We painted our garage.

Here's a pano of it, but in order to experience it fully, please come to the garage.

Pandemic Trip Report: The Outer Banks

Since moving to North Carolina 15 years ago we've only been to the Outer Banks once, for one night. This neverending pandemic we're living through seemed like a good opportunity to get in some quality isolated ocean time. I spent a few days trying to find a true oceanfront house that didn't sleep 25 people - nearly everything out there is enormous, and I had no interest in driving three hours for a winter beach trip if the ocean wasn't literally in front of my face at all times. Finally, I found it, a normal sized three bedroom house in Rodanthe. It's wildly expensive in the summer but quite reasonable in winter, about the same as we'd paid for the cabins in the mountains.

This is the best equipped place of the three pandemic trips so far. Once I got in there and saw it was nice and normal, I started working to convince Ben we should come back later in the winter. 

It was dark when we arrived around 5:30pm - the last part of the drive on the narrow pitch black highway was oddly harrowing. I hadn't realized quite how isolated it feels out there. Anyway, when I got up in the morning and saw the ocean from our deck I was pretty excited. At high tide, there's not much beach between the house and the water. You are Right There.

The first day was stormy and windy, so we just hung around the house staring out the windows. It cleared up in the afternoon and we were able to go for a walk. A pumpkin had blown onto the beach in the storm.

It was really windy for the next 36 hours or so and there were tons of surfers and kitesurfers in the ocean taking advantage of the waves.

Our house was near the Rodanthe pier, which appeared to be closed for the season. Most things there close after Thanksgiving, but as of course we can't go anywhere anyway, it didn't matter. As in the mountains, we brought all our food with us.

Our little green house! The railing up to the lower deck was half buried in sand. Maintenance has to be a nightmare.

There was a full moon.

It was always so exciting every morning to see what the ocean would look like. Every day it was different. As the effects of Monday's storm subsided the waves really calmed down.

We drove to see the Hatteras lighthouse.

And kept going down to the tip of the island to get a lay of the land. We tried to walk on a short little path into the swamp but it was too wet from all the rain.

We stopped at a random place on the way back to go look at the ocean. There's one highway that runs down the middle of the islands, with dunes built on either side to protect it from the elements - so you can't actually see the ocean most of the time when you're driving. I really had not realized how deserted it was going to be. Even in nice weather we only ever saw a handful of people, and most of the beach is protected land so there are no houses anywhere around. You need to either walk a long way or drive on the sand to reach some of these beaches.

Here's Ben from the lower deck.

We got up earlyish one day and went to the Wright Brothers National Historic Site, about 45 minutes north. We learned that the Kitty Hawk area looks like New York City compared with the rest of the OBX - very Pigeon Forge/Branson-y, with miniature golf courses and wax museums and all that jazz. I was pretty glad we'd ended up in the middle of nowhere.

The Wright Brothers visitors center is the first National Parks visitors center ever built! We love a visitors center. We arrived just after they opened and there were only a handful of cars in the parking lot so we thought it might be OK to go inside, but I guess everyone arrived at the same time because there were about 10 people (all masked) hovering around at the initial informational areas. We stood there near the door for a few minutes and then realized "this is stupid," skipped to the end to look at the replica plane, then went outside.

It was really cold and windy. We learned that COVID masks are handy for keeping your face warm.

They have a little path to illustrate the length of the first flight. All the pictures of this event make it look like it was right on the beach, but there's no sand anywhere in sight now.

In the afternoon I sat in a chair with this view of the water reading a book while Ben went for a long walk.

Our last full day was sunny and the wind had died down, so we set out to do a 10 mile hike across the tip of Hatteras Island. It was really interesting through a bunch of different types of terrain, forest and swamp and beach.

There are no roads anywhere near this part of the beach, only sand. 

Near the Hatteras lighthouse there's a small graveyard for two British soldiers who were killed by a German U-Boat in World War II. 

The last sunset! I have never thought of myself as a beach person - and, to be fair, I probably wouldn't be interested in going in the summer when other people are around and it's hot outside. It's an ideal way to spend a week of winter pandemic lockdown, though. We're going back in February. See you soon, little green house!

Pandemic Trip Report: Smoky Mountains National Park

We went to the mountains again in September, this time on the Tennessee side. We did have to stop on the way, but it turns out highway rest stops are not bad - you don't have to touch anything at all. I saw one unmasked teenager hanging out in the bathroom (WHY) but on the whole they were pretty sparsely populated and everyone there followed the rules.

It was raining when we arrived and the first day was misty and foggy. Those are some smoky mountains!  

We decided to go after Becca told me she'd rented a cabin near Pigeon Forge. We had just gotten back from the mountains but could already tell we were going to need regular breaks from the house, so we decided to crash their family vacation. I found a cabin in the same neighborhood, and we all quarantined for two weeks beforehand so we could hang out. 

This trip was the best thing about 2020, hands down. We would never have even thought to try to go on a Tennessee vacation with the Mathiesens if there weren't a pandemic, but I'm so, so glad we did, and I feel like we're going to make it more of a priority to see our friends in a post-pandemic world. I hope so, anyway. It was great to spend some time getting to know their kids, wandering around in nature, cooking dinner together and drinking wine on the deck every night.

We went for easy walks and hikes every day, a nice break from the grueling situations Ben gets me into when we're alone. We walked up this big ramp to Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the Smokies.

We also got to have our weekly Zoom call in person! The five of us have been meeting on Zoom every Saturday since March - certainly the most frequently we've ever been in touch since high school. It's usually the highlight of my week, and was awesome to be able to do it together in our St Joe SMARTS t-shirts.

The Smokies are beautiful, of course, and the easy pace meant we got to really appreciate it rather than getting sweaty and tired (can you tell I don't love hiking). 

We also went into a little general store and got some fried pies and ice cream. This was the first grocery store I'd been in since March. I didn't love it but the patrons were all masked up, kind of surprising for Trump country.

We didn't see many people on some of the hikes but this one on the last day was pretty populated. 

We got to walk behind a waterfall!

This was the scariest place, some kind of roadside attraction with goats. We got out to see the goats, but overall it felt quite bad with lots of red staters wandering without masks. All those flags say TRUMP on them, if you can't tell - a curious situation we're in, where retailers decorate their establishments with presidential propaganda that ends up feeling threatening somehow. We did not stay here long.

Overall, it was an awesome five days. Hard to believe it's been 25 years since the three of us graduated from Central High in St Joe, MO.

Pandemic Trip Report: Little Switzerland, NC

This year I was supposed to go to France with my mom in May, then Denver with my SMARTS girls in June, then Indianapolis for the DCI Championships with my mom and sister and niece, then the Swiss Alps with Ben in September. Instead, I stayed in my house. 

We went out to dinner on Thursday, March 12, and I went to work on the 13th. After that, for many months we barely left home at all. Seven months into this pandemic, we're now seeing friends outside once in a while, I've been to the office maybe six times for an hour or two, I go to Target once a month to pick up a prescription they won't deliver. Generally, though, we are at home, and day to day don't find it difficult. We have jobs that are well-suited to working from home and have come up with plenty of ways to entertain ourselves. I've been teaching myself to play the guitar, learning Christmas carols on the piano, getting super into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, trying not to check political twitter and FiveThirtyEight every twenty minutes, et cetera. Ben is learning calculus and studying electronic circuits, weeding our half-acre yard by hand, and constantly trying to come up with new things he can take apart and put back together inside his car.

But even happy introverts start to go crazy after four months of staring at the same set of walls - especially once it got too hot to spend any significant time outdoors. In July we decided to risk contamination and rented a cabin in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. Little Switzerland is midway between Boone and Asheville off the Blue Ridge Trail, a little over three hours from home. We made it the whole way without stopping and met the cabin owner at the post office so we could follow him to the cabin.

LOOK HERE WE ARE IN A NEW PLACE.

This is the small "downtown" area of Little Switzerland. Naturally we did not get to see what's inside of any of those buildings but I'm sure it's nice. 

The cabin was small, just one bedroom, but perfect for us. We brought all our own food so we wouldn't have to go anywhere.

This was the star of the show, though: the view from the deck. Fifteen minutes after arriving, sitting on that deck in 65 degree weather, I realized the whole thing had already been worth it even if we never did anything else the rest of the week.

Our only activities were daily hikes. This was Crabtree Falls, only 20 minutes or so from the cabin.

We also drove to the top of Mount Mitchell, the highest point on the East Coast, and did a trail along the ridge that claimed to not have much overall elevation gain, but after starting we realized this is because it constantly goes up and down and back up. 

I hung in there for a couple hours but you know, once it gets to the point of hauling yourself around on ropes I'm pretty much done. I turned back and Ben went on to the next peak and then turned around. He ended up hiking about 3 miles further than I did but made it back to the car only 1/2 hour after me, which feels confusing.

After this day on Mount Mitchell, my legs hurt so much we had to take a day off and hang around the cabin. The trip was perfect, exactly what we needed. Perfect weather, quiet, beautiful, lots of good exercise.

And then a half hour into the drive home, my transmission exploded. We barely made it to the top of an exit ramp, engine smoking. We were 200 miles from home and had cancelled AAA years ago. My car came with roadside assistance, but when I called they said my membership had expired. Nobody told me it was going to expire! They could still help me out, but not for free. They wanted to tow the car to the nearest Audi dealership in Asheville, but that was in exactly the wrong direction. Who knows how long we'd get stuck there depending on what was wrong with the car? Staying in a hotel and trying to figure out how to get food during a pandemic did not sound like what we wanted to be doing. 

I started calling around trying to find someone to tow it to Raleigh. Nada. The local towing companies were really apologetic about not being able to help, particularly because that exit is a renowned car theft hotspot and under no circumstances should we leave the car unattended there for even thirty minutes. Around the time someone was telling me this on the phone, Ben found a used syringe lying on the ground. 

I called AudiCare back and told them to arrange a tow to Raleigh for the sweet price of $800. All this took a couple of hours and it was ninety degrees. It felt like a relief at that point to have something arranged even though it was an obscene amount of money to just get the car to someone who could tell us what was wrong with it. Then I got a text from the tow company, confirming the arrangements, and helpfully pointing out that because of COVID we would not be able to ride with the driver and would need to make private transportation arrangements. Oh, sure. That sounds easy.

I found a local-ish cab company. They could have someone take us to Raleigh for $400. She suggested calling an Enterprise Rental Car location not too far away, but they didn't have any cars. "We might have one this afternoon." Not helpful, guy! I called the cab company back and told them to send someone. Then I thought, "I wonder what Todd & Elise are doing today?" It turns out they were doing nothing, and our amazing friends got in the car to drive 200 miles and pick us up. 

The tow truck guy arrived and took the car, leaving us on the side of the road waiting for a cab that was going to take us to a nearby truck stop. During this period of the day, many people stopped to make sure we were all right. One woman tried to give us cash ("it's not much, but maybe it can help") and a pamphlet about Jesus. 

Finally we made it to the truck stop. After four months of never going anywhere but our own home, we had to sit inside a truck stop Subway for two and a half hours. It was surreal. I'd say about 40% of the patrons were masked up, which frankly felt better than I'd expect from rural North Carolina. Fortunately it was a big space, and we had a corner all to ourselves away from everyone else. 

I don't know if I've ever been happier to see anyone than when Elise walked through the door. Then of course we all rode in their car without masks for three hours, but frankly it felt like if we were going to get COVID from this experience we'd already have gotten it.

Before we were even home, the dealership called and told me some kind of road debris had cracked the foundation housing and caused it to explode. The transmission itself was by some miracle not damaged, and I had the car back within a couple of days and everything was fine.

VACATION!