Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

North Carolina Travelog #29
Waynesville, NC · Tue, 25 Aug 2026. 7pm.

Today we drove the southernmost 57 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I know that distance because of this road sign we passed shortly after turning onto the parkway this morning:



Now, I didn't drive it all in one go. In fact we actually missed a piece earlier today. After passing the parkway's summit on Black Balsam Mountain we exited the parkway to get lunch in Waynesville. We got back on the parkway further down, skipping a segment of 8.5 miles. Oh no! So late this afternoon I made sure we went back and drove that segment. 🤣 It was for good cause, though, as it was a reasonable way to get to Woodfin Falls, our last hike of the day today.

And speaking of lunch in Waynesville, now we're back in Waynesville... for dinner. 🤣 We've decided not to drive the parkway all the way back to Brevard. Going the long way around— driving major highways— is 50% more miles but gets us back slightly sooner. And affords us stops like this for dinner (and maybe dessert later) since there are no restaurants or shopping along the parkway.

How Much of 469 Miles?

Driving 57 miles on the parkway today is only a small accomplishment. That's because the parkway stretches a whopping 469 miles, from Waynesboro, VAa in the north to Cherokee, NC and the Smokey Mountains National Park in the south.

How many of those 469 miles have I driven? Using the site www.blueridgeparkway.org to map it out, I figure:

• Today I drove the southernmost 57 miles


• On a visit to North Carolina two years ago I drove a different 63 miles of the parkway, from Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain in the eastern US, in the south past the famous Linville Viaduct, to Boone, NC to the north.


• On a trip a few years ago in Virginia I drove the northernmost 45 miles of the parkway, from Waynesboro, VA (not to be confused with Waynesville, NC!) to Lexington, VA.

Add it up and Ive covered 165 miles. That's just 35% of the parkway's 469 mile length. It looks like I've got a lot more driving to do!

Update: On Friday I drove another 27 miles of the parkway, from the junction above Brevard to Asheville. That lifts my total to 192 miles, 41% of the whole.

And the Skyline Drive!

In some past blogs I've written that the Blue Ridge Parkway extends north to Front Royal, VA. I was mistaken about that. The difference is in the official government designation. The mountain parkway between Waynesboro, VA and Front Royal is the Skyline Drive, part of the Shenandoah National Forest. I knew that fact but what I did not know is that the Skyline Drive's 105 mile length is not included in the Blue Ridge Parkway's 469 mile run. They're basically the same road, constructed at the same time, but now one piece has tollbooths and different mileposts. 😒

Anyway, put these two roads together and the scenic drive totals 574 miles. And I've driven all 105 miles of the Skyline Drive. Putting the two together (edit: and including Friday's update) I'm at 297/574 miles, 52% of the combined parkway mileage. Woah, I'm halfway there!

A few days ago we hit Costco for a shopping run and saw a new product: Bibigo Korean BBQ-Style Pizza.



Bibigo is a brand that makes a variety of Korean foods. They've had shelf space (freezer space, actually) at Costco for years. They're carried at other stores, too. We've tried a few of their dishes before.

Generally speaking their quality has been good but the tastes are very Americanized so not our thing. I gained an appreciation for Korean cuisine when I traveled to Korea many times years ago. When I think Korean food I want Korean Korean food, not vaguely Korean-looking food made safe for Midwesterners with unadventurous palates.



We cooked the first of two pizzas in the box last night. The pizzas have generous amounts of toppings. They weigh in at nearly 22oz. each, which is a lot for frozen pizza this size. I didn't get a picture of the whole pizza, cooked... because by the time I remembered "Hey, take a photo!" we'd already sliced the pizza and put pieces on our plates. 🤣 So here you get the view of just 1/6/th of the pie.

So, how was it? Three things:

My immediate impression was satisfaction with the dense toppings coverage. Most frozen pizzas come with scant toppings. Often I add extra cheese and meats or veg. With this pizza there wasn't even room to add extra if I'd wanted. And because of the generous toppings the pizza was appropriately filling.

The pizza cooked up well following the instructions on the box. The crust achieved a pleasant crispy texture without getting burnt, and the cheese melted smoothly all the way across. Usually with frozen pizzas the cheese gets overly browned on the edges before melting properly in the center.

As kind of expected, the taste wasn't quite our thing. I mean, I don't like carrots very much, so I pulled half of them off my slices. I don't hold that against it. The problem was the unexpected sweetness of the barbecue sauce. It is not a Korean-style BBQ sauce. Yes, you could find something like this at some restaurants in a big city like Seoul... but it would be from food sellers peddling a Korean take on American cuisine. Like when they serve hot dogs on milk bread buns with a mustard-and-mayo combination sauce. 🤮 It's way too sugary and nowhere near enough savory. Also, whatever pepper they used to give it heat had a weird burn that didn't hit up front but piled up on the back end. Most Korean food is not spicy... especially Korean BBQ beef, which IME Koreans consider ruined if a heavy sauce masks the flavor of the meat. And when Korean food is spicy, it's a) either a traditionally spicy dish or is clearly labeled as spicy, and b) carries an even burn.

On the whole this pizza wasn't bad. It just struck us as not particularly Korean and had unexpected bits to its flavor profile. Oh, and the pieces of beef on it were flavorless. I guess that's why the sauce was so strong. We'll cook and eat the other pizza that came in the box but I expect we won't buy this again.

It's been a regular question of adults in the modern era: What will you do in retirement? I observed the need for people to have something to fill their time when I was just a kid. One of my uncles retired and found he was going nuts sitting around the house all day, so he went back to work. A similar thing happened with many of the older men in my neighborhood.

As I joined the full-time workforce after graduate school I started wondering about retirement myself. What would I do? Would I feel at wits' end like most of the male role models available when I was growing up, and keep working? Or would I find enough pleasurable activities to enjoy in my free time?

I had what I called "practice retirement" in my early 30s. I went through two separate year-long stretches between jobs when the economy tanked. During that time I realized that yes, I do have activities I enjoy that can fill my days apart from work. The only problem with this "practice retirement" in my early 30s is that I was stressed because I needed money. That limited how much I was able to enjoy my time not working.

Now that I'm in my 50s and have retired for real— and have solved that money problem by saving and investing carefully for 20 years— I'm finding that staying active in retirement is not quite working out like I planned. For one, there's this problem:



The no-money problem I had when I was 30 and not working has been replaced by a low-energy problem. But, ironically, I'm not just sitting at home staring at the TV for 12 hours a day. I'm staying busy by going to doctors and clinics.

Yes, it seems like almost every week Hawk or I have a doctor appointment somewhere. We try to bunch them up, though, so it's more like half the weeks we have no appointments then the others we have 2-3.

Oh, and there are all the pharmacy trips, too. We have enough scrips between us that we're refilling some medication once a week on average. And that's with 90-day fills now being standard. If we were on 30-day supplies we'd be hitting CVS three times a week! Though like doctors visits we've got prescription renewals bunched up so it's only every second or third week we have to go to CVS. Then we get multiple fills at once.

Staying busy in retirement... but not like I expected!

North Carolina Travelog #26
Cherokee land · Tue, 25 Aug 2026. 3pm.

After a lunch break down off the Blue Ridge Parkway— and a bit of gem shopping for Hawk after that— we headed back up and over the ridge to our next stop, Soco Falls.

Soco Falls is on Cherokee land. It's reached by a short but steep foot trail that crosses a gravel service road.



A nice wooden platform provides the view you see in these pictures. Is it the best angle? Not really. There are visible use trails down to the bottom of the canyon, where the view is likely better... but there are also clear signs instructing visitors to stay on the official trail, for their safety and to protect the environment. We saw other people at the bottom of the falls but decided not to disobey the signs and fences even though it would have been easy to step around them.



Soco Falls has a fairly large parking lot up by the highway. This being a weekday it was less than half full. But still, there were about two dozen cars parked. And we passed people regularly going up and down the trail. But once at the viewing platform it seemed less crowded. People seem to walk down the hill, go, "Yup, there's the falls!" and leave a minute later. We lingered for maybe 10 minutes, enjoying the view, and had the place to ourselves more than half the time.

North Carolina Travelog #25
Waynesville · Tue, 25 Aug 2026. 1pm.

After hiking Wildcat Falls and visiting drive-to Sunburst Falls high on the flanks of the Balsam Ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we drove back up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and continued west. I'd been noticing for a while that the roadside pullouts we were passing, every mile or two, were marking higher and higher elevations. Recall that when we turned onto the Parkway this morning we were already at 4,280' elevation. But now the roadside markers were showing 5,700... 5,800... 5,900.... I wondered, would we reach 6,000'?



In fact, yes, the road crests 6,000'! This viewpoint at elev. 6,053' is the highest point of the parkway. I was surprised by that because I would've guessed the road's summit is 80-100 very squiggly miles east, in the Black Mountain range— home to Mount Mitchell, which at elev. 6,684' is the highest point in the eastern US. The parkway doesn't go to that summit, though. It crosses the shoulder of the Black Mountains, and a dedicated access road leads to the top. So here we are at the highest point on the parkway.

Right now, though, we're actually down the mountain a bit, in the small town of Waynesville. Hawk and I diverted here for lunch. That's one thing about the Blue Ridge Parkway— there are no shopping plazas or food courts along it. That's a big part of how it's so beautiful and so mellow. But it also means we need to exit the parkway and drive down the mountain somewhere when it's time to eat. A small sacrifice for the beauty of the parkway.

This week I thought I was going to cancel a points credit card I've had for two years. Instead the bank made me an offer, and I've chosen to keep it for a third year. The card is the Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards Business Premier card.

I opened this card two years ago with a juicy sign-up bonus. That propelled me to a whopping $2,400 win the first year of ownership. As good as that is, without those sign-up bonuses the second and subsequent years with these points cards often don't pencil out. Thus I often cancel them after one year. But this one I kept for a second year already. Let's check the math on that.

Over the past 12 months I charged a whopping $55,000 on this card. I earned 89,000 points. At my valuation of $0.02/point that's $1,780 of raw value. But there's an opportunity cost to that. If I'd charged that $55k to one of my no-fee 2% cashback cards instead I'd have earned a whopping $1,100. Cash. Then there's the $99 annual fee (AF). Subtracting out both those costs, the net value is a still respectable $581.

I've got to say, $581 in net value from a card in its second year is stellar. That proves my thesis for why I kept it a year ago. So why, then, was I thinking about canceling it now?

Churning and a Retention Offer 

The reason to cancel now is that I can Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Part of the credit card churning game is knowing when you can reapply for a card and get the sign-up bonus all over again. I can't reapply for this card now-now, but I can in a few months. So I figured I'd cancel now, get the AF for next year reversed (it posted to my account a few weeks ago), and apply again in a few months. But Chase made me a retention offer.

The retention offer's a simple one. Chase offered to credit me $149 to keep their card. That's more than the $99 AF they charged! I guess their computer looked at that $55,000 I cycled through their card in the past 12 months and said, "Holy smokes, let's not lose this guy!"

Netting an extra $50 over the AF is a nice touch but it's small potatoes. I've turned down offers like that before. Because, remember, what I'm comparing it to is the value I can get from the next card— like the $2,400 I got from this card in its first year.

But here's the thing... a stellar offer like that isn't on the table right now. Chase's current sign-up bonus offers are weak. Thus taking the retention offer on this card becomes my best choice. I definitely want to open a new Southwest card sometime in 2027 for a big bonus to requalify for Companion Pass. Renewing this card doesn't give me any bonus but does give me another 12 months of time to wait for a better offer to come around while still having a Southwest points card for basic earnings.

I'm almost caught up blogging about our trip to Hawaii last week. That's good because I still have at least 5 correction: 8 blogs in the backlog from our North Carolina trip last month! I'd thought maybe I could push those out in parallel with writing about Hawaii.... I posted one on Tuesday, Wildcat Falls, and it was a mistake. It was a mistake because it put me behind on writing about Hawaii while in Hawaii. But now that I'm pretty much done with Hawaii I can catch up on North Carolina. ...And I'd better do it quickly, otherwise it'll lap our next trip, planned for Friday!

Maui Travelog #21
Back home · Retrospective

On our trip to Hawaii this past week we made use of points and cash to pay for the trip, as usual. The two "big ticket" items were the airfares and the hotel. The airfares, we bought with cash. The hotel, we paid with points. A bit of analysis on that:

• The airfares on Southwest I could have bought with points. After all, I have almost a bazillion of them. 😅 But as I noted earlier today, paying cash helped me achieve my elite status goals for the year. I'll start spending down those bazillion points next trip. 🤣


• Using Hilton Honors points at the Waldorf Astoria hotel felt like a coup. For 440k points (yes, that's a lot) I got 5 nights at a hotel where the cash rate when I booked was $800/night all-in. Simple arithmetic says I captured 0.9 cents per point (cpp). That's the coup— because Hilton points usually have a value of 0.4cpp.

But wait, there's more.

The Value of Elite Status

Elite status and premium credit card ownership helped out with this trip, too.

• On Southwest the Companion Pass I've earned for the past many years gave us basically two-for-one airfare. That's why renewing it by paying cash for this trip's flights was the right choice, versus using points right now.


• My Diamond Elite status at Hilton, a benefit I get from owning the American Express Hilton Aspire credit card, got us a daily food & beverage credit of $50. Knocking $250 off the food tab for the trip helped defray costs.


• Diamond status also got us a room upgrade. Booking on points got us the least expensive room type, the "terrace view"— i.e., looking away from the ocean. The hotel upgraded us to an ocean view room. It was far from the most deluxe ocean view, but it was worlds better than facing the parking garage. We would've gladly paid $50/night for that upgrade and would've considered $100/night.


• Also from these elite-status benefits from the Amex credit card I get a statement credit of $200 every six months when I spend at least $200 at a listed Hilton resort property.

Those three benefits from the Hilton Amex card are not free, BTW. That card costs a whopping $550/year. I made the calculation a few months ago that this card is worth paying for as long as I can make enough of these benefits work for me. With trips like this, it works out.

Hawaii Travelog #19
HNL airport · Sat, 12 Sep 2026. 8pm.

We're back on the ground after leaving Maui. We're in Honolulu, making a connection. So far we are... -5% of the way home. Yes, minus 5%. HNL is west, and home is east. 🤣

I chose to fly this longer route, with a connection, for two reasons. One, it gave us more time in Maui today— time we used well at the lazy river and water slides. Two, it was the best option with an evening departure on Southwest. More on that when we get home. Update: Why go out of my way to fly Southwest.

Hawaii Travelog #17
Grand Wailea hotel · Sat, 12 Sep 2026. 7am.

Today's our last day at the Waldorf Astoria Grand Wailea hotel. We had thought we'd be doing car touring yesterday & today— but we canceled that plan Wednesday due to a dodgy weather forecast (clouds and rain the whole time) and concerns about my sprained ankle. Alas while my ankle is still dodgy, the weather has been beautiful. At least here at the resort. And you know what beautiful weather at the resort is good for? Enjoying the lazy river pool and water slides. So that's what we're going to do again today. And since our flights home aren't until this evening, we've arranged a late checkout to enjoy the day longer.

The hotel offered me a complimentary 1pm late checkout due to my elite status. Hawk and I looked at our schedule, though, and decided it's worth it to pay for an even later checkout, 4pm. It's $250 plus tax, almost $300 all-in, but there's real value in it. We'll be able to enjoy the pool all day and then still go back to our room to pack, shower, and change into clean clothes for the trip home.