I reached the small town of Banner Elk [population 800] and then drove the last 3 miles uphill to the resort. Banner Elk is at about 3700 feet elevation and the resort, Beech Mountain  is at a little over 5000 ft. The road up was wide but there were quite a few hairpin turns on it.

 The appearance of the resort - The Pinnacle "The Highest Resort East of the Rockies" - was schizophrenic: on the one hand the grounds were attractive, meticulously well tended with groomed shrubbery and many flowering plants; and there were wide panoramic views of the mountains in the distance. But set among the well groomed grounds, between you and the views, were various sheds and work buildings that looked like they were thrown-together afterthoughts.

The building itself was the main odd contrast to the grounds. A large elliptically shaped wooden modular construction that is probably about 25 years old. It was gloomy and inexpensive looking on the outside. The entrance to it varies depending upon which part of the ellipse that you're entering through. Going into the first room that I had was almost nightmarish because all you saw were metal stairwells, dark wooden walls and a few air shafts with dying plants at the bottom.

My main reason for the trip was to spend a few days, maybe even almost a week, in a place that might be boring because it wasn't a city but which would be noticeably cooler than Washington in the daytime and really cooler than Washington at night.

The afternoon I arrived Washington was 95 to 97 degrees with a heat index of over 100; the temperature at Beech Mountain was about 83 or 85 and in the sun it was uncomfortable. I had been expecting that but I thought that the nights were going to be much cooler. In fact the woman at the reception had predicted that it would be so cold at night -- without air-conditioning -- that I would have to pull out blankets to keep warm. She was absolutely, positively and 100% wrong.

It was a one bedroom apartment that because of bunks along the wall was listed as sleeping 4. It was a narrow shot gun arrangement panelled in dark knotty pine walls with a ceiling less than 8 feet high. It had everything that was advertised and that you needed for a longish stay, such as a microwave oven, full-size refrigerator, small but full-size stove, pots and pans, bedding, dishcloths, etc. Since there was no cross ventilation in the unit and since the ceiling was low, it was warm all throughout the night.

I had tried going out onto the balcony but because the balcony was actually an alcove built back into the unit, it also had no air circulation. It wasn't until I went outside the next morning that I noticed how much cooler it was outside, probably in the middle or even low sixties. But that didn't do any good in the bedroom.

I realized later on that since the resort is basically a ski resort, maybe they were most concerned with keeping people warm and that was why the units were built so that there were few exposed walls and relatively few windows that could let air and breezes circulate. But it was unsuitable for the purpose I had in mind. [I canceled the second night and stayed at the resort only one night, making a reservation for the next day in a motel in Abingdon].

I decided to make an excursion in the afternoon and to come back after the sun went down and the room would be cooler. Since I hadn't had lunch [or breakfast - I had started out at 6 am] I went down to Banner Elk and had a pork loin sandwich at the Banner Elk Café, a very pleasant restaurant. Banner Elk has Lees-McRae College, the "highest college in the United States", which combined with tourism is the economy of the town. The waitresses at the café were young and attractive and presumably from the college. I then went over to check my email at Mona's Cyber Cafe which was, warm, but which was otherwise a pleasant place where I wouldn't mind spending time sitting and reading in the Fall or Winter or Spring, not the Summer.

Banner Elk is pretty but only two blocks by two blocks so I set out for the bigger town, Boone, about 15 miles away. I'd been there before to eat at "The Famous Dan'l Boone Inn"  and remembered Boone as being basically highways lined with strip malls and big box stores, surrounding a medium sized college, Appalachian State. This time I did get into the old downtown section, which was about four blocks long with the businesses mostly on just one side of the street. Although Boone is far bigger than Banner Elk, unless you're shopping, it really hasn't much more to offer than Banner Elk and is a pretty unattractive place.

I got back to the resort around 6:30. Based on the number of cars parked in the parking lot, the resort was about 20% filled. The clientele was mostly middle class families playing horse shoes, having barbeques or walking around the landscaped sections.

Since it was still uncomfortably warm in the room, I wanted to go out but there was really nowhere to go. Banner Elk was only 3 miles away but I'd be coming back in the dark and they were too many hairpin turns to go around that I wasn't familiar with. So I left the resort but stayed up on the mountain in the village of Beech Mountain.

Because the place is a ski resort it has four venues for socializing: a honky-tonk type bar, a family-style pizza parlor, an expensive Continental restaurant and a delicatessen/general store.  Since it was the off-season, all four places were deserted or almost deserted except for the general store. But I didn't want to sit and read and eat in any one of them because all were uncomfortably warm: as in the resort there was no air conditioning and they didn't seem to have their windows open or else didn't have enough windows to let the outside air circulate.

As I said, the next morning the room was still warm but it was cool outside. Interestingly no flies or other insects and also no birds singing. Maybe the 5,055 foot altitude keeps the insects and birds away. The next morning I made a reservation for a Hampton Inn in Abingdon, Virginia.

The drive from Beech Mountain went through Banner Elk and then Valle Crucis, basically via US 421, the highway with 489 turns, over one set of mountains, into Tennessee; then over two very high mountain ranges, I think Roan Mountain or Iron Mountain, inside Tennessee, through Shady Valley and Mountain City into Virginia where the land became rolling. 

When you drive in the Great Smokies there's an unusually large number of touring motorcycles; they make their base at Myrtle Beach and then go through the mountains, either independently or on group tours. I didn't realize, however, how wide-spread the touring motorcycle culture was in this area.

At the small crossroads of Shady Valley, Tennessee,  where I had stopped for a moon pie, the general store, Shady Valley Country Store [at the intersection of US 421, Hwy. 91, and Hwy 133], is also a motorcycle touring center and there's a motorcycle bed and breakfast down the road.  The town must be the center of cranberry farms - which I would have thought would be in low lying areas near water - because it has the Cranberry Festival. This blurb [click here] is a guide to driving on driving Highway 421 and I drove the section of it starting at Holston Lake [although the opposite direction from this description].

Henry S had driven up to Abingdon from Asheville North Carolina [about two hours away] and we met in the lobby and front porch of the fancy Martha Washington Inn  [later I found out the Martha Washington has free wireless in its lobby] and then had lunch in Wither's Hardware Restaurant  [a transformation from practical store to tourist venue that's common in many places in gentrified Abingdon].

The temperature in Abingdon was also far lower than in Washington but was still in the middle eighties and uncomfortable when walking around in the sun. When I checked into the Hampton Inn that afternoon the first thing I did was turn the air conditioned on high. The room was cold after a while [later the room was actually uncomfortably cold but I decided to enjoy it]. The room was large and high ceilinged with free wireless and the view from the window was of a flower garden.

I had supper at a local seafood restaurant called the Harbor House  for a broiled flounder filet dinner. [Later on I discovered a German, or at least Mitteluropäisch, restaurant, The Tavern -- maybe for the next time].

The last 10 or 12 years I've been intending to go to shows at the Barter Theater but whenever I'm heading down that way, Abingdon is either very close to my destination and I don't want to stop or else its too far from my destination and I feel I have to keep driving and not waste time.

There was a choice of two performances: one was a musical comedy at the main theater and one was an Appalachian music play at their annex theater. Since the main theater is the historic one, I decided on the musical comedy which was Singin' in the Rain.

Most of you probably know about why the Barter Theater is called the Barter Theater but I've put a little blurb on the side of this letter to explain it.

I had remembered that there was something unusual about the main theater and that it was connected with a Broadway theater. It turned out that the Empire Theater in New York was being ripped down sometime in the 1950s or 1960s; the manager of the Barter Theater heard about it, went with a group of volunteers up the 600 or 700 miles to Manhattan on a weekend the Monday before the theater was being demolished and brought back hundreds of seats, paintings, frescoes, light brackets and also some other decorative odds and ends which were used to refurbish the Barter Theater.

The theater is relatively small, I'm guessing about 600 seats, but with good lines of sight and -- to my surprise -- no miking, at least not for this show. The play was a stage version of the classic Donald O'Connor / Debbie Reynolds / Gene Kelly movie musical Singin in the Rain. It used the score from the movie and added in several other songs from the 1920s. Perhaps the most striking thing about the production was the faithfulness to the movie.

All the iconic scenes like Gene Kelly hanging from a lamppost with the umbrella, or Debbie Reynolds in the yellow rain suit, or Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor ending their dance number Good Mornin' by landing on a sofa and tilting it forwards were in the play and followed the movie exactly. I felt a little sorry for the actor playing the Donald O'Connor role because he had to duplicate everything O'Connor did in the Make ‘Em Laugh number from the movie but in real time.

Perhaps the production wasn't good enough to appear on Broadway but it was good enough for Washington or Baltimore or Chicago and certainly outstanding for Abingdon Virginia. The production had some odd aspects; in the number Moses Supposes the style was switched from 1920s to 1940s, in the Broadway Melody production number, the style switched yet again to late 1940s hipster [then it went back to the 1920s] and an anachronistic  reference to Hurricane Lina.

The cast was about the size of a Broadway show, maybe with two or three fewer chorus members and dancers. The main leads, none of whose names I recognize which doesn't mean anything, were more than good and they pleased the audience. The orchestra was physically small, maybe 7 or 8 members, although most of them doubled. But you didn't notice any smallness during the show.

Katharine Cornell the shell and it about 1030

The audience in the not sold-out house seemed to be [I'm really guessing here] about half from the "Tristate" area [Bristol, Kingsport, Abingdon] and about half tourists from as far away as Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta [the reason I know that part is that there was a contest that the person who came from furthest away got prizes -- as matter of fact, pretty good prizes].

There was an interesting blurb in the program stating that the Barter Theater was the ninth biggest employer in Abingdon; but even more interesting was that of the 12 biggest employers only 4 were for-profit operations [Cracker Barrel Restaurant, Food City Supermarket, K-Mart and a law firm]; everything else was some variant of government.

On the drive home the next day up through the Shenandoah Valley, I first went to drive around Emory and Henry College just outside Abingdon, Very pretty with its own [no longer used] train station and perhaps a third of the large campus is a golf course.

For lunch I stopped at Lexington, home of Washington and Lee  and the Virginia Military Institute at the Southern Inn, a former old fashioned luncheonette made into a "fine" restaurant. It was a southern barbecue sandwich but made with large sliced pieces of pork instead of the shredded or chopped kind; the cole slaw on it was also different, made from red cabbage. Although it was lunch, the young attractive waitresses, probably from Washington and Lee were dressed semi-formally with skirts and aprons that went down to their ankles. I also wound up being offered a free dessert.

Lexington is very attractive and it's been awhile since I've made a walking tour of it. But with temperatures up in the high 80s I decided to put it off for another time.

Total mileage for the trip was 944 miles at 28 mpg with gas ranging from $2.15 in southwest Virginia to $2.25 in Tennessee and $2.30 in Alexandria.