DAY 2: MAYBERRY…LITERALLY

So…after leaving the town with the “pay by the hour” type motel that I don’t even want to talk about, we started to head towards South Carolina. It would take us 5 hours to get to Pawleys Island where my Aunt has a condo.

I told my Mom and Aunt “Happy Mothers Day” and treated them to lunch but reminded both of them that they are still fired from ever booking a hotel again.

As we were driving down the highway, I saw a sign for a visitors center so I said I was taking the exit and going to the center. I collect stickers and National Park type patches to show where all I have been. I followed the signs and it just took us deeper into off roads of Virginia. They commented about how they liked this drive much better and my Mom mentioned how she wants to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway someday. I told her we could find it and drive a section of it until we needed to go to South Carolina.

I found where you get on in Virginia and had two very happy women. Then they saw signs for a town called “Mt. Airy.” I had no idea what that town was and my Mom said, “It’s Mayberry.” I laughed but she was serious. It was literally Mayberry from the “Andy Griffith Show.” I could NOT believe I was actually in MAYBERRY. Here are pictures to prove it…

We did some shopping and tried eating at a diner on the main drag but since it was Sunday it was closed. So we went to a MEXICAN restaurant in Mayberry! I will admit that it was kinda cool to see the town, well, except for the guy with his windows down blaring rap music while he drove down the Main Street of MAYBERRY. I mean can anyone get much cooler than that?!

During all of this, my Aunt in SC is texting saying she will have dinner ready when we arrive and that she’s going out on the beach and to meet her there. We didn’t think to tell her we made a detour! It was 5 hours from where we left that morning and the gps said we still had 5 hours to go. Didn’t make any sense!

Found the Blue Ridge Parkway again and stopped at some places to take pictures and then came up on a detour. We followed the detour and followed the detour and followed the detour. I pulled over to check the gps and took its directions. Well, we ended up crossing the eastern continental divide 4 times! Through all of this we were still only 38 miles away from the town we left that morning and 5 hours from SC!

We stopped for gas and the guy asked me where we were going. I said Myrtle Beach. His eyes got huge and he said, “If you can make your way to 52 by 7pm you might make it to Myrtle Beach by midnight.” We left at 9:30am and it was now 6pm and we were still 5 hours away from SC.

Through all of this, I have never heard my Mom laugh so much. We were all laughing so hard we were crying. That made all the crazy of the day worth it and we made it to my Aunts by 11pm but she had put dinner away and said “You crazy ladies can have it tomorrow!”

Here are some photos of the small amount of the parkway we drove.