Drove the Champ to work yesterday morning, fortunately things were going
well so I didn't have to hang around very long, so I went hunting a
small part of my not misspent enough youth.

I've got a kind of interesting long term project going on, that in the
end makes no difference but it's fun.  Many years ago, back in the Red
Lobster days when I was driving around in my Hawk there was a place we
used to go to party.  It was a neat place, you would turn off of the
main road, go past a graveyard, through the streets of a subdivision
with no houses, and then through the woods on a dirt track.  After
driving through the woods a ways a trail led down onto the wooded
floodplain by the Neuse River.  On the other side of the river there was
a HUGE rock, the thing must have been 4 or 5 stories tall.  One time I
drove out there in my Mom's Datsun B-210 and managed to get it stuck in
the mud up the the floorboards.  The next morning I went back out there
and got it unstuck (the ground and the mud had frozen overnight), but it
was unstuck on the wrong side of the mud, so of course I got it just as
stuck again only this time pointed in the other direction!  Got a friend
of mine to come out with his Studebaker Champ pickup and pull the thing
out of the mud (got to love those Studes!).  It's funny that I got Mom's
Datsun stuck in there but never got my Hawk (with about 4" of ground
clearance) stuck.

I often wanted to try to find that place back, but it's complicated by a
couple of things, one is that about 30 years have past, the other is
that floodplain is now the bottom of Falls Lake.  I did some hunting
using Microsoft's Terraserver site and thought I found a couple of
likely spots, and Saturday drove out there in the truck (of course).
Well, I burned about a third a tank of gas driving around on a beautiful
Saturday afternoon and didn't find it.  However I did visit Falls Dam
for the first time, and also Blue Jay Point county park.  I ought to be
able to find the rock using a topographical map, and the graveyard
should still be there (unless they moved it for the lake).  There is a
listing of old Wake County graveyards available online, but there are a
LOT of them and it will take a while to work through the list.  Like I
said, it's not a big deal, but a fun little project that gives me an
excuse to do some research on the web and ride around northern Wake County.

This afternoon I drove out to a nearby state forest Murphy and I like to
visit, partly for a nice walk in the woods and partly to take some
pictures of an unusual Jeep I found in the woods.  If anyone is
interested here are a few pictures...

http://community.webshots.com/album/324748565IrbGEE

I put about 300 miles on that old truck this weekend, once I do
something about that seat I want to go on a real road trip!

Jeff DeWitt