I flew direct from Heathrow to Raleigh North Carolina on American Airlines. The plane was an old 767 with no in seat TV screen or entertainment. The last time I flew one of these was back in the early nineties! I got the shock of my life when they charged for alcohol onboard! What is this, a budget airline? Anyway more of the crap American Airlines later...
I picked up the hire car, a Dodge Avenger.
Under the hood, a 2.4 Litre. 173bhp and 0-62 in 10.4 secs. Yawn.
Hampton Inn Suites Brier Creek North Carolina. The office was opposite, which was lucky because it was 40 degrees outside. Hot, hot, hot.
Brazilian Bar. Cool bar and restaurant, but loud live band that drowns out any conversation, even in the restaurant area.
Longhorn Steak house. Good bar, but just don't expect the staff to remember to serve the sides with the meals.
We also checked out Wild Wings and North Carolina Ale house, which we proper HUGE American bars. But these were across the road, and in the US there is no way for pedestrians to cross 10 lanes of traffic. Everyone must drive to the bar I guess.
At the weekend we headed up to Blue Ridge Parkway to drive along the mountain road. Using my Garmin Nuvi GPS with the US maps loaded onto an SD card we picked up the Blue Ridge Parkway at Roanoke.
The view from Bluff Mountain.
By the time we got to Price Lake a thunderstorm had started. At one point the rain came down so heavy that it was difficult to see the road, which was a bit worrying given there were 3500ft drops on each side of the road!
Wilson Creek Valley. We were now well above 4000ft. From here you could see the water vapour evaporating and rising.
The top of Linville falls.
Linville falls.
The stream Linville falls pours into and winds through the mountains.
There were loads of Harley Davidson bikes cruising the Blue Ridge Parkway. The problem is once we got of the Parkway and picked up Highway 181 to head home, there were loads of Harley's cruising. And one thing about Harley's is that they do not corner very well, so every time we went into a corner they all slowed down, because they couldn't lean into the corner. It comes to something when a Dodge Avenger can take a motorbike!
Back to the Longhorn steakhouse for a few beers after 600miles of driving.
Longhorn Steakhouse by night.
North Carolina Farmers market, lots of cheap fresh fruit.
We took the opportunity to look at houses for sale...
Brier Creek County Club. 5250 SQ Feet. USD $615,000. (£320,000 !!)
Brier Creek County Club. 3270 SQ Feet. USD $575,000. (£300,000 !!)
Brier Creek County Club. 4251 SQ Feet. USD $695,000. (£360,000 !!)
The only danger here is that I would get DVT from sitting on a bar stool too long waiting to catch the American Airlines flight.
Our A174 flight was due to leave at 17:55. We arrived at the airport a few hours early so had a bit of a wait. But at 17:30 as we tried to use the gate there was a big queue. No one knew what was happening. The monitor showed our flight delayed to 21:00. The few AA staff were unhelpful and no one knew what was going on. AA staff just handed out a number to phone an AA helpline. Thats great - rather than telling 300 people what the problem is, ask 300 people to ring a help line!!
Only after phoning the helpline did I find out that our A174 flight had become A9215. Apart from this the helpline were useless. We retired to a bar and checked the monitors, since there was no AA staff around. The flight was delayed from 21:00 then 22:00 then 22:30 then 11:00 then 11:15. At this point they stopped updating the monitors. The flight finally boarded at 23:45 and left at Midnight.
During all this delay there were no AA staff to explain anything. And the monitor kept simply pushing the departure time back. I felt sorry for the people with collecting flights who did not know which time to use for re-booking their connections. When we finally boarded the plane there was NO apology for the delay. Then add to this no inflight entertainment and charging to alcohol. And because they had changed the number of the flight (so it no longer counted as a delayed flight - rather a rescheduled flight) my taxi firm did not know to pick me up.
In my 20 years of travelling this is the worst flight I have ever taken. I emailed AA to complain, but surprise surprise, no response. If I fly to North Carolina again, I will fly Virgin into Washington, and hire a car and drive down to Raleigh.