Celebrating the Groves Legacy with the Glovers

November 23, 2010
Grove Park Inn, Asheville, NC
Could there be a more appropriate place to spend Thanksgiving than a resort built from the profits of a product formulated to make you fat?

We are at the Grove Park Inn, built by Edwin Grove in 1912, using a fortune acquired from the sales of his famous Tasteless Chill Tonic (which outsold Coca Cola in the 1890s), and other miraculous medical concoctions. We are spending the long Thanksgiving weekend here with our Indiana Glover grandchildren and their parents.

The Inn is decorated for Christmas and filled with fanciful elaborate gingerbread scenes from its annual competition (stay tuned for pictures another day).  There is a roaring fire and non-stop musical entertainment in the Great Hall. We joined  a small crowd gathered on the deck with their wine or hot chocolate to watch the sun setting behind the Blue Ridge Mountains in grandeur.  We have gone with the boys to check out the tennis courts and the indoor pool which we will visit tomorrow to work off a small fraction of the calories we consume at the breakfast and Thanksgiving Dinner buffets.

Let the Thanksgiving festivities begin--we are thankful to be sharing the holiday with family from afar!

Sunshine Makes Everything Better

FestiVELO Day 3

November 5, 2011

The temperature was no warmer today than yesterday and the winds were stronger, but the sun shone bright and the ride was scenic, which made a world of difference.  Bike Club friends Lucille and Arte rode thirty miles with us today, while other Bike Club members did longer rides.   

Our first destination was Cypress Gardens, where the butterfly pavilion-- heated to a tropical temperature and filled with colorful flowers, birds, and butterflies—was the most popular attraction for our cold and windswept riders.  

Then it was on to lunch in the Old Santee Canal Park, on the site of America’s first canal, which began operating in 1800.  Jimmy Buffet songs blaring from the sound system in our picnic shelter inspired us to think of tropical locales, and our lunch menu was inspired by his song “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”  

We didn’t have time to stop in the Museum or Interpretive Center, but took a moment to learn about this interesting vessel.  It is a full size model of “Little David,” a semisubmersible torpedo boat built in Charleston in 1863 which earned fame during the Civil War as the first submarine to make a successful torpedo attack on a warship. 

We rode from the rest stop back to our starting point, changed from our bike gear into warm dry clothes, then headed by car to the next stop on the 70-100 mile rides—Mepkin Abbey. The Abbey has been home to a colony of Trappist monks since 1949, but the property dates back to 1681, when it was a 3,000 acre land grant plantation.  The plantation grew to 10,000 acres in the early 1900s, and was purchased in 1936 by Henry R. Luce--publisher  of Time, Fortune and Life magazines, and his wife Clare Boothe Luce—playwright, author, congresswoman and ambassador.  Clare found religion and joined the Roman Catholic Church after her daughter died in a car accident in 1944, and she donated most of the plantation property to the Catholic Church for the use of the monks in 1949.  

We visited the Abbey gift shop and wandered the tranquil garden and grounds, but did not see any monks out and about.  The woman at the shop told us that this time of day was when they were in their rooms meditating or taking naps, since they get up at 3 a.m..  

This is a sculpture that the monks made using wood from trees downed here by Hurricane Hugo in 1989.  The hurricane was devastating to the area, downing 12,000 trees in Cypress Gardens as well.  We never missed the extra trees at either the Abbey or Cypress Gardens—the monks could probably find in that a meditation on time’s power to heal, or resilience (or maybe they would just shake their heads and tell us that we are not very observant).  

From the Abbey we headed south to Charleston, where we stayed overnight in an unremarkable Best Western Inn near the starting point of our Sunday ride—a bike tour of Charleston’s historic district.  

Finding Fun in the Face of Adversity

FestiVELO Day 2

November 4, 2011

A cold front with a hard rain blew through late last night, and although it was mostly gone by this morning, it left behind grey skies, a temperature of 52 degrees and 15-20 mile per hour winds—conditions just barely within our riding tolerance range.   

On today’s thirty mile ride chain link fences and modular trailer style homes replaced the white picket fences and gracious Victorian homes of yesterday.  Our destination was St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, built in 1767.  There was supposed to be a docent there to give us a tour, but he or she was a no-show (no surprise), so all we know is what we read on the historical marker out front, and the grave stones all around the church, many of them marking the final resting places of Confederate soldiers.   

There was also supposed to be a tour of a fish lift (whatever that is) just down the street from the church, but the drive to it was gated closed and there were no trespassing signs all over the property.  The ride organizers also made a spontaneous unannounced decision to move the scheduled lunch break from the rest stop in front of the church to a rest stop that was only on the 60 and 100 mile ride routes, so we had the unexpected, but really fortunate, opportunity to find lunch on our own. 

After long hot showers back at our hotel, we headed to Summerville by car for lunch at Ladles, a cozy restaurant offering a dozen different soups daily.  Soup was the perfect lunch on this chilly day.  

Then we went to the Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site nearby.  Congregationalist descendents of Puritans who settled in Massachusetts to find religious freedom from the tyranny of the Anglican Church of England traveled south to make their fortune here in 1697.   Ironically, just nine years after they settled in this area they called Dorchester, Anglicanism was declared South Carolina’s official religion.  In 1720, St. George’s Anglican Church was built in Dorchester, and although the Congregationalists worshipped two miles away, they were taxed to support St. George’s.  All that remains of the church is the bell tower, because the British (Anglicans all, no doubt) burned the church (and most of the town) during the Revolutionary War.   

We also wandered around the town fort, heralded as the “best preserved tabby fortification in North America,” surprisingly intact in light of the success of the British in destroying the rest of the town.  Even more surprising to us was that in 1726, less than 30 years after the founding of Dorchester, slaves made up 70% of the population of the town.

Back to FestiVELO—dinner was a “Seafood Extravaganza,” which started out dismally (a bony catfish fillet was the only seafood served, with a promise of crabs and clams to come “later”), but unfolded over the course of the next couple hours to  eventually include all the seafood we could eat (as long as we could figure out how to eat whole crabs using only our hands and plastic utensils—no crackers, mallets or other tools one normally uses to crack the shell and claws were available).  Clams, shrimp, and low country boil all made an appearance for those who waited, and probably oysters showed up as well after we stopped checking back in the seafood tent.  

The Charleston Hot Shots string band made another appearance tonight, with Lucille back on the spoons, and the rest of us providing back-up on our complimentary kazoos. 

A Southern Sampler

FestiVELO Day 1

November 3, 2011

There are some things that really bug us about the South, like shoddy planning and a lack of punctuality (maybe Southerners would call these things spontaneity and a relaxed lifestyle).  This ride is full of examples of those qualities, but I am working really hard to live in the moment and ignore them, so I will focus on the highlights of today.

We rode in Summerville, a truly beautiful little inland town that became world-renowned after it was named one of the two best health resorts in the world at the 1899 tuberculosis World Congress in Paris.  Its claim to fame was its mild climate and long leaf pines that “charged the air with derivatives of turpentine,” according to a Chamber of Commerce brochure.  We failed to smell the piney air, but had a wonderful time riding the winding roads through the historic district, admiring the beautiful Victorian era and early 20th Century homes and cottages and their lushly landscaped yards.  

We rode six miles around town, using both the ride cue sheet and a Summerville Walking Tour of Homes and Flowers brochure as our guides, making frequent stops to read about notable homes (and to take photos, of course).

Our lunchtime rest stop featured favorite foods of the south—shrimp and grits, moon pies, and Yoo-hoo Chocolate drink (a very unusual, but surprisingly tasty, beverage we have never taken the opportunity to sample before).  Here we are enjoying shrimp and grits and Yoo-hoo.

Not so much of a highlight was a fourteen mile ride on the Sawmill Bike path, which ran beside the “channelized” Sawmill Creek, now a drainage canal that only occasionally smelled of raw sewage.

The highlight of our evening was the Chocolate Obsession, a chocolate lovers’ feeding frenzy featuring two chocolate fondue fountains with lots of sweet treats to dip in them, and a more than you could possibly sample selection of chocolate cakes, pies, cookies, bars, candies, and  éclairs, plus hot chocolate to wash it down, and ice cream to put on top of it.  Our bike club friends were very impressed by Dick’s capacity for chocolate and his ability to get every last bit of ice cream out of his cup.  (It’s a good thing we enjoyed the chocolate, since it turned out to be our dinner—but we won’t go into the details of the shoddy planning and lack of punctuality in reference to the low country boil that was supposed to be our dinner, but was not finished cooking until sometime around 9 p.m..)

An old timey band with two ukulele players and a washtub string bass serenaded us during dinner time, and our bike club friend Lucille joined them playing her wooden spoons—they were good, and she was terrific.

Reflections

Monck's Corner, South Carolina
November 2, 2011
We are in Monck's Corner (near Charleston) for FestiVELO, a four day long celebration of bicycling and food.

We haven't started riding yet, but our adventures have already begun.  We met our bike club friends at FestiVELO sign-in and all went to dinner together at Gilligan's, a local shrimp and catfish joint.  Here is our view from the dining room.

After dinner, we decided to skip the campfire, popcorn and s'mores at ride headquarters, and just head back the the hotel. We were driving along a dark road when what to our wondering eyes should appear but a big old lit up sleigh being pulled by reindeer.  Of course we turned in to investigate, and found ourselves driving onto the campus of a big company called Santee Cooper. We drove through a red and green light tunnel into a fantasy Christmas world with hundreds of displays, millions of lights.

There were a bunch of security cars patrolling the grounds, but they did not stop us, so we cruised the mile-long drive, stopping along the way to take a few pictures. Dick asked a worker what was going on, and he told us we were previewing "Celebrate the Season," a new holiday attraction debuting on the day after Thanksgiving. Dick asked him what Santee Cooper makes, and the worker said, "electricity." Dick said, "Then I guess they can afford to run all these lights."

Just after Dick snapped this picture, all the lights went out at once, and we had to find our way out of the maze-like office campus in the dark.

Here's HO HO HOping that our the rest of FestiVELO brings us more great surprises and magcal moments!

Chattenooga, Chickamauga and Cherohala

October 16-18
DISCLAIMER:  We are having technical difficulties in getting the site to reproduce our photos in their true clear focus--apologies for any visual shortcomings, and we will continue to try to come up with a solution.

The Landings Automobile Society is on the move, and we’re along for the ride.

 
First stop—Chattenooga.

The last time we visited Chattenooga we were aboard Starsong, tied up along the riverwalk, in the shadow of the city’s landmark aquarium, and almost within misting distance of the massive water cannons that serve as a riverfront focal point—or exclamation point.

 

This time we are staying with our auto tour pals at the luxurious Chattenoogan Hotel on the other side of town, but Chattenooga is pretty compact, and it only takes us about 20 minutes to stroll down to the river and revisit some of our favorite spots. We can also hop on the free electric shuttle bus that pops by every five minutes, and get to the riverfront even faster.  

We especially enjoy walking along the bluff high above the river and admiring all the sculptures around the Hunter Museum of Art, as well as an art gallery sculpture garden tucked into a tiny slice of hillside that abruptly drops to the river below. We hunt for this sculpture of Icarus taking off from the edge of the cliff, and are glad to find he is still flying high in the sculpture garden six years after we first discovered him.

New to the Hunter Museum’s collection since our last visit is a Tom Otterness sculpture entitled “Free Money” featuring two people dancing on a money bag.  Tom Otterness is apparently all the rage now—we saw his chubby money-grubbing figures popping up all over New York this summer.  How ironic that Mr. Otterness is getting rich off his works poking fun at people’s relationships with cash--laughing all the way to the bank, no doubt.

Thanks to the great travel planners in our car club we visit an unusual attraction that most visitors don’t even know is here—the world headquarters of Coker Tire, a family-owned company that owns the molds for, and therefore is the sole supplier of, thousands of vintage car tires which are no longer made by major tire companies.  Corky Coker, the President of the company, has an impressive eclectic collection of rare cars and motorcycles, and his wife collects cute little cars.  We have an entertaining guided tour of their collections during our visit (wherein we learn, for example, that the original National Park Tour buses like the one in Corky’s collection had rag tops so that  passengers could stand up and “safely” feed the bears by reaching down from the roof level). 

Chickamauga

It was the first battle ground to become a national monument.  It was arguably the battle ground that turned the tide of the Civil War.  Our outstanding ranger guide leads our entourage around the vast expanse of fields and forests where about 80,000 men fought on Chickamauga’s rugged terrain, and he tells us many stories.  No matter how many battle fields we visit, the scale of the war—and its casualties-- is beyond comprehension. This is the statistic that is most astounding to us:  At the start of the Civil War, the United States military had just 16,000 troops.  By its end, 3.5 million men had fought in the Civil War.  The fields and forests around Chickamauga are abloom with hundreds of monuments erected by states to commemorate their militia men who fought and died in battles throughout this vast park. 

We also learn that no war re-enactors fight battles on National Park lands, since the park service protects these areas as sacred ground (and, also, the Ranger told us with a twinkle in his eye, there are liability issues, since once in a while an inexperienced re-enactor will do something dangerously dumb like forget to take the tamping rod out of the gun before shooting, thereby sending the rod out as a dangerous projectile).  The park service feels so strongly about this policy that even the battles in the orientation films we see at the visitor centers in battlefield parks are filmed off-site, rather than on the park lands where the battles were actually fought.  

Cherohala Skyline Drive

Twisting and turning through the Smokie Mountains, reaching up to a mile in the sky, the Cherohala Skyline Drive is a favorite route for motorcyclists and sports car enthusiasts. On this sunny fall day the leaves are ablaze with color, and the drive is pure joy.

It takes us three hours to traverse the 46 mile route. We stop beside a mountain lake for a picnic along the way. We stop at just about every pull-out and overlook, and take hundreds of pictures. 

Just a little postscript—a glorious road like this one does not come cheap, or easy.  The Cherohala Drive took 34 years and $100 million to complete, making it North Carolina’s most expensive highway (and it is probably its only highway with no restaurants or gas stations). 

We Turn 100!

Savannah Century Ride
September 4, 2011

Does this look like people who have just finished a 100 mile bicycle ride? (I don’t think that Dick used Photoshop magic on this photo—we really were smiling and standing without assistance).

Here is the evidence—Dick photographed his bicycle computer odometer to capture the moment (just under 7 hours riding time, 101.27 total miles, at an average speed of 14.5 mph and a maximum of 29.3).

Here are the top ten keys to our success:

10. Heat Trials: We have ridden 598 training miles over the last six weeks, mostly in temperatures over 90 degrees (it was 97 degrees when we finished our 80 mile training ride). So, we were ecstatic when today’s ride was under partly cloudy skies, with temperatures topping out at a "cool comfortable" (relatively speaking) 88 degrees.

9. Torrential rain: Our favorite part of the ride was a zero visibility deluge at Mile 75 that soaked us in seconds, pulled the temperature down (very briefly) to 77 degrees, and pulled our heart rates down by 15-20 beats per minute.

8. Training diet: A double dip hot fudge sundae for Gayl and Red Velvet Cake a la two scoops mode for Dick the night before the ride, and cookies at every rest stop. Now, that’s carb loading!

7. His and Hers Heart Rate Monitors: Mine says I burned 6,819 calories on the ride. So, why am I afraid to get on the scale? (See Training diet above.)

6. Ibuprofen: and lots of it, at 800 mg a pop!

5. Chamois butt’r: Any explanation is too much information.

4. Team work: I drafted on Dick’s pulling power in our little pace line of two for most of the ride. When I had a hard time keeping up with him, Dick boosted my energy by pulling cookies from his personal stash and passing them to me on the fly. In return, I think I might have pulled him for a tenth of a mile. It’s that kind of reciprocity that cements our relationship of equals.

3. Fear of Failure: After telling forty or fifty of our closest friends about our plans to ride the Century, we couldn’t face the prospect of telling them all that we failed to make it.

2. A kiss for luck at every rest stop.

1. Our greatest motivation: This is our big chance to grab our lives back from the tyranny of training. It is time to check this one off the list and get on to the next adventure!