Moorsvile, NC

I slept in late, never too late while vacationing, and got out of the house at around eleven. I grabbed brunch at an incredible Argentine empenada joint in a strip mall next to a Dollar General. I'll take sentences I never thought I'd write for $400 Alex. Hung out with Jack for a bit while he was on his lunch break and made my way up north to Spencer.

Spencer has the North Carolina Transport Museum. When they say transport, they mean it. They really did have all types of transport. Planes, trains, automobiles, and more! The collection itself was neat but not mind-blowing. The coolest part of it was the sheer volume of trains they had on hand. Everything else seemed to be old cars, planes, boats, and bikes that people had lying in their garage and donated. All cool stuff, but not mind bending. The real grand takeaway was what happened there before the museum opened. The name 'Spencer Shops' betrays little, let me run it down for you. Back in the bad old days, steam locomotives needed to be inspected every 150 miles and overhauled every 300. This meant that every 150 miles a depot was built to perform this work. Spencer was one of the largest in the entirety of Southern Railways. At its peak, the facility employed around three thousand people working three shifts 365 days a year. There was a large hall called the back shop (as in "ooooh dear, we're gonna need to take one to the back.") the size of two football fields where a dozen locos could be going through major repairs at any given time. The size of the crane installed to move wheelless trains was immense. There was a body shop, a paint shop, a machine shop, and even a facility to make new boilers on site. If needed, this place could have built a train from scratch. For inspections and minor repairs, a 32 stall roundhouse with a hundred foot turntable was built. The museum still restores trains in the roundhouse to this day. It also enabled me to live out a boyhood dream. For the price of the best dollar I've ever spent, I was allowed to take a ride on the turntable for a full revolution, super cool.

Do you think he'll notice that all the mail is gone?

I departed the museum and headed for what I thought was the Cheerwine bottling plant. For those not in the know, Cheerwine is a North Carolinian soda that tastes not entirely unlike a particularly saccharinus and very cherry heavy Cherry Dr. Pepper. Delicious. I first had the stuff when I worked at a soda shop in Santa Barbara. I did not wind up at a factory but a distribution center. I did manage to walk away with a half liter bottle of their soda syrup. I shot Jack a text asking him to pick up vanilla ice cream on the way home. He's got the air conditioning.

I got back to his house long before him and got to enjoy some time on the porch with an elderly neighbor of his who is called Pappy. Pappy was born in Kentucky and after a life of farming and selling tires, he settled in the same neighborhood as Jack. His wife, like most here, works for JR Motorsports. Pappy and I talked about nothing for around an hour and drank beer until Jack rolled in. We cooked dinner and after our steak drowned the vanilla ice cream in Cheerwine syrup. It was way too much, just perfect. An episode of Magnum PI and it's time for bed. It feels weird saying goodbye tonight when I'm going to wake up in their house tomorrow after he's gone to work. "Goodbye, it was great to see you. I'll just be on the other side of this wall for eight hours."

Tomorrow is a short day, just heading to Raleigh. Should be a good day for some highways.