6/5/13, Wednesday, June 5: Back to the Blue Ridge Parkway, Day 2, Weather Permitting: I forgot to note that I discovered belatedly that yesterday on the Waterrock Knob Trail, I saw a trillium! Sorry, this is real down-home country here: I seen a trillium!

Why so excited? When I was little, the Golden Book nature guide to U.S. wildflowers listed almost exclusively Eastern flowers, as the great majority of Americans then lived east of the Mississippi. In fact, it seemed to me that California must have NO wildflowers except for mustard and wild radish. Nothing with a classy name like "trillium."

   I thought it was a wild ginger, because it had 3 brown petals and 3 green petals or sepals, arranged radially symmetrically, but it lacked a couple wild-ginger signs: the flowers were above the leaves (ginger flowers are below), and the leaves were in 3s (ginger has 2 leaves above the flower).

   I tried to tell myself that it was some other variety of ginger than that pictured in my wildflower guides, but there were just too many differences. Was it (gasp!) the treasured trillium? It was! It was a Wake Robin Trillium, to boot!

   In the real world, this morning I filled a prescription at a nearby Rite Aid (!), shopped for groceries, and got onto the Blue Ridge Parkway pretty late -- around 3 PM. It was overcast, but the deeper greens of the trees contrasted even more with the pinks and whites of the azaleas and mountain laurels, the cascading white roses, the vivid magenta rhododendrons, and the amazing bluets. Bluets are pretty minor individually, but they grow in masses, and the clumps and patches glowed like blue neon against the grasses.

   LATER: WEATHER DOES NOT PERMIT: I encountered patchy, thick fog, even creeping along at 15 mph with my flashers on, but by 6 PM, the fog was so bad, I turned off the parkway and tried to get to my night's destination, Glendale Springs, on lower and presumably less foggy roads. It wasn't to be: as I tried to tack back, I encountered the same, impenetrable fog.

   And it looks as if the next 2 days will continue rainy and therefore dicey for getting back on the parkway. I'm not sure what to do, but I'll think of something. If nothing else, I can hunker down here in the Boone KOA till Saturday, as the nasty weather seems to cover the rest of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Rats!

   (The grocery store I went to this morning was called Ingles: een-GLAYSS to me. But with a big sign out front saying "American Owned." Go figure. Turns out Ingles is ING-gulls. Just never can tell with these gringos.)