It's Too Quiet

We are spending some time pondering just what people do up here. The streets are way too quiet. We've had 3 meals in the hotel restaurant and only breakfast could be said to have had a crowd. We don't see anyone in the hotel lobby. We don't see anyone in the garage. We don't see anyone walking down the street. Apparently everybody up here goes straight to work and straight home.

We did see quite a few people at the library. It's a really nice library, with the entire third floor devoted to us genealogy freaks. We saw the usual mixture of middle-aged researchers, with the odd young couple and trailing kids coming in to spend an hour poking around with the idea of finding ancestors.

I sat beside a lady who seemed to be trying to impress either herself or those around her of just how much research she was doing. There's one in every crowd. She had amassed a mountain of books for Rowan County, North Carolina, at her workspace and they sat there all day without her cracking them. If anyone else needed to research in Rowan County, they were out of luck because I don't think she left anything on the shelf and she never returned one to the reshelving table. When she was actually sitting down and not carrying books back and forth, she kept up a continual muttering under her breath. Just the kind of oddball that gives genealogists a bad name.

For the most part, everyone we have met has been very pleasant and friendly. We did get a double take from the waitress this morning when we requested grits. We had to quickly acknowledge that we were joking. Yankees.

Tomorrow we will take another stab at the library before hitting the road on Saturday to experience the countryside. I'm looking forward to seeing where my grandfather was born. Yes, I confess. I'm half Yankee.

LSW