I’ve got a few thousand photos and vid stills to dig through, but here’s an early taste.  The first batch of these will be posted across several blog entries, with a couple of photos for each entry with descriptions and captions and all that nonsense.

I’ll be sort of narrating my trip along with the pictures, which will be in sequence.  Let’s get right into it with a few pictures from good ol’ Oxford, NC.

I left around six in the evening on May 18th, 2009.  You can find a nice overview of my route and trip plan using the Page links in the left-hand menu here.

First, we have Mike’s Country Store.  This is the closest retail establishment to my folks’ place in NC, about 8 miles.  I’m facing east here (my car is facing south) at the intersection of Cornwall Road and NC Highway 96.  If I was going to Michigan directly from here, I’d have cut to the north of my folks’ house and caught NC96 just south of Virgilina, and then headed through South Boston and across southern VA.  While I did eventually want to turn north, there was a more efficient place to do it in Tennessee.

I should mention that a fair bit of this trip was captured on video rather than photo, and I still have to go through a lot of those recordings to get stills.

This is North Carolina Tobacco Country, or it was until the big government buyout a couple of years ago.  You’ll typically find a half-dozen or so good ol’ boys sittin around having coffee at this store or hundreds like it across the south.  There’s a short-order grill for breakfast and lunch, and they handle smokes and beer and snacks and fish bait and so forth.

“Mike” is a rather portly fella, around my age or maybe a year or five either way.  Probably a little older, but his daughter and mine went to school together.  Last I knew, he had either sold the store or was subletting it to some other folks, who were making improvements and modernizations to the inside of the store, much to the dismay of all concerned.

To our right here, we can see the Unknown Factory.  For some odd reason, although I drove by this place probably 2 out of every three days I lived in NC, I never knew what they did here.  Once in a while you’d see people standing outside smoking by the benches beyond the door (you might not be able to see these on-page – try clicking the photos to view them larger).  At the end of the road across the street is the rear parking lot for one of the local elementary schools.  This is on the north side of town, driving sort of northeast toward one of the main drags.  Downtown is to the right/south.

The pictures will get more exciting as we head west, I promise :)