Vacation: Day 6 (Everything Must End)

The end of a vacation always sucks. Panic sets in, you must work soon, you must go to the airport, you must drag all your crap home. If you pack as poorly as I do you especially dread dragging your crap home. I simply cannot pack for less than ten days even if I am only going for three. Shoes especially get me in trouble, I want to bring three or four pairs and that right there is half my suitcase.

Anyway…I got up slowly, showered, laid back down, snoozed and finally got up and got dressed and packed by 10.30 am. Quite an accomplishment if you ask me.

My friend's dad started a little museum/hall of fame several years ago and I had yet to take a look so we headed a few miles to check out the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame Museum. It is really busting at the seams and probably needs to expand soon or seriously cut back on what it can display. It has several awesome cars from the early days of stock car racing, before it was NASCAR and ones from just this past season. The cars are really cool and the uniforms are funny because many are super small. A car my friend's dad set a speed record in is also there so that was pretty awesome to see.

After the museum visit the sky opened up and poured and it kept pouring. We gave up on any other events other than lunch. Since I hadn’t quite had enough pork we went to Lancaster’s BBQ. It is a popular BBQ joint, and is also a popular NASCAR fan stop as the place is a mini museum on it’s own. It is covered in car body pieces, driver and crew uniforms and anything that seems related to NASCAR, there is also a bus installed on the mezzanine level and has seating inside. We were seated in the bus, very exciting right? We had a nice view of everyone else eating.

While we were still looking over the menu the waitress brought our drinks and said “here’s a basket of hushpuppies while you decide”. I actually said, out loud (probably louder than it needed to be) “It’s just like heaven!”. They were a sweeter and more flour based hushpuppy than the corn meal ones I had earlier in the week, but they were just as good, especially dipped in BBQ sauce, which in NC is mostly the sweet variety.

We ordered too much food as usual. After a basket of hushpuppies we did not need Redneck Nachos (nachos with pulled pork), but got them anyway and then I got a BBQ Pork sandwich and fries. The fries were good but I could barely manage to eat the nachos and sandwich so they fell by the wayside. All was very tasty and was a nice cap to my pork vacation.

The rest of the day was driving in the rain, going through airport security, flying, and getting home. The boring and tedious stuff.

All in all it was a very good vacation and thank god I don’t have to have my cholesterol checked until next week.