We spent yesterday exploring part of the Crystal Coast; this interesting, laid back region of North Carolina. Here you can find everything from bustling small cities like Beaufort and Morehead City, to quaint little fishing towns like Harkers Island. No matter what your interests are, from history to collecting seashells, to fishing, or just sitting back in a beach chair and watching the seagulls fly by, you’ll find it all here.

Our first stop of the day was Fort Macon State Park, home to historic Fort Macon, which saw service from before the Civil War to World War II. The old fort was built as part of a chain of coastal defense forts, was seized by the Confederate Army during the Civil War and then recaptured after a siege by the Union Army, and has been restored to its glory days.

We enjoyed wandering through old barracks and climbing up to the fort’s walls to where sentries once stood guard duty, looking for enemy ships, blockade runners, and World War II German U-boats.

From Fort Macon, we drove 27 meandering miles to the charming little village of Harkers Island, where we stopped at the Cape Lookout National Seashore Visitor Center. It was here that we met a very nice man named Chuck Anderson, a fulltime RVer who is volunteering at the Visitor Center. He told us a little about his duties, we exchanged travel adventures, and then spent some time looking at the displays about the local wildlife and history.

Almost next door to the Visitor Center is the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center. This was one of the most impressive off the beaten path museums we have ever visited. We expected to see exhibits on the region’s hunting heritage, and there were certainly plenty of them, from duck decoys to massive ten gauge shotguns.

We also met a local woodcarver named Anthony Brooks and watched him at work for a while. Though he was born and raised on Core Sound, Anthony had a distinctive Scottish accent that he said he inherited from his grandfather, instead of the southern drawl we’ve heard most people use here.

What we didn’t expect at the museum were the impressive exhibits on the region’s history. There are displays on the fishing industry, a wonderful collection of model boats, quilts, and even a fully sailed fishing skiff on display. On the second floor, the several small towns strung along Core Sound have their own exhibits on their local history.

From Harkers Island, we drove back to Beaufort to tour the North Carolina Maritime Museum, which focuses on the seafaring past of the area. Everybody from the notorious pirate Blackbeard to the brave men of the United States Lighthouse Service and commercial fisherman are remembered here. The museum also has displays of fish and marine mammals that inhabit coastal waters, including this Great White shark caught 40 miles off Cape Lookout. This massive critter measured over fifteen feet long and weighed 2,080 pounds! Suddenly I wasn’t all that interested in launching my kayak anywhere around here!   

We had been bracing for predicted heavy rain and strong winds as the Tropical Storm Ida moved across the Southeast, but except for a few sprinkles while we were at Fort Macon, it was actually a pretty nice day. We’ll wait and see what today brings.

Whether you’re in sunshine or rain today, take a moment to thank a veteran for your freedom. Bad Nick made it a point to in today’s Bad Nick Blog, titled appropriately enough, Thank A Vet.

Thought For The Day – Wrinkled was not one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up.

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With Hurricane Ida downgraded to a tropical storm, we were not too worried about it up here in North Carolina. The weather reports are predicting heavy rain and wind on Wednesday, but nothing we can’t handle.

However, I wanted to get out of our campsite at Neuseway Nature Park in Kinston, because the high water markers from previous floods were over my head, and in Saturday’s blog I included a picture of the electric boxes mounted high on poles at the campground. One of the locals told me that the river carries a lot water from the mountains in the western part of the state east to the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t tread water well, and our Winnebago probably wouldn’t float very well either, so yesterday we hit the road.

We pulled out of the campground shortly after noon and drove 67 miles east on U.S. Highway 70 to Morehead City, where we are now parked on a paved lot at the Elks lodge, waiting for the storm to pass. Our route ranged from divided four lane highway with a 70 mile per hour speed limit, to small towns with more traffic and a lot of stoplights to deal with. But overall, it was an easy trip.

The lodge has one 30 amp electric outlet on the back of the building, but I couldn’t plug into it, because the outlet is in a plastic box about two inches deep, and my 30 amp cord would not clear the bottom of the box. One of the lodge members came out to check on us, saw the problem, and said we were welcome to cut the bottom of the box out if that would help.

I drug my Dremel tool and extension cord out of the bay, to plug into a nearby 15 amp outlet on the side of the building. Unfortunately, the extension cord wasn’t quite long enough, so we went to Plan B. We ran the cord in the driver’s window of our motorhome and plugged it in inside, then Miss Terry fired up our Onan 7.5 Quiet Diesel generator to power the Dremel tool. In less than a minute I had cut a wedge out of the bottom of the box large enough to accommodate our power cord, and we were plugged into shore power. RVers are resourceful, if nothing else! 

If you ever wondered just how much difference driving 55 miles per hour saves you, here are the results of a quick informal experiment I did yesterday.

The Silverleaf engine monitoring system can be configured to monitor both instantaneous miles per hour and your rolling miles per hour over a given distance. With our Winnebago’s cruise control set at 55 miles per hour, on flat terrain yesterday, the Silverleaf showed us getting 8.5 to 9.25 miles per gallon. When I bumped it up to 63 miles per hour, in the same terrain and with the cruise control on, we dropped to 7.5 to 7.75 mpg.

That’s not a huge variation, but if my calculator is working correctly, on a 1,000 mile trip it could make a difference in your cost of about $50, depending on fuel prices along the way. This wasn’t a scientific experiment, but it was interesting to see the difference.

As I said, this is pretty flat country here on the coastal plains, and the Silverleaf showed we averaged 8.5 miles per gallon yesterday.

There are several places we want to visit in this area to gather stories for the Gypsy Journal, and I need to tweak Carlyle Lehman’s Focal Wood website, so we’ll have plenty to keep us busy for a while.

Bad Nick has been busy already, posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled I’d Put Down A Vicious Dog. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – I’m not a complete idiot, some parts are missing.

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