Somewhere Else: Charlotte Diaries: October 29, 2009, 11:06 pm

We are leaving Charlotte tomorrow and will be taking the train to New York. I must say I’m not so happy saying goodbye to North Carolina. This place has revealed to me a beauty I’ve never seen, experienced, and enjoyed before. This morning, we woke up at tito Mike and tita Tammy’s log cabin on a mountain ridge in a small town called Todd that’s around 3-4 hours drive from Charlotte.

Their cabin overlooks a valley that at this time of the year, is congested w/ trees that are bald but for their heads – a bunch of leaves in different shades of brown hanging on to the top branches. In small patches all over the valley are the Evergreen trees, which literally take to its name and have stayed a deep green despite the season of autumn. I’m sure I’ve seen such scenery before, in a dream or in a painting. I never thought I could gush so much just by looking at trees.

I woke up at 5am. Scared to fall back to sleep, oversleep, and miss the glorious sunrise that tito Mike and tita Tam promised, I finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and launched on to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Among the weirdest discoveries we made here in Charlotte is that at autumn, the sun rises past 8am. My cousins Chris and Katie go to school at 7, in total darkness. This Saturday, they start daylight savings and move their clock an hour forward (Hmmm wait, as I write this, I’m calculating whether it’s forward or backward). This is how it goes thru spring next year.

Ting, Tita Mae and I went out of the house past 7 in a cold so severe I thought my fingers would break and my hand would scar like a 90-year-old woman’s hands forever. But I resisted getting back under the sheets. The sun was early up there in the mountains. It heralded its coming with a deep sheet of orange across the horizon. A thick fog hummed in silence through a maze of hilltops. It was a beauty that’s almost a surprise since we did not so much as feel we were in the midst of such natural splendor when we arrived late the previous night.

I took a powernap after that short romantic episode w/ the sunrise and woke up for breakfast of toasted croissants, strawberry jam, blueberry muffins, and hot chocolate. I have to mention that tita Tam is an excellent host.

On our arrival night, she prepared a feast on her own. I remember tita Elena, upon seeing the buffet, exclaiming, “Tam, this is a feast!” There were two kinds of chicken – one roasted, one steamed w/ mushroom – and shrimp that looked, smelled, and tasted like it was sautéed w/ garlic and oil. Everything was delish! But the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake was def the dessert. We all thought it was the canned fruit salad in the big bowl on the buffet; so imagine our surprise when Tita Tam took out of the freezer a glass container w/ iced cake and microwaved a bottle of homemade choco caramel syrup. She calls it Iced Toffee dessert; I remember it as crazy yummy dessert. It was wickedly good I had two slices and a half.

Our schedule the next morning was very lax. Tita Tam used the many free time to bake a potato dish w/ beef and melted cheese. It was, again, excellent. Tita Tam is an excellent host. She feeds us well.

After breakfast at the cabin, we had a long drive through scenic fields of good-looking farm houses, Christmas tree farms (trivia: President Obama picked his Christmas tree last year in one of the farms we passed by today!), sweet little chapels, and like in all of the North Carolina we’ve seen, trees in gorgeous autumn colors.

I doze off and woke up in Blowing Rock, a charming resort town almost two hours away from Charlotte. It reminded me of Bowral, a resort town 4 hours-drive away from Sydney that Carlo and Phuong showed me just a few days before I left back for the Philippines. While Bieni played at the Children’s Park, I sat on one of the benches and continued reading Kerouac. I felt like I’m in the setting of the movie, Wicker Park.

After the park, Bieni and I hopped from one store to another to look for mama and tita Mae. The shops had a lot of gorgeous stuff (Oh, my heart, the rings!) but they were ridiculously priced – well, at least for me. I asked tita Tam why they didn’t want to move in since Blowing Rocks is closer to tito Mike’s work than Charlotte is. Tita Tam said property there was more expensive than in Charlotte since it is after all a resort town. It is in majority occupied by rich retirees.

True enough, when Bien and I lined up for ice cream at the famed Kilwin’s, the other people on the line were white-haired and a little bent on the back. It was the longest line I’ve ever seen before an ice cream counter. I got a scoop each of Peppermint Crunch (Oh, heavens) and Pistachio Nut. They serve the biggest scoop in the world (my own surmise) and my small cup looked defenseless against the delish that I was about to consume. I got stares from the old people who picked only one flavor. Heck, I’m not even sure if I’ll ever find myself in Blowing Rocks again.