Category: Eastern North Carolina trips
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Driveover Country: the Chapel Hill to Topsail Beach attempt, June 23-24, 2016
People smugly call places like Oklahoma flyover country. However, almost everybody I know in North Carolina drives to the beach and they hardly notice what I-40 passes through. Beyond the southeastern Raleigh suburbs no one seems to even stop for gas until they get to the coast. Tootie had rented a small house in…
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Jacksonville Skyline, March 5, 2016
Another version. (Can you imagine keeping everyone waiting while on national television?) Jacksonville, North Carolina, population 70,000 is the largest city in North Carolina that I had never visited. Its location is remote, Down East near the coast, but still not at an actual beach. It is a military town dominated by…
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Elizabeth City NC, Nov. 23, 2015
Growing up in Virginia Beach, less than sixty miles north of Elizabeth City, I saw it as something exotic, our closest foreign place, somewhere I often thought about but never visited. My friend Bill rode his bicycle down from Virginia Beach to Elizabeth City in about 1975, slept by himself in an abandoned house,…
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Down East: Snow Hill to Kinston; Nov. 12, 2015
Most people outside North Carolina do not realize what a huge area encompasses what we call Down East; flat, flat, flat, and stretching on for miles. There are a bunch of small towns, a lot of agriculture, and small cities like Rocky Mount, Wilson, Greenville, Goldsboro, and Kinston. While the Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham areas have…
