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Brunswick Stew: tour of Brunswick County, Virginia; May 7, 2023
I like to cook Brunswick stew once or twice a year. While I prepare it fairly freeform, utilizing whatever ingredients are available, I base my cooking on a recipe from my well-worn copy of the 1985 cookbook Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking. I never met Bill Neal before he died of complications from AIDS in about…
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Cycling the Piney Woods of rural Mississippi including “Going Down to Laurel” March 30 – April 2, 2023
What would a bicycle tour of the Pine Belt region of rural Mississippi be like? We started our tour at the small town of Prentiss MS, (population 975.) Prentiss, founded in 1903, is the county seat of Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi. The largest city in the region is nearby Hattiesburg, founded in 1882. In this…
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Searching for the end of the earth, East Bank edition,March 5 and 13, 2023
Louisiana geography is complicated. Divided by the Mississippi River, southern Louisiana has an East Bank and a West Bank, even though with a curving river the East Bank is not always to the east. In the swampy landscape south of New Orleans, on the East Bank there are roads that head out into the marshes,…
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The Uwharries of Central North Carolina; January 10-12, 2023
It was about thirty degrees outside at eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning when I headed out by bicycle for a three day trip from my home in Chapel Hill NC. Brrrrrr. I was in search of parts of North Carolina I had never seen. I did not intentionally set out to ride through the Uwharrie…