A lot of you wrote in after I wrote about the rise and fall of the Wiener King: A once-promising fast food chain based in Charlotte that once had dozens of locations before shriveling up and disappearing in the 1980s. At least one of my readers was an actress in a Wiener King commercial. Several others pointed out that even though the corporation is long gone, former Wiener King buildings are still out there today, with architecture that’s easily recognizable (anyone who’s immediately recognized a repurposed Pizza Hut knows what this feeling is all about).

However, only one of you was so bold as to make a pilgrimage to the last remaining Wiener King in America.

Folks, meet Rabbit Hole reader Jake Patterson, who was inspired to veer off of the fastest route from Canton, Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky to visit Mansfield, Ohio. Luckily for all of us, he live-tweeted his journey. Unluckily for him, the Wiener King was closed when he got there and never opened. One person in the parking lot told him that the hours were pretty hit-or-miss, and that he’d be better off heading to the Mansfield Family Restaurant across down, where “what they don’t have in quality they make up for in size.” Jake ended up eating there instead before going on his way.

Some people are lured to Gastonia by the promise of an alpine wonderland that never was. Poor Jake was lured to Mansfield, Ohio by the promise of a Wiener King that never opened.

One last thing: The owner of that last remaining Wiener King, Jimmy Smarjeff, saw the story and wrote me a note about a memory he had, of the people who bought the Wiener King branding in bankruptcy paying a visit to his dad, who was the store’s original owner:

Folks, if you come at the last remaining Wiener King, you best not miss.

Two weekends ago, my family and I took a trip to Elkin. We hit up the Reeves Theater for lunch (they turn the lobby into a cafe during the day), then made the short hike to Carter Falls and spent most of the afternoon splashing in Big Elkin Creek and climbing the rocks. After that we drove back into town for dinner and a beer at Angry Troll Brewing. Had we been there earlier, we probably would have hit up the Barking Coyote Kitchen.

This is the first time I’ve been back to Elkin since 2019, when was following some thru-hikers on their trip down the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and yes, the hiking around town is great. Elkin is a great home base if you want a short or long walk in the woods, and that town’s focus on making trails to make themselves a great place to live has gotten the attention of people far beyond Surry County.

That is not what I want to talk about, though.

When we were packing up and getting ready to leave the falls, another family had shown up. They were doing the same things we were when I hear a woman shriek. Immediately everyone crowded around the base of a tree, where we all saw what startled her: A SNAKE EATING A FISH.

A Rabbit Hole reader told me later that this was a nonvenomous Northern Watersnake, which made me feel better, but didn’t work out so well for that fish.

Charlotte is North Carolina’s largest city. Somehow a 900-pound bull was able to just roam freely through it for almost a week.

If somehow you’ve missed this, here’s the short version: A farmer in western Mecklenburg County was trying to move the bull from a pasture to an enclosure last Monday to protect it from some severe storms that were moving through. The bull got out and ran into the woods, where it then became a folk hero.

If you’re wondering, again, how a bull could somehow elude capture in Charlotte for five days, consider this: That animal got loose in a part of the county that’s out near the airport and still (for now) fairly rural. People spotted it along Moores Chapel and Nance roads, but police had trouble tracking it down. At one point they put up a heat-seeking drone, only to come up empty.

That is, until Friday, when the farmer hired, in effect, a cow bounty hunter who killed it once it finally turned up on Moores Chapel Road. CMPD had said it was posing a safety hazard.

Now, here’s the thing. I live out in Oak Ridge, northwest of Greensboro, and over the last eight years we’ve had escaped cows roaming our neighborhood three times. It’s kind of comical. You’ll pull into the neighborhood, glance into someone’s front yard, and a big black cow will glance up at you as it’s chewing somebody’s well-manicured lawn. They’re carving new neighborhoods into what previously had been woods and farmland up here, which means your neighbors are sometimes livestock. The last time the cows got out, in 2019, they’d trampled a fence and ended up in the neighborhood septic field, where apparently the grass tastes amazing. The farmer kept putting the cows back, but they kept getting back out to eat the delicious septic grass. In the end, that farmer had to slaughter the cows, which was probably going to do anyway. Our neighbors used a GoFundMe to raise money to help him fix his fence.

I say all that to say this: Once you get a taste of freedom, it’s hard to go back to your pasture.

So RIP to you, Queen City Bull. You got a taste of the good life. Now, in death, you’ll forever be Charlotte’s Harambe.