some blog and email time.  Welcome to the ridiculous (at $35/nite!!).  The ghetto of RV parks:

On top of that, the wifi wouldn’t let us connect to the internet.  We could connect to the signal (weak, but serviceable), but kept getting “local access only” and “contact your ISP” messages.  Well, it’s not "our ISP, it’s theirs.  The office had no clue, blamed it on our computer.  Their router, for the whole park, was just a household one that you use for your own LAN setup.  It was far too weak and the whole setup was backwoods all the way.  So, no wifi.  We did get two stations over the air, at least when the thunderstorms weren’t overhead, so something was salvaged.

Update.  I’m writing this many days later, as only now do we have wifi that is fast enough to actually upload to the blog.  I’m watching the U.S. in their second game with Slovenia, and we’re behind 1-0 in the first half.  C’mon guys.  Go USA!