To Richmond, VA

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It is late and has been a long day so we'll see how far I get with this. We aren't off to a great start.

The NC Transportation Museum's tour began in Salisbury early on Amtrak train #80 the Carolinian and picked up again in Greensboro and picked up 2 hosts and 5 guests finally in Cary. We boarded in Cary. We met Dr. Kevin Cherry again (we first met him this spring on the Old Albemarle boat tour). We were greeted and remembered. We were given name tags and a Norfolk Southern string pack. The string pack was a good bag! It contained Richmond maps and brochures, sun screen, lip balm, hand sanitizer, mouth wash, toothpaste w/ a travel toothbrush, a collapsible water bottle, Advil, Orbit gum and a pocket pack of tissues! The train eventually arrived a full hour late and everything all day was moved back or shortened.

So, 10:45am board the train. We find we've been assigned seats in a little booth formation at the front of the car with exactly 10.5 inches between the edge of one seat to the facing seat. We were assigned forward facing seats but we couldn't sit there! All the overhead storage was taken so we had to use under our seats which left no room for our feet. I had my legs between the legs of the man across from me and Clay was sitting sideways with his legs in the aisle. The 4 people across the aisle I am not sure ever got sitting all 4 in their space. Clay and I went back to the cafe car 2 cars back and rode sitting in there for all but about an hour of the 4 or so hour ride.

First stop about 4:15pm after 3pm arrival in Richmond was Maymount. It sounded interesting. But we were supposed to meet one of the tour hosts who had a snack buffet set up for us in the park and it took us about a half hour to find him! Some walked the park and some rode the bus. In the end, we never caught side of anything worth seeing. If we'd had a map to start we might have stayed off at the first stop and walked to the picnic area, but we didn't get one until we found our way to the visitor center and then our time was nearly up. Oh well. In hindsight, they probably should have just skipped this and gone straight to the motel. But that raises another downside. We are in a very nice Comfort Suites. The problem is that it is 15 miles outside Richmond across the street from a nearly shut down shopping center! So far we've been a 30 minute bus ride from anything.

We got checked in at 5:30pm. We got back on the bus at 6:15pm for a ride to Carytown to be dropped off for dinner on our own. We got turned loose at 6:40pm and met back at the same corner at 9pm to return to the motel.

We had dinner at Weezie's Kitchen. This is not the menu they were serving! I had chicken fingers and got too much food. The real problem happened when I bit the first one which I picked up and it didn't feel that hot, but when I bit it, it steamed a big blister on my lower lip. Clay got Philly cheese steak sandwich that he said had a bell pepper taste. We walked to Kilwin's for dessert. Clay had a cone and I had a marshmallow. We still had an hour to kill. So we walked. The original plan had us here from 6 to 9pm. The stores mostly closed at 7pm so my the time we arrived most of the stores were closed. You can only eat so much. The find of the day was our last stop at Narwhals Rolled Ice Cream. It was not only fascinating but delicious! They freeze cream on a frozen drum to order. We had a Reese's Peanut Butter cup version to share because we were already stuffed. This was the highlight and surprise of our day. Two thumbs up!

We are up and out for the whole day tomorrow with rain forecast. We had an early morning so I'll close now and hope Clay will agree to add a photo slide show link later. I think most of his photos are of food as we didn't see much today. He has a great video though at Narwhals. We'll see. Check back.

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