huevos con vino

A few days ago, my wife, her brother, one of her best friends (and our host in VA), and I all piled into an SUV and drove down the Virginia coast into North Carolina.  I spend most of my time in Seattle, so I don’t know too much about East Coast geography.  Apparently, Virginia Beach is about 15 miles from the North Carolina border, which really blew my mind since I think of NC as being really, really far away from me.

We drove down in search of two things: a nice beach, and Pigman’s Bar-Be-Que.  We also wanted to check out a Brew Thru location because, hey, how often do you get to drive through the middle of a liquor store?  Not often in Seattle, unless you’re into armed robbery.  We found all of the above (not the armed robbery) and I have the cop tan on my left arm to prove it.

First, the food.  Pigman’s Bar-Be-Que is an interesting place.  The food is good and reasonably priced by my standards; good BBQ seems to be getting more and more expensive around the US.  I ordered a half-rack of baby back pork ribs, a double side of baked beans, hush puppies, and a quart of sweet tea.  I think it cost about $12-$14, but it was really damn good.  The scary thing was, I wasn’t full.  I should have ordered the full rack of ribs.  I’m not sure how this happened since I am of German and Irish descent, primarily, but I can eat a mess of ribs, where a “mess” is equal to 20-30 ribs.  I remember doing this once in Oklahoma, in front of my soon-to-be in-laws, and all my mom would say later was, “Oh my God, I raised you better than that.”

Anyway, Pigman’s is an excellent place to go if you feel like eating a mess of ribs, or something similar.  Unlike Doumar’s, where the quantity isn’t quite the focus, Pigman’s will load you up real good.  The only problem yesterday was that I wanted to swim in the ocean after lunch.  So I stopped at the half rack of ribs.  It is worth noting that the Pigman’s logo seems to suggest a sexual relationship between a pig and a man as indicated by the somewhat amorous advances of the pig in the logo.  People in New York City did not believe me when I told them about this strange logo.

Speaking of inappropriate sexual innuendo, the drive down from Virginia Beach into Kill Devil Hills is an exercise in billboards.  The billboards laud everything even closely resembling Americana or Jesus, with a particular focus on cartoonish animals and people.  It is quite popular, for example, for a BBQ place to show a smiling, wide-eyed pig suggesting that you stop in and eat some of his brothers and sisters with a gallon of sweet tea and a heap of napkins.  It is also popular to suggest that, through some circuitous logic, Jesus died for our freedom as Americans.  There’s something so simple and pure in that type of logic that it makes you crave an entire case of beer.

And then there are the place names that make a Yankee like myself laugh out loud.  For example, Downtown Duck sounds like a slightly downtrodden superhero with lame powers.  It’s also the name of the center of town in Duck, North Carolina.  Downtown Duck is a real place, just like Kill Devil Hills.  Lots of signs enjoy making light of the “Devil” part of Kill Devil Hills, suggesting that they are indeed keeping the devil at bay with their homemade fudge, or their handicrafts, or their BBQ pork sandwiches.  A name as evocative as Kill Devil Hills is a natural inspiration for this sort of schmaltz, a word I never heard once in North Carolina, although I did see 4 bagel shops on the way down the coast.  Go figure.

Some of my favorite billboards advertise slightly bawdy references to peanuts, or walnuts, or whatever kinds of nuts people eat in the South.  “Eat My Nuts,” shrieks one squirrel from a billboard.  Another billboard talks about going nuts for someone’s crabs, or getting crabs after going nuts.  It’s hard to recall exactly at this point just which sexual or oddly scatological references were real, and which ones only seem real to me now, a few days after the drive.

One thing that was real was the Brew Thru, and I have the pink beer huggie to prove it.  In Seattle, any sort of neoprene device that keeps your bottle or can of beer cold is called a “cozy,” or a “coozie,” the latter of which seems a little too strange to be true.  But in Virginia and North Carolina, or at least on the coast there, you use a “huggie.”  Strange.  So yes, I did indeed buy a pink beer huggie from the Brew Thru.  The Brew Thru is designed like the beer aisle in your local supermarket.  The only difference is that you drive your car right down the aisle, selecting beer while young people grab your order and load it into your trunk.  Seriously.  There is even a little poem as you drive into the Brew Thru; the poem says something about how some cars smell bad, some don’t, but all are welcome at the Brew Thru!

The reason people go to Kill Devil Hills, or Kitty Hawk, or Nag’s Head, must be the coastline.  It is gorgeous.  I spent about 20 minutes (without sunscreen) flailing around in the ocean before I decided to leave without getting a wicked sunburn.  It was about 86 degrees and very sunny the day we went to the beach, so I think I was smart to leave when I did.  That said, I did get a “cop tan,” which is when one of your arms gets sunburned because you’ve got it resting outside of your car as you cruise around for hours.  The sharp line dividing the burn from the pale part of my arm is receding today, about 4 days after the drive.  To me, a good cop tan is proof that you have had a real vacation, one where you could care less about getting a line on your arm.

So as my cop tan fades, I realize that I should publish this post before my vacation ends.  I’ll be writing about Doumar’s in my next post, and about the perils of a double meat pork sandwich in an SUV.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under travelog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.