Today we headed home from Celo at 7:30am, this time it was a straight shot up US23 through the heart of Appalachia in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. Around 10 I started looking for a place for us to stop for breakfast. As Big Stone Gap neared deep into the hill country of Virgina, I dreamed of homemade biscuits and gravy with country ham.
Since I am reading the novel titledBig Stone Gap, I thought it would be fun to stop there for breakfast. The novel tells the story of interesting characters in a sleepy mountain town and so I had a picture of a sweet and pretty little town, but what I found was wide streets angling through car dealerships and beauty salons and the like. Not only was it nothing like I had imagined, but there was no place at all to stop for breakfast. We found one family restaurant, but it didn’t open ’til 11.
In Norton, VA (a fairly big town in perspective to where we were) we stopped once again to get get breakfast, but after driving all the way through town, the only place we could find was a Dairy Queen where we ate a $2.69 breakfast on Styrofoam plates.
A hundred miles or so later we stopped in Kentucky we stopped for gas, and while I was waiting to pay for the gas, the woman in front of me bought some cigarettes. The cashier told her it would be $9.56, (they cost $5 a pack here in Michigan) so I assumed she had bought two packs, but I was floored when the the woman was handed a carton of cigarettes! No wonder everyone in Kentucky seemed to smoke.
Before we left left rural Kentucky coal country for the Interstate where we would be surrounded by generic chain stores and gas stations from now on, we stopped at a little mom and pop store where I picked up a bottle of Ale-8-1 a drink you can only find in Kentucky. In this cookie cutter land of ours, it’s nice to be able to still find some regional and local products.