Searching for the Elusive White Squirrel
By Dani Halliday
THE HIGHWAY 64 PROJECT
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Welcome to the Highway 64 Project.
The Highway 64 Project is not a travel guide. This is an ongoing project, a living laboratory for the study of the rhetoric of travel writing. This site is run by Elon University students who strike out along historic highway 64 in North Carolina and explore the intricacies of local food, culture, and landscape, while delving into how local communities are developing resiliency for changing weather patterns.
While you will find the ongoing reflections of college students here, there are also restaurant reviews, descriptions of towns and communities, as well as profiles of interesting people and places. There is also a serious effort to examine North Carolina’s efforts to prepare for a changing climate. And this is travel writing perceived as a rich rhetorical endeavor, done with a clear sense of the history, tradition, and diverse nature of the genre itself.
Although much of this site is specifically about Highway 64 as it crosses the entire state of NC from the mountains to the sea. We intend to continue growing our repository of essay reviews of important works of travel writing, maintain links to key travel writing sites, and collect helpful information about the complex subject of travel writing. We are also devoted to developing a resource for regional and comparative climate information. We hope to make the Highway 64 Project a destination site for folks all across the state, as we celebrate the cultural fabric of the Old North State.
Please explore with us!
Our Map
Highway 64 Diner Experience
The signs were all there and it was simply too good to ignore: there was not only a restaurant named for our project, but it was merely a little over an hour away. A road trip was clearly called for! We talked to the owners about a visit, set aside a pretty October afternoon, and struck out from campus to get onto Highway 64 and find our way to our target for the day, the Route 64 Diner.
The Route 64 Diner is conveniently located right on Highway 64 between Asheboro and Lexington in a quaint rural setting near where the Uwharrie River crosses the highway. In past lives, the building had housed several establishments including a BBQ restaurant, a bar, and was revamped into a family restaurant with its current diner theme only recently. After working there for a year, the new owners bought the establishment and have turned it into a local hotspot with a loyal following.
The owners, Tara, and Jon Snow are transplants from upstate New York who moved here a few years ago to make a new start away from the brutal winters and high taxes of their home state. They brought with them their young family and lots of experience in the restaurant business as Tara had been an executive chef for 17 years. Traditional Italian influences were their strengths, and they built the initial menu around such items as their famous spaghetti, meatballs, meatloaf, as well as burgers, and quickly realized that serving breakfast all day was also a big hit. But the challenges of adapting to the expected foods of their adopted state was intimidating—at first. Soon, they turned to their new friends and employees for help and soon branched into local favorites such biscuits and sausage gravy, fried catfish, chicken livers, and the ubiquitous sweet tea. Tara admits she had never heard of sweet tea before moving to NC, but now serves at least 10 gallons a day! They also reached out to friends and relatives to educate them on the intricacies of NC BBQ and have now established themselves as a destination for Lexington style fare. They buy all their meat locally and try to adjust their menu to fit the needs of their customers, both in menu variety and value. Feeding people in an affordable fashion is one of the Snow’s primary goals.
After a great chat with the owners and meeting their children and the staff, we settled in to explore the menu. In the following piece, we will discuss our trip, our interview with Tara, and offer some reviews of the food we sampled on our field trip to our namesake diner!
