Maggie's Farm

North Carolina is a gem of a place, from the beach music of the pier at Atlantic Beach to the mountains of Asheville and the Appellation mountains and the Appellation Trail. But Asheville is citified so on one trip where the wife and I were going on the Trail for a few days we chose Elizabethton as our base camp.

Now I’ve lived in the South more than half my life. My entire family is from the South. I graduated from a high school in North Carolina so you could say I’m familiar with the region. But one evening we decided to have some pizza at the local Pizza Hut. It was full of the locals. Elizabethton is not a touristy place. We order our pizza and then by simple sound our ears were drawn to the conversation in the booth next to ours. These four guys in their late twenties we talking up a storm but neither my wife nor I could recognize a word.. Pretty soon we picked out Ernhardt, and then racing, so we started listening closer. It was still unintelligible but a hoot to try and decipher.

If this country ever needs code talkers again I’d tell the DOD to get on up to Elizabethton, pronto.