Happy Valley, N.C. Journal · Recipes · Est. 2026
Throttle and Rust
Old trucks, slow meat, and the race on the radio. That's pretty much it.
Caleb & Sarah Whitaker
The property at golden hour
Late afternoon, the valley.
I kept telling Caleb we should write some of this down. The Saturdays, the people, the things that get fixed and the things that don't. So this is that. A small place to put the photos and a few sentences about what was happening when we took them. Megan, my friend from school, put this together for us one weekend. She has more taste than the two of us combined.
— Sarah
About us

I'm Caleb. My wife Sarah and I started this little corner of the internet because we kept taking pictures of stuff in the driveway and didn't really have anywhere to put them.

I run a landscaping company. Spent a lot of years on crews working high-end properties — a couple NASCAR guys' places out toward Mooresville, a few others — before I went out on my own. Sarah went to App State for teaching and now stays home with our kids. Her dad raced short-track for years up at Wilkesboro and Hickory, and the radio in the garage was his father's before that. So the race on Saturday isn't a new thing for us. It's just always been there.

Most weekends I'm under a hood and Sarah's got the smoker going. Friends drift in and out. Crank finds shade. The duck gets into something he shouldn't. That's about the size of it.

— Caleb & Sarah
If you need us, write Sarah.
sarah@throttleandrust.com
On the calendar
North Wilkesboro. July 19.
First points race up there in thirty years. Ricky raced that track. We'll have something to say about it.