U.S. East Coast travels

A last look at Beaufort, N.C.

2007-11-19T07:17:00.000-08:00

My mother, sister, niece, and I had lunch in Beaufort again yesterday. We sat outside in the warm sun on the deck of a restaurant on the town waterfront, with a nice view of water, docks and boats. My sister know the chief cook at the restaurant where we ate, and he treated us to a nice meal. That was a good surprise and a very nice gesture on his part.

This is what my mother calls a "shotgun" house. It's one of the
more modest dwellings along the Beaufort waterfront these days.

Beaufort is one of the most picturesque and cosmopolitan places along the central coast of North Carolina, because it is a popular stopping-off point for people traveling by boat up and down the East Coast. For example, today at lunch there were two men at the table next to ours who were speaking French. From their accents, I could tell they were Canadian.

A monument to the county's Confederate soldiers in the Civil War

This area is a birder's paradise. Yesterday I saw egrets and a blue heron in the marsh behind my mother's apartment complex (she sold her house two years ago and moved into a retirement complex). There are flocks of geese and ducks flying overhead all the time, headed south. And there are so many sea birds — gulls, terns, cormorants, plovers, sandpipers, etc. etc.

I think these are cormorants flying low over the surface of the sound.

There are a lot of big old live oak trees along the N.C. coast. Their thick, arching limbs make sensuous shapes overhead and their branches and leaves provide much needed shade in the heat of summer.

Live oaks on the grounds of the Carteret County Courthouse

Beaufort is the county seat, and the big brick courthouse was built about 100 years ago. The county's population has doubled or tripled over the past 40 years, when development started in earnest. Retirees flood in, looking for a mild climate, low prices, and good recreational facilities.

The Carteret County courthouse in Beaufort, N.C.

One of the most impressive houses on Front Street in Beaufort is one that was home to the Carteret Academy, a boarding school for girls whose families lived on the N.C. Outer Banks in the 19th century. The classrooms were on the ground floor with dormitory rooms on the upper floors.

The Carteret Academy, a building that dates back to 1842

The ground floor, in brick, was built under the original house some 25 years ago, if memory serves. More and more old houses around Carteret County are being elevated so that they can withstand floodwaters. Newer houses are often built on tall pilings for the same reason.

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Starting Wednesday 21 November, I'll be blogging de nouveau at Living the Life in Saint-Aignan.

Grits Grill, Nags Head, N.C.

2007-11-18T06:35:00.000-08:00

Do you eat grits? Have you ever eaten grits? Do you even know what grits are?

In Nags Head, North Carolina, there's a breakfast restaurant called the Grits Grill, where grits are the mainstay of the menu. The Grits Grill is open daily from 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., serving eggs, bacon, sausages, biscuits, toast, and... grits.

A breakfast place in Nags Head, N.C.

Wikipedia describes grits as a "corn porridge" — think oatmeal, cream of wheat, and, especially, polenta. Both grits and polenta are made from ground corn, a.k.a. Indian corn or maize in some parts of the English-speaking world, maïs in France, and blé d'Inde in Québec.

The chef at the Grits Grill

The main difference between polenta and grits is that polenta is made by grinding up whole corn kernals and grits are made by hulling the kernals before they are ground. Polenta can be described as "yellow grits" as opposed to the white grits served across the Southern U.S.

When I was in college in North Carolina, way back when, "grits" was a term used by students from Up North to describe us Southerners. Then I finished college and moved to Champaign, Illinois, to continue my studies at the University of Illinois, and I knew I wasn't too far from home when I saw grits being served at breakfast in the university cafeterias there.

I'm not sure exactly what this means...

I had never heard of polenta until a guy I knew in Paris in about 1975 told me about it. He had grown up in southern France and he prepared a dinner of polenta with sausages (chipolatas, I think) in a tomato sauce. Now that I live in France, I know I can have (yellow) grits whenever I want, because they stock polenta at Intermarché and SuperU in Saint-Aignan.

I'll be flying back to France tomorrow. According to Walt's blog, it has been very cold in Saint-Aignan for the past few days. It's supposed to snow today and then warm up and rain for a couple of days. Walt will drive up to CDG airport Tuesday morning to pick me up.

Ocracoke, N.C.

2007-11-17T05:08:00.000-08:00

Sand dunes protect Ocracoke Village from the ocean's waves

In 1585, a ship carrying a band of English people who planned to establish a colony sailed through Ocracoke Inlet. It was the first English attempt at colonizing North America, and it ended in failure. Conventional wisdom says what is now known the Lost Colony was set up to the north, on Roanoke Island, but some believe it was really located on Cedar Island in what is now Carteret County.

Sailing to Ocracoke...

Ocracoke Inlet was open in those days, while today's Hatteras Inlet and Oregon Inlet didn't yet exist. Ocracoke was not an island then, but the tip of the peninsula that was the Outer Banks. Since the Great Gale of 1846, which cut Hatteras Inlet through the banks, Ocracoke has been an island. It is still accessible only by boat or aircraft.

...or riding the ferry

Ironically, the Great Gale of 1846 also virtually closed Ocracoke Inlet. Until then, Ocracoke was a thriving port. Ships arriving from across the ocean and along the coast stopped here, as did ships sailing away from two of North Carolina's oldest mainland towns, New Bern and Bath. After 1846, Ocracoke went into decline.

First sighting of the village and lighthouse

Isolated and windswept, the island was home to about 500 residents who continued to speak an archaic brogue that sounded more English than American to those who lived on the mainland. You can still hear that brogue, but it is dying out now, as television, radio, and tourists and new residents from the West and the North bring a newer brand of English to the island.

Ocracoke Lighthouse is one of the oldest on the U.S. East Coast

Today, about 800 people live "permanently" in Ocracoke Village, which is at the southern limit of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The village is located on the south end of Ocracoke Island, which is about 12 miles long and only a few hundred yards wide in many places. Its average elevation is five feet above sea level.

The harbor on Ocracoke Island is called Silver Lake

The population swells in the summertime, as tourists come in. The village lives almost entirely off of tourist dollars nowadays. This year, Ocracoke was named the best beach in the United States by a professor in Florida who does such ratings.

Old fishing boats and new buildings at the docks on Silver Lake

A few signs

2007-11-16T05:23:00.000-08:00

My trip to North Carolina is drawing to an end. It's Friday, and I leave on Monday to return to France. I'll be leaving home to return home. Is that a paradox?

On the Cedar Island - Ocracoke ferry

Yesterday it rained nearly all day. Over the course of the day, I spent an hour or more talking with a man who was born in North Dakota, lived as a boy in Montana, and then had a career in Seattle. For medical reasons linked to the rainy, chilly climate in the Pacific Northwest, he moved to Hawaii and had another career there.

Back of Beaufort

Through a series of unlikely events, including a relationship with a German woman whose daughter had relocated to North Carolina, this man has ended up living out his retirement in Morehead City. He says he had never heard of North Carolina before he came here, and wouldn't have been able to find it on a map.

To me, that's the story of today's world.

On Front Street in Beaufort

I also spent a few minutes talking with a 90-year-old...er, -young man who grew up in Eastern Kentucky. His father was a coal miner. He served in the army in World War II and has great memories of places like Le Havre, Paris, and the south of France. Problem is, this man is so deaf that it was hard to communicate with him. Otherwise, he is in very good health.

Clawson's Restaurant in Beaufort

In the afternoon, I paid a visit to a cousin I hadn't seen in at least 30, if not 40, years. Her name is Ethel and we grew up together. Her mother and my grandmother were first cousins — their fathers were brothers, one born in 1879 and the other in 1895. How's that for a complicated genealogical chart?

On Beaufort's waterfront

Anyway, to me all this seems emblematic of today's world. I guess it's always been so — plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as we say. Ethel, her husband, their granddaughter, and I had a very nice visit, talking over old times, reliving family memories, and catching up on lost time. One reason I got to go see her was this blog: she wrote me a note a year or so ago to say she had been reading it.

Cruises over to Cape Lookout lighthouse

Blogs are great.

By the way, the pictures in this post are some random shots of signs I've seen around the county over the past two weeks.

Morehead City, on Bogue Sound

2007-11-15T04:56:00.001-08:00

The people of Beaufort, N.C., were so poor during the 19th and 20th centuries that they had no choice but to stay in their houses and try to maintain them. In Morehead City, on the other side of Newport River and Beaufort Inlet, people were not so poor. They tore down the big old houses downtown and sold the land to developers who wanted to build banks, stores, restaurants, and movie theaters in their place. Downtown thrived for a few decades.

A nice house near the shore in Morehead City

The population of Morehead (we drop the "City" when we talk about it, and we call each other Moreheaders) is now about 8,000 — that's twice as big as Beaufort, and twice what the population was when I left to go to college 40 years ago.

Sunset on Bogue Sound, 14 November 2007

Morehead itself is located on a peninsula surrounded by Bogue Sound and Newport River. The sound is about a mile wide at its widest and about 30 miles long. There are inlets at each end — Beaufort Inlet at the east end and Bogue Inlet at the west end. Newport River is really a wide, shallow bay, fed mostly by sea water but also by a small stream at its western end.

On the shore in Morehead, live oak trees are shaped
by salt spray carried by prevailing southwesterly winds

The neighboring town of Beaufort was founded in 1709 and has a long history as an ocean-going port. Of course, ocean-going vessels in the 18th and 19th centuries were mostly small sailboats. Morehead City was founded in 1857 by North Carolina's governor John Motley Morehead as a new town and a new deep-water point for the state. The land was subdivided and a railroad linking the new town of Morehead to the state capital, Raleigh, was built.

The bridge linking Morehead to Bogue Banks and the ocean beaches

Morehead is protected from the ocean's waves and from big storms by the narrow strip of sand known as Bogue Banks. My grandmother used to tell me about sailing across the sound in a skiff to go to the beach along the ocean. There were just a few buildings over there in the 1920s and 1930s. In my lifetime, I've known three different bridges. The first two were drawbridges, and the one used now is a high-rise bridge. Now Bogue banks is covered by big houses and condo complexes.

Fences, docks, and the bridge

When I was growing up, we lived in a small house on the edge of a neighborhood known as The Promise Land. People abandoning Diamond City, near Cape Lookout, in the early 1900s had dismantled their houses and floated the boards over on skiffs and barges to rebuild them close to the shore in Morehead, where they were protected from hurricanes and storm surges. A lot of the streets were dirt roads — I remember that from the 1950s and '60s.

Gnarly live oak limbs trying to escape from somebody's yard

Development proceeds apace in and around Morehead City. On n'arrête pas le progrès. Monster houses on stilts (elevated above potential flood waters) stand out like sore thumbs in old neighborhoods of small, low clapboard houses. Traffic is incredibly heavy — I think people live in their cars. Retirees from "up north" have discovered the place. The old downtown is moribund, and a new "downtown," centered on a WalMart super center, has grown up on what used to be the western edge of the built-up area. That's typical in American nowadays.

A sign on the wall of the Beaufort ice house

Why do retirees want to live in Carteret Country on the North Carolina coast? Well, the weather here is very mild, except when hurricanes hit. Today, for example, the temperature in my mother's apartment is 78ºF — that's slightly above 25ºC — and she has not yet turned on the heat this year. Today is November 15. To me it's still hot and humid. Hence the importance of ice and iced drinks.

Beaufort, North Carolina

2007-11-14T17:45:00.001-08:00

Beaufort, N.C., was founded in 1709. It is the third-oldest town in North Carolina, after the towns of Bath and New Bern. Beaufort, pronounced [BO-furt], not [BYOO-furt] as it is in South Carolina, was originally called Fishtown. It is a fishing port located on the mainland facing one of those famous inlets that let water and boats pass through the N.C. barrier islands.

Cars waiting for a sailboat to pass by on the way into Beaufort

When you drive from Morehead City east to Beaufort, you pass over a long causeway and then a drawbridge. As you can see, the bridge was up when I drove over to Beaufort this afternoon. There are plans to replace the old drawbridge with a high-rise bridge in the near future, but the residents of Beaufort and town, county, and state authorities do not so far seem to be able to agree on exactly where the new bridge should be built.

There are a lot of old houses in Beaufort, which has a population of about 4,000. Every year there is an old homes tour. People work very hard to preserve the look of old Beaufort, and a lot of new homes being built on the outskirts of the old town are built in the old style.

Photo above is a detail from the photo below

The Manson house dates back to the beginning
of the War Between the States

The oldest houses still standing in Beaufort date back to the 1720s. In all, about 100 Beaufort houses are "plaqued" as being of historical interest.

Photo above is a detail from the photo below

The Ward house dates back to the founding of the USA
after the War for Independence

Beaufort is a choice stopping-off point for pleasure boats cruising down the U.S. East Coast from New England and New York toward Florida on the Intracoastal Waterway. It is home to the Duke University Marine Laboratory and the North Carolina Maritime Museum.

Photo above is a detail from the photo below

The Sloo house dates back to colonial times

Near Beaufort is the Cape Lookout National Seashore, which is made up of a long string of barrier islands that are reachable only by boat. The park is centered on the Cape Lookout lighthouse. Until about 1900, the whaling and fishing village of Diamond City was located near Cape Lookout, but destructive storms finally forced its 500 or so residents to abandon the site and move to more protected islands or to the N.C. mainland.

Don't build near an inlet

2007-11-13T21:05:00.000-08:00

No, don't build a house near an inlet. Inlets move around. First the sand washes away on one side and builds up on the other, and then the sand washes away on that side and builds back up where it was before. It's hard to predict when all that might happen.

A house at Bogue Inlet where the water is eating away at the land

Some people built houses on the shore at Bogue Inlet at the western end of the barrier island that protects the towns of Morehead City and Swansboro from the Atlantic Ocean. Then the inlet started to shift. Bulldozers were brought in, sand fences were put up to help blowing sand build up where residents wanted it, and now sandbags have been put around some of the houses to keep the waves from washing them away.

These two houses at Bogue Inlet are in real jeopardy.

It's not really working, though. The sea and the waves and the currents are relentless. Storms come along every year, and in some years there are catastrophic hurricanes with destructive winds and storm surges.

The beach at Bogue Inlet is flat now, but it was
probably all sand dunes a decade or two ago.

Before World War II, only the poor people lived on the shore. That was the only land they could afford. People of greater means knew the shore was a dangerous place to build a house. They lived away from the water, especially the ocean.

Inside the inlet, in Bogue Sound, the water is calm, shallow, and marshy.

Now all that has changed. People want to walk out their front door and go swimming. It sounds nice, and if you can afford the insurance I guess it is. But be prepared to kiss your house goodbye when the next big storm rolls in.

The salt marshes make nice patterns in the water.

Riding the Outer Banks ferries

2007-11-12T04:45:00.001-08:00

The Ocracoke lighthouse

Drive down the N.C. Outer Banks from Nags Head or Manteo or Kill Devil Hills. At Oregon Inlet, in the north, cross what is known as a high-rise bridge. Continue for another 30 or 40 miles toward Cape Hatteras down the long, narrow strip of land that separates the Atlantic Ocean from the calmer waters of Pamlico Sound.

The ferry Cape Point departing Hatteras Island for Ocracoke

About halfway down you will notice a place where the ocean washed across the island in a recent hurricane. Except for the efforts of the N.C. Department of Transportation, which sent crews and bulldozers to fill in the gap in the sand, there would be a new inlet there.

The ferry's front probile, with the pilot's cabin up top

An inlet is a gap in the narrow sand bank that encloses the North Carolina sounds and that lets sea water and estuary water be exchanged between the open ocean and the more protected coastal waters and wetlands. The inlets are endlessly shifting and changing as strong tidal currents and storm-driven waves move sand onto or away from the shore.

Heading toward Ocracoke Island

Hurricanes often cut new inlets through the Outer Banks. Water surges over the barrier island and cuts a deeper and deeper channel into the sand as it rushes through. It's the coastal equivalent of a gully or canyon, but everything happens in fast motion during a hurricane

The ferries are registered at the state port in Morehead City

It's very difficult to build a bridge over an inlet because the sand is so unstable and the tides and currents are so swift. Building the Oregon Inlet bridge near Nags Head was quite an engineering feat, and I believe it is the only bridge on the Outer Banks that spans an inlet. Other bridges link the islands to the mainland, spanning the slower moving waters of the sounds.

Sailing into the sunset toward Ocracoke

Here's what Wikipedia says about Oregon Inlet: it was created by a hurricane in 1846. So it is very new. One of the ships that rode out that storm in the sound was named the Oregon, and it gave its name to the new channel.

Welcome to Ocracoke

Here's what's even more interesting: Wikipedia says that Oregon Inlet, like many other inlets along the Outer Banks, constantly "moves southward due to drifting sands during tides and storms. It has moved south over two miles since 1846, averaging around 66 feet per year."

Outer Banks sunset, 09 November 2007

The inlet that now separates Hatteras Island from Ocracoke Island was also opened up by the great storm of 1846. The same storm nearly closed up the inlet on the opposite end of Ocracoke Island, sending the once-prosperous ports at Ocracoke Village and Portsmouth Village on the other side into a steep decline. Portsmouth Village was abandoned in the early years of the 20th century.

Ferrying toward the western sky

One inlet that has been fairly stable since the late 1600s is Beaufort Inlet, about 75 miles down the coast from Ocracoke. Beaufort has been a fishing port since about 1710, and nearby Morehead City is one of North Carolina's two modern deep-water seaports. Morehead City was founded in 1857 and then developed when the harbor was linked by rail to the more densely populated Raleigh-Durham area.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just turn a knob
to get a clearer vision of the world?

Inlets, then, are bad places to try to build bridges. There is a project to replace the one at Oregon Inlet, which costs a fortune to maintain, with a bridge that would be built farther away from the inlet and the pounding waves of the ocean. If you want to move people and vehicles from island to island rather than from island to mainland, what is the solution? Ferries.

Down East

2007-11-11T03:46:00.001-08:00

A lot of Americans know the expression "Down East" as it is applied to the state of Maine, up north. Here in North Carolina, Down East is used in at least two different ways. Up in the Raleigh-Durham area — the Research Triangle — people call the whole eastern part of the state, down toward the coast, "Down East." At least I think that's what they mean when they say it. Somebody from Raleigh will have to confirm that.

An old Primitive Baptist church (1829) in the village of
Atlantic, N.C., which used to be know as "Hunting Quarters"

Here in Carteret County, on the coast, we use the name "Down East" to describe the part of the county that starts when you drive through the area called "Back of Beaufort" and cross the bridge that spans North River. Beaufort, a fishing town founded in the early 1700s, is east of Morehead City, and Down East is even farther east. Besides, it's very low country, just a strip of land with a highway on it that runs through salt marshes for a good part of the way to Cedar Island.

The Free Will Baptist Church at Lola, on Cedar Island, N.C.

The little communities that are strung out along U.S. Highway 70 for 40 miles from Beaufort to Cedar Island — Otway, Harker's Island, Gloucester, Straits, Marshallburg, Davis, Williston, Stacy, Sea Level, and Atlantic — are unincorporated. There are a few grocery stores and gas stations down there, but not much else in the way of commerce and shopping.

At Cedar Island. Because buildings are built of wood,
and violent storms hit the area frequently, there aren't
very many really old buildings in rural Carteret County, N.C.

The people Down East are currently fighting a battle against development. They know that if they don't do something now to preserve their culture and environment, they will quickly be overrun. Carteret County has turned into a big retirement area, and McMansions are being built all along the shoreline at lightning speed.

An old cemetery in Kitty Hawk, N.C., on a rainy day

I think a lot of the people who live Down East are the descendents of New Englanders who made their living by fishing and whaling and who migrated down the U.S. East Coast starting in the 1600s. They had their roots in England and Northern Ireland. Carteret County was pretty isolated from the rest of North Carolina and the U.S. until the 1940s, when the federal government built the two big military bases called Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point nearby.

Also at Kitty Hawk

The old English-sounding brogue that you used to hear spoken around the county, especially on the docks and fishing boats, is rapidly dying out. The locals sound more and more Southern, and less and less old-timey and unique. The wave of immigrant retirees from "up north" that started building in the 1980s has dramatically accelerated that phenomenon.

A nautical theme

2007-11-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

A ferry steaming from Ocracoke toward Cedar Island

Yesterday we drove from Morehead City to Nags Head, N.C. Well, we drove part of the way and we rode on car ferries the other part.

Miss Patience docked in a little harbor Down East
in Carteret County, North Carolina

To get to Nags Head up the Outer Banks, you drive about an hour from Morehead City (which is already the jumping off place of the state) on curvy roads through salt marshes and little unincorporated communities with names like Williston, Davis Shores, Stacy, Otway, and Sea Level until you arrive at Cedar Island.

The little fishing harbor in the village of Atlantic, N.C.

There you board a car ferry for the 23-mile crossing to Ocracoke Island, which takes 2¼ hours. It was windy and a little chilly out there yesterday, but the sun shone brightly. The ferry, which can take 50 cars, was full.

A shrimp boat trawling the waters off Portsmouth Island, N.C.

From Ocracoke Village you drive about 12 miles and then you take a second, shorter ferry ride over to Hatteras Island — that's a 45-minute trip itself. And then you drive about 60 miles from Hatteras Village up through Frisco, Buxton, and Rodanthe (three syllables please) to Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills, where Orville and Wilbur successfully first got their motorized airplane off the ground about 100 years ago.

The ferry we took from Cedar Island to Ocracoke was
called the Carteret. Its home port is Morehead City.

First in Flight, that's the motto on North Carolina car license plates. I know I fled many years ago! Ha ha ha! But I always enjoy coming back.

America today...

2007-11-08T20:19:00.000-08:00

...or at least what I'm seeing. Looking back through the pictures I've taken over the past ten days, I found these slices of Americana.

When did the greenback become multicolored? Bluish ones and yellowish tens. Is the color change one of the reasons why the greenback doesn't seem to be worth much any more? Right now, it takes about $1.50 US to buy one euro. Five years ago, you could buy a euro for $1.00. But Washington doesn't care.

Some things don't change. Coca Cola continues to coca-colonize the world, starting with the U.S. So much soda containing so much corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. Even in France, you see Coca Cola on restaurant and café tables everywhere.

Americans still like ice in all their drinks. The refrigerators in U.S. kitchens dispense ice cubes from contraptions in their doors. Americans who come to France find the lack of ice in their drinks one of the hardest things to get used to. It must be because so much of the U.S. has a very hot climate compared to Europe.

The hamburger is alive and well in America. I thought all burgers had to be cooked well-done, E. coli oblige, but this one was served almost raw. Nobody asked me what cuisson I wanted. I ate it with some trepidation, but felt no ill aftereffects.

There are more and more skyscrapers in all the American cities I've seen. This one belongs to the Bank of America, and it's in Atlanta. It seems slightly out of scale with the surrounding environment. Every city, even the medium-size ones, have to have some.

Are more people riding Harleys as a way to combat the high price of gasoline? I don't know, but I've been seeing a lot of motorcycles here in North Carolina. At the same time, I also see a lot of monster-size SUVs and pickup trucks. All the cars seem enormous, in fact, and they float along in steady streams from stoplight to stoplight on wide smooth roads of many lanes.

With all the talk of destructive hurricanes and rising sea levels, why do people keep building matchstick houses and flimsy condos right on the beach all along the East Coast?

Presidential elections last two years or more now. The president's term of office is only four years. It's becoming a permanent campaign. (Jimmy Carter isn't running this time, but some might wish he were.)

Is this a motto for today's America? Or just some friendly advice?

Food you can't get in Saint-Aignan

2007-11-08T08:31:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I went shopping for food products that we can't get easily in France. Mostly, that means Latino food, though there are also some Southern U.S. product like grits and corn meal that I take or ship back too.

By the way, polenta substitutes naturally for grits in my shrimp and grits recipe. Actually, polenta is to grits as corn meal is to masa harina. And masa harina is one of the Latino products that I will take or ship back to France. After all, Chris and Tony brought us a very nice tortilla press when they came to France last spring. So into the box will go 5 lbs. of masa harina and 5 lbs. of white grits.

A grocery store in Morehead City, N.C.

And into the box will also go the things I bought yesterday at El Mercadito, a Mexican grocery store in Morehead City. It's unbelievable that such a store even exists here in coastal Carolina. Times and countries change quickly nowadays.

Peppers in adobo sauce

What did I buy that you can't get in France? First, three cans of chipotle chiles in adobo sauce. I think I will go back and buy some more of those next week if I can fit them in the box I plan to ship back to Saint-Aignan.

Si señor, three bags full

I also bought three bags of dried red peppers labeled Chile de Nuevo Mexico, Chile de California, and Chile de Arbol. Plus a bag of Epazote en Rama and a bag of Oregano Entero. Rick Bayless uses all these in the recipes in his cookbooks, of which we have two. All of the above products are Mi Costeñito brand and distributed by a company in Chicago.

Long may she wave...

Meanwhile, across the highway from El Mercadito is a big shopping center where you can buy, buy, buy at WalMart, Staples, Lowes Home Improvement Center, Best Buy, Sears, Belk, and many more stores. Along the road there's a car dealership that flies an over-sized American flag.

Shrimp and grits, with okra as a bonus

2007-11-07T17:26:00.001-08:00

As I said, in Jacksonville NC yesterday we drove up to a stoplight at an intersection where there was a fish market on the corner across the street. Ma said she had been wanting to try it for a while, and I said well, there is no time like the present. We pulled in and parked.

Jacksonville NC, for those who don't know, is a military town. It is the site of the largest Marine base in the U.S., Camp Lejeune. The population is about 70,000, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of those people were Marines and their families.

The fish market was a long low brick building with two entrances, one leading into the restaurant and the other into the market where fresh fish is sold. Three or four employees waited on customers and prepared fish for them, scaling, gutting, and filleting the flounder, bluefish, and mullets customers bought.

Fresh shrimp from a down-home N.C. fish market

The customers in the market when we arrived were three or four young Asian people who spoke to each other in their own language but ordered in English, buying fresh whole fish, along with four or five African-American people doing the same. We were the only Euro-Americans in the place, except for the ones behind the counter.

I bought a bluefish which we will eat soon and a pound of big shrimp — twenty of them, to be precise. As Ma and I drove home, we talked about what we would have for dinner. Unfortunately, Ma is allergic to shrimp. I said we had some broccoli and some green beans I could have with shrimp. She said what about potatoes — do you want to stop and buy some?

Searing some cleaned shrimp in a skillet filmed with vegetable oil

And then I thought of grits. Actually, at lunch in Beaufort the day before, my friend Monet's mother had asked if the restaurant served shrimp and grits. In fact, that is a more South Carolina than North Carolina concoction. But Ma was born in South Carolina and my father was born in North Carolina, so I've got mixed blood in my veins and a cross-cultural palate.

Boil up some okra in salted water

When we got home, I cleaned the shrimp, which were sold headed but with the shells on. To clean them, you peel off the shell and then you cut a slit down the back of each shrimp and remove the gut by running the shrimp under cold water. The main reason to remove the digestive tract is that it is often full of sand, and gritty shrimp is not the same thing as shrimp and grits.

Shrimp and okra in a buttery sauce spiced with hot red pepper flakes

Then I started ½ cup of grits cooking in two cups of water. I poured the grits into water that I had heated almost to boiling in the microwave, stirred them well, and then finished the cooking in the microwave.

Meanwhile, I heated a small amount of vegetable oil in a skillet, and when it was very hot I placed the shrimp in the pan and seared each one on both sides.

Shrimp and okra served over grits

Oh, I almost forgot about the okra. I had opened Ma's freezer for something else and there, staring me in the face, was half a bag of frozen okra. That sounded perfect as a vegetable to have with something as Southern as shrimp and grits. So I put a pot of water on the stove, brought it to boiling, and put the okra in to cook for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, I sprinkled some salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes on the seared shrimp and turned the heat down. I added in a good tablespoon of butter for flavor, and I put some of the boiled okra in the pan too. At that point, the grits were cooked: they were loose and soft, not too liquid and certainly not too dry and pasty.

Then all there was to do was to spoon some grits into a soup bowl and serve some shrimp and okra on top, with the buttery, peppery cooking sauce drizzled on top. It's a dish I will make again soon.

Waiting for DSL

2007-11-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

My mother and I drove to Jacksonville, NC, yesterday to go to the phone store and change her plan. We added DSL to her line. It won't be extremely fast — 768 kbps download and 384 kbps upload — but it will be 12 to 15 times faster than her current dial-up connection. And the cost, at $25 a month, won't break her budget.

I never thought Ma would one day sign up for DSL. But she has. She reads the blogs, and now maybe she'll start sending e-mail and surfing the web with more confidence and enthusiasm. I'll be able to show her some tricks later this week and next.

In Jacksonville, an hour's drive from Morehead City, we drove past a fish market/restaurant. Ma said she wanted to try it one day, and I said we should stop immediately and look around. We did. It was great — like something you might find on the Normandy or Brittany coast in France. There were a dozen or more varieties of fresh local fish on ice — flounders, bluefish, jumping mullets, croakers, and more — as well as nice fresh shrimp with or without the heads, as you wanted. There were soft-shell crabs too.

I bought a bluefish, which is a fish I really like, and a fish market employee cleaned and filleted it for me at no extra charge. It was $1.99 a pound. And I got 20 nice large headless shrimp. That was about a pound and cost $8.00. I shelled and cleaned the shrimp myself at home and made shrimp and grits for dinner. It was mighty fine. That'll be my next blog topic, once the DSL connection is activated and I can more easily and quickly upload pictures. Later...

A day at the beach

2007-11-06T07:55:00.001-08:00

The Atlantic Ocean on a beautiful calm day

Being here on the N.C. coast when the weather is fine is just great. And yesterday the weather was very fine indeed. It was almost hot out. The low temperature this morning in Morehead city was 67ºF, or about 19ºC. Tonight, however, the temperature is expected to drop to 30ºF or -1ºC. Brrr.

Yesterday morning, my friend Monet from California and I took a walk on the beach in the resort/retirement community called Pine Knoll Shores on Bogue Banks, the barrier island that separates Morehead City from the ocean.

Monet and I met in California in 1989, when we both started working for a company called Software Publishing in Silicon Valley. We were both from North Carolina, and we soon found out that we actually had mutual friends in N.C. We've been friends ourselves ever since, and it was great that she was able to come to N.C. while I was here this time.

Monet and her mother drove the three hours or so from Raleigh down to the coast to see me and other friends of theirs in Morehead. They, my mother, and I had lunch on the waterfront in the beautiful old N.C. port town of Beaufort yesterday. We actually sat outdoors on the second-story porch of a restaurant, where we had a nice view of the harbor and boats docked down below.

It is so comfortable here for me. I know how to talk to people in our Southern ways and dialects. I slip right back into it when I arrive. People are very polite and cheerful.

At lunch, my mother just wanted a glass of water with her meal. When the waitress brought it, Ma looked in the glass and said to the young waitress: "Honey, there's something floating in my glass."

"It's probably just a lemon seed," the waitress said.

"No, I don't think so," Ma answered. "It's got wings."

The people at the table next to us burst out laughing, and the embarrassed waitress went to get Ma a fresh glass.

The rest of us were drinking "sweet tea." We had a nice lunch.

Five pictures from N.C.

2007-11-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

The weather has been nice here every day except one. The mornings are cool, but the sky is bright blue and the sun warms everything up by afternoon. The high temperature is supposed to be 70ºF/21ºC today. I'll be going down to Harker's Island for lunch and a visit to the waterfowl museum there with my mother and some friends from Raleigh.

An inviting scene on Adams Creek

The one day when the weather was not so nice was Friday, when a hurricane traveled by out at sea. We caught the fringes of it, and we experienced strong northerly winds for more than 24 hours. That wind causes high tides, and there was some flooding in the marshes and at other low-lying points. The water was very choppy.

Looking north from Morehead City over toward the
Blair Farm development across the mouth of Calico Creek.
Monster houses, steely water, and whitecaps.

The weather is supposed to change tomorrow. A cold front is moving in from the Midwest. High temperatures will drop to 55ºF/13ºC. Nighttime temperatures will be down around freezing. It is November, after all.

Cotton bolls in Carteret County, NC

Over at Adams Creek, I noticed a field of cotton. There were others that had been harvested already, and there were big bales of cotton sitting on the edges of those. My sister told me that a lot of North Carolina farmers who used to grow tobacco now are growing cotton.

Seen on the side of a Mill Creek fire truck

And finally, here are a couple of pictures I took at the Mill Creek Oyster Festival. The festival was a benefit for the local volunteer fire department.

Rubber duckies, but what for?

I have no idea why there was a little inflatable wading pool full of bright yellow and red ducklings out behind one of the booths at the festival. There was no water in it, and nobody was attending to it.

The Mill Creek Oyster Festival

2007-11-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

The central coast of North Carolina, Cape Lookout,
and the Morehead City-Beaufort resort area

Yesterday my sister and I drove up to the community of Mill Creek to have some seafood at the annual Mill Creek Oyster Festival. The festival is a benefit for the community's volunteer fire department.

This is a dancing oyster, I think.

Mill Creek is on the north bank of the Newport River in Carteret County, NC, just six or eight miles north of Morehead City as the gull flies. Driving there requires covering a much greater distance, since there is no bridge across the wider parts of the Newport River. Mill Creek is an unincorporated settlement with a population of a few hundred.

Get your shore dinner here.

Actually, the Newport River is an estuary or a bay and its water is brackish if not salty. It is inhabited by oysters, clams, shrimp, and edible fish with names like croakers, spots, and hogfish. Those are the seafood specialties served at the annual oyster festival.

Fried oysters, hushpuppies, baked beans, and cole slaw.

My sister and I didn't know quite what to expect when we decided to go to the festival yesterday afternoon. We thought there might be a lot of booths where people would be selling crafts, local food products, or even flea-market junk. It turned out there were just a few such booths, mostly selling jewelry and tee-shirts.

Want a big Pepsi?

Mainly, there was food. You could buy a ticket to be served a fish plate ($4.00), a shrimp plate ($7.00), or an oyster plate ($9.00). All the seafood was breaded and fried, and the side dishes were baked beans (white beans in a sweet tomato sauce), cole slaw (raw cabbage salad in a mayonnaise dressing), and hushpuppies (fried cornbread). That's typical coastal North Carolina cooking. Beverages being sold were coffee (the thin American variety), sweetened iced tea, and soft drinks (Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc.).

Joanna had a plate of fried spots.
She said they were " purty good."

Oh, I almost forgot about the roasted oysters. For $15.00, you could get all the roasted oysters you could eat. In North Carolina, oyster roasts are an autumn treat. People build a fire under a big thick piece of metal or a grill set up on bricks or concrete blocks. They spread oysters on the metal or grill and cover them with wet burlap bags. If the bags seem to be drying out, they spray or douse them with water. The oysters get steamed and smoked under the burlap. You eat them with lemon juice, vinegar, or a hot cocktail sauce made with ketchup, vinegar, and horseradish.

Roasting mass quantities of oysters for the Mill Creek festival.

The atmosphere was festive and many of the the signs were obviously hand-lettered by volunteers. It was all pretty rustic and rural. The weather was beautiful and we enjoyed the food.

Sandstone and shadow in Birmingham

2007-11-03T03:28:00.000-07:00

We were up on top of a tall tower with a seating area
below. Sharp shadows show how strong the sun was.

Last Tuesday I went with my friends to Birmingham, Alabama. I had never been there before. The weather was mighty fine.

Nice patterns in sandstone walkways

I figured that the Alabama Birmingham had been named after the city of Birmingham in England, but I didn't know that the Alabama city was so named because it was also a major coal-mining center. Birmingham AL was founded in the mid-1800s and grew quickly. It also has significant iron-ore deposits, so it became a steel-making center. And it has significant sandstone deposits as well.

Steps

The sandstone I saw was used as paving stones, but there are also houses built out of it all around the region. I think there must be a lot of iron ore in the stone to make it that orange color.

First week in U.S.

2007-11-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

I've been in the American South for almost a week now. It has been very busy, and since I didn't have a computer with me, it's just been to hard to process photos and write text for my blog. My friends in Alabama have a high-speed Internet connection, but they use Macintosh computers. I struggled some with the Mac interface, being a Windows user, and I finally decided I just didn't have time to work on photos and write blog topics.

We ran around a lot and had a great time. My friend Marie from Normandy and I were just slightly jet-lagged. On Monday Marie and I went along on Meals on Wheels rounds with our friends Evelyn and Charlotte. Marie went into the recipients' houses with Charlotte, and the first meal they delivered went to a 90-year-old widower who can no longer cook for himself. He had been in France during the war, and he was thrilled to meet a Frenchwoman. He kissed her on both cheeks and reminisced about his wartime experiences, she told me.

Evelyn served "field peas" as part of her Thanksgiving meal.
They are a kind of black-eyed peas.

Monday afternoon we visited a violin "factory" in Anniston, Alabama. Maybe I'll be able to post about that visit later, with pictures. Then Monday night Evelyn and Lewis served us an American Thanksgiving dinner -- nearly a month early, but because they wanted Marie to have that experience. Everything was delicious.

A museum photo... how things have changed.

On Tuesday we went to Birmingham and visited the civil rights museum and memorial park. More about that later, but they didn't allow photos inside the museum. Tuesday night, we went out for dinner in a typical Southern barbecue restaurant.

An Atlanta institution, The Varsity

On Wednesday we drove to Atlanta and went to the Carter Center, which includes a museum dedicated to Jimmy Carter's presidency and Mr. Carter's presidential library. We ate lunch at The Varsity restaurant, which is one of the oldest fast-food restaurants in the U.S., again for the experience. Marie had her first glass of "sweet tea" -- that's the sweetened iced tea that people in the South often drink with their meals.

My mother lives on the edge of Calico Creek,
which flows through a salt marsh near her house.

At that point, my friends drove me to the Atlanta airport for my flight to North Carolina. Yesterday, I spent the day with an old high-school friend I hadn't seen in about 15 years. Today, I'm resting and trying to post this blog topic. To be continued...

Arrived, but what a trip

2007-10-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

Air France flight crew personnel were on strike in Paris on Saturday and Sunday. The scene at the airport on Saturday afternoon when I arrived was chaotic. It took me nearly two hours to get from the RER station to my hotel by shuttle. And it was only a two-mile ride.

On Sunday, the Air France terminal was a mob scene. There were literally thousands of people waiting for the airline staff to tell them whether or not their flight was actually going to depart and to let them check their bags. My friend Marie and I stood in a crowd from about 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. We finally boarded the flight at 3:30, but then we didn't take off until 6:00.

As we stood in line to check bags, an Air France employee came by and asked for U.S. residents to make themselves known. I raised my hand and she said I could go to the head of the line, and then I remembered and said that I actually resided in France. She said it didn't matter, that I should go to the front of the line anyway.

Then I told her that my friend who was traveling with me had a French passport. She leaned over and told me very quietly just to tell the screeners that Marie was my wife. That's what I did. I asked her why Americans were getting special treatment, and she said it was because not everybody would fit on the plane and they wanted Americans returning home to get on first. French people who got bumped would just be told to go back home, unless they lived very far from the airport.

Our plane was not full. Walt says he heard on the news that because some members of the flight attendant crews were out on strike, they couldn't accommodate all the passengers that the plane would normally hold. So there were many empty seats on our plane.

The upshot of it all was that after a day of wondering whether we would actually be able to come to the U.S. at all, we finally arrived in Atlanta four hours later than scheduled. But we made it, and our friends were at the Atlanta airport to meet us.

Departing Saint-Aignan, temporarily

2007-10-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

Soon to be on the road again

This is a test post for this old blog. Tomorrow I'll be leaving Saint-Aignan and going to spend the night at the airport near Paris. Then I'll fly out Sunday morning, arriving in Atlanta late in the afternoon. I'll spend three days in northern Alabama before continuing on to the coast of North Carolina to visit my mother, sister, and the rest of my family there.

I'm going to try to post topics here while I'm in the U.S.

Last full day in the U.S.

2006-11-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

If you are reading this blog for the first time, you might be surprised to find yourself reading not about France but about the United States. I've been on an East Coast tour for a month now, traveling from Upstate New York down to North Carolina and Alabama, and ending up in Illinois. I fly back to Paris from Chicago tomorrow, and I plan to resume posting topics about life in France's Loire Valley later in the week.

Meanwhile, I've been in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, area for a couple of days, staying with friends. I spent five years here in the 1970s, when I was in graduate school. I have a lot of nostalgia for the University of Illinois, but it certainly has changed. I hardly recognize the campus, with the exception of its old core, the main quadrangle.

The old Greyhound bus station in Evansville, Indiana

I'm thinking about transit these days, in anticipation of our flight back to France. On the way from Kentucky to Illinois, I drove through Evansville, Indiana, just because I had never been there before. The old Greyhound bus station was the most interesting thing I saw there.

I crossed into Illinois at Mount Carmel, where an old friend grew up. She lived in Paris back in the 1970s, when I did. Then I took a detour off the main highway, just to see the sights. I ended up on very narrow roads and got stuck behind a school bus that was dropping off children in the Illinois equivalent of a village.

Stuck behind a school bus in southern Illinois

The bus stopped in front of at least 5 houses — trailers, actually — and at each one or more kids got off. The houses were just a few hundred feet apart, but rather than let them all off at a single stop and leave them to walk to their respective houses, the bus made all those stops. I was stuck, because it is against the law to pass a stopped school bus in the U.S.

The shadow of our Chevy Impala on an Illinois field

Later, Walt snapped a picture of the shadow of our car against a typical Illinois landscape as we drove north. The sun was going down.

The quadrangle at the University of Illinois on a nice fall day

Yesterday, we walked around the Illinois campus. The sun was out and the weather had warmed up enough to make walking outside pleasant.

The College of Agriculture building on the quad at Champaign-Urbana

Today, we had lunch in an old student hangout on campus called the White Horse Inn. As we left the place after enjoying a nostalgic hamburger with cole slaw and fries, we noticed some students on the 5th-floor balcony of their apartment across the street. Today the Illinois-Ohio State football game was being played on campus, and a lot of students were partying (evidently). These particular guys were rowdy. When they saw us, one of them yelled: "You guys are too old. Get the f*** out of here!"

I guess my University of Illinois days really are over. I might as well go on back to France.

Kentucky

2006-11-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

First of all, let me say Kentucky was really pretty. The drive from Dale Hollow State Park, near Albany and Burkesville, over to Glasgow KY took us along a hilly two-lane road through many small towns and settlements. A lot of the houses along that road (route 90, which runs along just north of the Tennesse border) are neat little brick bungalows. There are many red-brick churches. The fall colors were beautiful on November 2.

I saw this sign half a dozen times along route 90.

There are also many picturesque ruins. Old falling-down houses with porches stacked high with junk are a common sight. Old general stores, closed up and in various states of decay, give you a flavor of what local life in this area must have been like before everybody had a car to drive. In a lot of ways, it made me think of the Loire Valley, where still today fewer people drive cars and where small villages are spaced out along narrow roads at regular intervals.

The "village" closest to the Dale Hollow resort is called Frogue.
I don't know how to pronounce it.

The lodge (or motel) at Dale Hollow is completely modern. You couldn't find a nicer place (considering the $55-a-night rate we paid) anywhere in Florida or California. But you know you are in Kentucky as soon as you get three miles up the road.

Back in the early 1980s, I knew a Frenchman who lived near Versailles and who thought Kentucky was one of the best American words he had ever heard. He would joke about one day going there on a vacation. I think he was half serious about such a trip, but I'm not sure he really believed such a place really existed. I wish he could have been with us yesterday.

You still see houses like this one, but many of the houses along the road
were neat and clean little brick bungalows.

Kentucky reminds me very much of North Carolina as well. Back in olden days, Daniel Boone forged the trail over the Appalachians at the Cumberland Pass, and many Carolinians and Virginians followed him west into Kentucky. The big difference right now between KY and NC is that rampant development and sprawl haven't yet hit Kentucky. That's a good thing for KY.

A "trailer home" that we passed along the way. Notice the Confederate flag
used as a curtain in the center window. (Click the picture to enlarge it.)

Farther north, up on the Ohio River at Owensboro, the barbecue restaurant called the Moonlite Inn was full of suprises. First of all, it seats 300 customers in a series of spacious dining rooms. And it was packed at 12:15 on a Thursday afternoon. I enjoyed listening to conversations all around, and especially to the wait staff. The people of Owensboro seem to have a strong Southern accent, despite being so far from the Old South.

The mutton barbecue was excellent. The meat was succulent and smoky. It had been shredded and coarsely chopped after long slow cooking. I wasn't crazy about what they called the "dipping sauce," however. It was a brown, watery liquid that didn't add much flavor. The bottles of dipping sauce on sale in the restaurant store listed the ingredients as, first, water, then Worcestershire powder (what is that?), vinegar, and sugar. The barbecued mutton would be much better with some good Eastern North Carolina hot-pepper vinegar on it. Nothing is better on barbecued meat than Wilber's vinegar sauce from Goldsboro, North Carolina.

The separate entrance for people who want to take their barbecued meat home.
These are American icons: an ice machine and newpaper vending machines.

We drove out of Kentucky into SW Indiana after lunch and drove up small roads along the Wabash River all afternoon, on our way to Champaign-Urbana. Just a few miles north of the Ohio River, in Mount Carmel, Illinois, the accents were no longer southern. Neither was the landscape.

Barbecue across the South

2006-11-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

I'm excited today because we are going to try a new kind of barbecue (or Bar-B-Q, as they seem to spell it here in Kentucky. It's one of the fun things to do when you travel around the south, if you eat meat.

In North Carolina, this time, we got to go to the two best-known barbecue joints in the state. One was Smiley's Barbecue in the town of Lexington, near Greensboro and Winston-Salem, N.C. Lexington-style barbecue is hickory-smoked pork shoulder served with a slightly tomato-y, slightly vinegary sauce. At Smiley's, I ordered coarsely chopped barbecue, and the meat was tender, juicy, and flavorful.

But to my eastern North Carolina palate, Smiley's cooked pork wasn't really barbecue. The meat was bathed in liquid, and it wasn't spicy enough. Real barbecue is exemplified, for my, by the hickory-smoked, vinegar-sauced, whole-hog meat cooked up and served at Wilber's Barbecue Restaurant in Goldsboro, N.C. The meat is not floating in sauce, and there are flecks of hot red pepper in the vinegar sauce and through the shredded or chopped meat.

I've been going to Wilber's since the mid-1960s. It's on the main road, U.S. Highway 70, between my home town, Morehead City, and the Raleigh-Durham area, where I went to college. Wilber's barbecue never disappoints.

We visited friends in Anniston, Alabama, on this trip. They are people I met on an Internet forum. In Anniston, we had lunch on Tuesday at Daddy's Barbecue. The meat was shredded, hickory-smoked pork, and it was delicious. My only criticism of it was the way it was served. They put a pile of barbecued pork on the plate and them dumped on a generous quantity of a sweet dark-red sauce that wasn't bad but wasn't necessary. The pork would have been better without it.

We also had barbecue in Atlanta. We bought it from a chain restaurant called Sonny's. It was surprisingly good, especially the shredded pork, which was seasoned with a hot-pepper-vinegar sauce. We also tasted the beef barbecue at Sonny's, but I found the sauce too ketchup-y and sweet.

Three years ago Walt and I tried barbecue in Georgia and in South Carolina. The Georgia version was ketchup-y sweet. The S.C. version was bathed in a mustard sauce that was also very sweet. I don't like my barbecue sweet.

In Owensboro, Kentucky, today, we are going to have lunch at the Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn. The specialty there is Kentucky mutton barbecue. Wow, barbecued lamb. It should be interesting, and it might be delicious. I'll report on it later.

Alabama to Kentucky

2006-11-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

We had a really nice stay with our friends E. and L. in Anniston, Alabama, from Sunday evening until Wednesday morning. We drove up to Cheaha, the highest point in Alabama, where the trees were showing off their yellow, orange, and red foliage. We also went to a nearby winery and tasted some muscadine, villard blanc, and chardonnel wines. Not to mention a peach wine and a blueberry wine. They were interesting, and a couple were good. Yes, chardonnel, not chardonnay. It's a hybrid.

Near Cheaha (TCHEE-uh-HA), the highest point in Alabama at about 2300 feet

This morning, before our departure on our trip to Kentucky, I told E. and L. that I wanted to have donuts for breakfast. They don't usually eat donuts but they were good sports. L. and I drove over to LaMar's Donut Shop in Anniston and bought a dozen glazed donut holes, one plain old-fashioned donut, one glazed old-fashioned, two regular glazed, and two maple-glazed. We all ate some, and E. then packed up the leftovers for us to take on our trip to Kentucky.

Needless to say, we don't eat many donuts in France.

We left Alabama in sunshine and cut through a little corner of northwest Georgia. It clouded over. A few minutes later we were in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it started raining. It rained hard all afternoon as we drove up through the eastern Tennessee mountains and the towns of Spencer, Sparta, Cookeville, Livingston, and Byrdstown.

We arrived at Albany, Kentucky, at about 3:00 p.m. It was pouring rain. We just drove through, which was a disappointment. We wanted to see it better. The population of Albany KY is 2200, which makes it smaller than Saint-Aignan. We couldn't take any pictures. It was raining too hard.

Tonight we are staying near Albany at the Dale Hollow State Park Resort hotel. It's a modern place on a big artificial lake, and it has wireless Internet access. A minute ago, Walt opened the dorr and went out onto the patio of our ground-floor room. "Uh-oh, a skunk," he said. I had to take a picture.

This skunk came close but did not spray us.

Signs of the times

2006-10-31T04:36:00.000-08:00

One of the pleasures we had during our time in North Carolina was a visit to the laundromat. The attendant was very helpful. Instead of making us buy a card to pay for the washers and dryers,which would have required a long-term investment we didn't need to make, she used her card to run the machines and we just gave her cash.

After we put our clothes in the washer, she said: "Now the good news for you, which is the bad news for me, is that I am required to stay right here on the premises. That means that you are not!" So we could go for a walk while the wash cycle completed.

I liked the sign on the washer that said it was forbidden to put human beings in the machine. Why in the world do they need to put up such a warning?

No people washing here

Changes in the weather

2006-10-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

During our time on the N.C. coast, we had nearly every type of weather you can imagine. At the beginning, it was so muggy that we couldn't believe it. It wasn't particularly hot, except at night. But you felt like you were swimming through the atmosphere.

The second week, the weather turned chilly and clear. That was during the "mullet blow." Since the beach runs east-west in Carteret County, a north wind flattens out the water and there's almost no surf. The water is a deep blue, reflecting the color of the clear sky.

Last Friday morning, storm clouds rolled in from the southwest. When we woke up at about 7:00 a.m., we could hear the surf for the first time all week. We decided to walk down to the beach to see what the water looked like.

Well, there was a magnificent sunrise under way. I could see the lighthouse in silhouette on the horizon. Within 10 minutes, the clouds had moved east and the sun had risen just a little more, so the show was over.

Sunrise near Fort Macon in North Carolina, 27 October 2006

By noon, it started to rain. The wind got stronger and stronger as the day progressed. The storm turned into a real sou'wester (as opposed to a nor'easter). In a sou'wester, the wind is warm and it churns up the ocean, making the water rough and the surf impressive.

The N.C. beach during a good sou'wester storm

Looking southwest over the beach just as the storm moved in

In the picture above, you can see that the prevailing wind on the Carteret County coast is from the southwest, because the sand fences are set up to catch sand blowing from that direction.

Looking southeast toward Cape Lookout and the lighthouse

Contrast the picture above with the ones I took a day or two earlier from the same spot — especially this one.

A view back toward the mainland showing the Morehead City waterfront

We are in Alabama today, visiting good friends. By the end of the week we'll be in Illinois, and we will fly back to France from Chicago next Sunday.

Pictures for yesterday's post

2006-10-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here are three photos I took yesterday and that I wanted to post with yesterday's text about eating jumping mullets. Google wouldn't cooperate but has changed its ways today.

On the horizon you can see the lighthouse at Cape Lookout, NC

Cape Lookout lighthouse redux, with people walking on the beach

Looking southwest along the beach from our condo at Southwinds

Cape Lookout is about 12 miles from where our condo is located. You can get there only by boat or helicopter.

The weather has turned cloudy and rain is supposed to begin falling by late afternoon. We are going to have strong winds, heavy rains, and thunderstorms tomorrow morning, according to the people who do weather forecasts.

Jumpin' mullets for dinner

2006-10-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Our old friend Peter arrived yesterday from Washington DC to spend a couple of days with us here. We've known each other since 1981, when we all lived in Paris.

Last night we went out to dinner at Morehead City's largest, oldest, and best-known restaurant, the Sanitary Fish Market & Restaurant. One of the daily specials was jumping mullet, fried or broiled. That's what I had, fried, and it was delicious. It seemed like an appropriate choice.

This morning I walked out to the beach again. The trucks and fishermen were there, and the tractors. I talked to a fisherman. He told me they had just finished hauling in the net and then putting it back out. He said they netted a truckload of speckled trout, which was unexpected. I asked if they weren't really fishing for jumping mullets, and he said yes, they were. But you take what you get.

More about mullets and mullet blows

2006-10-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

A pretty prickly pear cactus growing on the grounds of our N.C. condo complex

The wind came out of the north for a second day yesterday, and it felt cold. We didn't go out until afternoon, when the sun had had a chance to warm things up a little. But it was definitely chilly as we tromped around in my boyhood neighborhood at 5:00 p.m., and we soon got back in the car to warm up.

The view from the deck of our apartment at the Southwinds complex

We had had bright sun and a brisk breeze in the morning, which made for beautiful views of the ocean. The temperature was in the high 30s fahrenheit — moins de 5º C.

Fishermen's trucks on the beaches of Bogue Banks

When we got back to the condo late yesterday afternoon, some downstairs neighbors were just coming out of their apartment. They had been keeping an eye on the fishermen down at the beach, they said. "Did they haul that net in yet?" I asked them. No, they said, but they hauled one in a little farther down the beach. They ended up netting 18,000 pounds of jumping mullets. That filled up the beds of four big pickup trucks.

Fishermen rocking the tractor — don't ask me why. Just for fun, probably.
More fun than just standing around on the beach.

What are jumping mullets? Here's one:

The jumping mullet, or striped mullet, Mugil cephalus

The jumping mullet is definitely not what is called a rouget or a rouget barbet in France — those are red fish. Maybe it's the grey mullet, but I don't really know.

The one thing I know about jumpings is that the only way to catch them is in a net. They won't take bait, so you can't catch them on a hook.

A Carteret County skiff towed to the beach by tractor

There's another fish in N.C. waters that we call a sea mullet and that can be caught by hook and line. It's scientific name is Menticirrhus americanus, according to this good site showing the fish that live in North Carolina waters. I wonder if the fish called sea mullet here is not the same as the one called merlan in France? Here's what it looks like:

The sea mullet, or whiting, or southern kingfish

The same fish can have many different local names from region to region. From country to country and language to language, it's even harder to sort it all out.

I won't even try to speculate on the origin of certain terms applied to hairstyles.

October on North Carolina's beaches

2006-10-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks to an unsuspecting neighbor in the Southwinds Condominiums complex here on the North Carolina coast, I am able to connect to a wireless network and blog this evening.

The North Carolina coast is where I grew up. In October, when the wind turns to the north and the first cool days of the fall make themselves felt, the people here in Carteret County, NC, describe the weather as a "mullet blow." The jumping mullets begin their coastal migration, and the local fisherman put out their nets to catch as many as they can.

Tractors left to spend the night alone on the beach

They use tractors to haul in the nets, and they use shovels to throw as many mullet as they can from the nets into the beds of their pickup trucks or trailers. The nets were out today, and there were two tractors and seven or eight trucks out on the beach in front of the Southwinds complex.

Walt taking pictures on the beach in North Carolina, 23 October 2006

Besides the trucks and tractors and their drivers, the only other people on the beach were a few late-season stragglers looking for seashells. And me and Walt, taking pictures.

A couple of hours after our mid-afternoon beach stroll, I walked back over to the shore to see if the nets had been hauled in. They hadn't. Maybe tomorrow. There was a beautiful sunset. It reminded me of Saint-Aignan sunsets, which I am eager to see again.

Sunset on Bogue Banks, NC — 23 October 2006

A closeup of the same sunset

I wonder what the sunset at La Renaudière looked like today. We will return there two weeks from tomorrow...

Hot-lanta!

2006-10-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

Walt has posted a topic about our visit to Atlanta and the new aquarium there. Here are a couple of my pictures:

Alaskan king crabs

A jellyfish

We spent two nights in a condominium owned by friends who visited us in Saint-Aignan back in December 2004. We are very grateful to them. Here are a couple of pictures of the condo complex:

Condominiums in a nice wooded neighborhood in central Atlanta.

After spending a couple of hours walking through the aquarium, we drove over to the Westin Hotel, parked, and took the elevator and a set of stairs up to the bar on the 73rd floor. This is a view from there:

Part of downtown Atlanta, looking north.
Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Now in North Carolina

2006-10-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

We left Albany NY last Friday and drove to Washington DC to spend the weekend seeing old friends there. The weather cooperated perfectly.

Face on the barrel of a cannon at Fort Ticonderoga, NY

Since Sunday evening, we have been in North Carolina. The trip has been very busy and we are trying to rest up before our next leg, which is a trip to Atlanta starting Thursday morning.

Walt and our rental car in front of a barbecue restaurant in Lake George, NY

Internet acces is not easy right now. We are sitting in an Internet café in Morehead City. The connection is wireless and works well, but we have just one computer so as I type Walt is just waiting. Not ideal.

I'll write more when I can. At least we haven't had any more encounters with the police. But my pollen allergies have flared up and I am congested and coughing.

Americana

2006-10-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

What do the houses in an "affluent" American suburb — in this case, near Albany, NY — look like? Here are some examples. The second two are very grand, aren't they?

Here's a picture of a house out in the country in upstate New York, north of Albany. I think it is very austere and puritan in appearance.

And here is a suburban Albany house where the homeowners are expressing their political opinions.

Finally, a sign I noticed in a window in downtown Albany.

Arriving in New York City

2006-10-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

When we arrived at JFK airport last Thursday, we got through immigration really fast. The immigration officer wished me a big smiling "Welcome home!" Our bags came right out. The customs officer asked no question.

We rode the Airtrain around the airport to the rental car center and picked up our Chevy Impala from Budget. We hadn't asked for a full-size car, but that was the car they wanted us to drive to Chicago for them. It has Illinois license plates on it.

To get out of New York City, we needed to drive up an expressway through the borough of Queens and cross a toll bridge before we could head north to Albany. All we had was a $50 bill, and we figured we would need some smaller bills for the toll. We also needed a phone card so that we could easily make calls within the U.S. The best idea seemed to be to get off the expressway, go into a neighborhood, and buy a phone card, just to break the $50 bill.

We decided to take Liberty Avenue east into Queens. We drove along for two or three miles. There were gas stations, car repair shops, and other businesses, but no drug stores or convenience shops like 7-11 that would be likely to sell phone cards.

We turned left at some point — 160th Avenue, maybe? — and drove north a mile or so. We ended up in the center of Jamaica, Queens, on Jamaica Avenue. It's a big commercial area, and there was a Walgreens drugstore. We found a place to park and this church was about the first thing I saw.

French-language church in Jamaica, Queens, New York City

It's a typical American church in many ways: it occupies a building that probably wasn't built to be a church. Then again, maybe it was. But it doesn't look like a traditional European church, that's for sure.

Bethany Baptist Church, Jamaica, Queens

Click on the picture, as usual, if you want to see an enlargement and read the text on the sign.

Somehow seeing a French-language church right away made me feel welcome in New York City.

In Hudson, NY, nearly three hours north of New York City, we took a long walk along the main street on Sunday afternoon. We stopped in a church to see the inside, and we were surprised to hear a service going on. It was about 2:00 p.m. The pastor or priest was speaking French. He was black, and the 30 or 40 people attending the service were also black. The priest read scripture in French and the congregation answered back in French.

They must be from Haiti, I told Walt. The service ended, and I listened to the adults talking among themselves. They were speaking Creole, which is based on French, Spanish, and English.

Meanwhile, Walt talked to a couple of teenage girls who were in attendance. They confirmed that their parent were Haitians. The girls spoke perfect American English. I walked up and said in French: "Alors tout le monde parle français ici?" — So everybody here speaks French? — and the girls eyes got wide. She stared at me for a second, and then beat a hasty retreat to rejoin her family. I guess she was shy — or shocked to hear somebody outside her community speaking French. It was cute.

The church in Hudson, NY, is more traditional

We are hitting the road again this morning and we don't know whether we will be able to post blog entries tomorrow. We're headed up to Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, a hour or two north of Albany, and will spend the night up there before returning to Albany tomorrow afternoon.

Albany from the air and on the ground

2006-10-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures I took in Albany last week, well before the incident in which the suburban police stopped me and told me to cease and desist as far a picture-taking went. Those were not the Albany city cops. I guess suburbanites are a little touchy about people taking pictures in their neighborhoods.

Here's what I wrote about that incident on my Saint-Aignan blog:

Speaking of terrorism and security issues, Walt and I were stopped by the police today in the Albany NY suburb where we are staying. We had gone out for a walk around our friends' neighborhood at about 10:30 a.m., and I was of course taking pictures. A lot of the houses are very beautiful, and they are very different from houses in France. Somebody called the police and reported me as a suspicious character. The policeman actually ran my ID through the police department computer to see if I was legitimate! He told me I could go on my way but that I shouldn't take any more pictures of houses. Do you think it's really illegal to take pictures when you are on a public right of way in America? Has it come to this? Are people this paranoid?

The policeman wasn't even polite or apologetic about it. It's creepy here. Not Albany, America. I don't like what's happened.

Walt's grandmother told me yesterday that there was a gruesome axe murder in this suburb last year, and that the police pretty much botched the case. A young man killed his father and maimed his mother. He has been convicted, even though his mother refuses to believe her son is guilty. I guess some people in town are still nervous, and the police force is over-zealous as a result.

The Corning Tower rises above the state museum building in Albany NY

We arrived in Albany last Thursday night. Friday afternoon we went downtown to see the NY state government complex known as the Empire State Plaza. The first thing we did was ride the elevators up to the top floor observation deck of the 40-storey Erastus Corning Tower to get the lay of the land and take some photos.

Albany City Hall

Albany's city hall is the brown, red-rooved building with the square tower on it. It's just at the edge of the state government complex.

The state capitol building is modeled after the Hôtel de Ville in Paris

From the observation deck where I took this picture, there are views to the north, east, and south. This picture looks north. In the foreground is the building called "the egg," which is a performing arts center. The capitol is the building with red rooves, and off in the distance you can sort of see the Adirondack Mountains on the horizon.

II "heart" New York

Looking straight down from the top of tower, you see the famous New York logo. Not to mention a lot of freeways and cars.

The cathedral at Albany

The cathrdral is just south of the Empire State Plaza, which was built in the 1960s and '70s. A large neighborhood was razed to make space for the Plaza in the center of the city. I think that neighborhood had been home to a lot of immigrants from Italy and other parts of Europe.

The roof of a parking garage seen from above

Expanses of land and concrete devoted to automobile parking are a characteristic of American cities nowadays. There are parking lots in French towns and cities too, but not on this scale. South of the cathedral in Albany is a parking lot. The car defines the American city in a way it does not define European cities.

Air vents (bouches d'aération)

Walt says these big air vents are designed to let wind in to blow the pollution out of the big parking garages used by state workers.

Albany's South End neighborhood

The old South End neighborhood is separated from the Hudson River by an impressive network of highways. In this picture, the fall colors are nice. There are a lot of vacant lots where houses have been demolished. I don't think the South End is a particularly prosperous district.

South End stoop

The buildings in the South End have a lot of potential, but people don't want to live there any more, I guess. A lot of the old houses are boarded up.

Seen in a window downtown

This is a nice piece of street art. It's painted on a boarded up window in downtown Albany.

Lombardo's Bar and Restaurant

Lombardo's is an Albany institution, I think. We didn't try the restaurant, at least not yet.

Albany is a beautiful place in many ways, as you can see from these pictures. It's a small city that, compared to cities in the U.S. South and West, hasn't suffered a lot of suburban sprawl and development.

Of course, Albany has been losing population for years. A lot of people from the U.S. Northeast have been moving to places like the Carolinas and Florida and Arizona and California. As a result, my home state, North Carolina, for example, has changed and developed rapidly. The population has doubled since the 1960s. With all the good and the bad that that entails.