I'm spending my blogging time in North Carolina right now, even though I'm sitting here in a tiny town in France's Loire Valley. I grew up in a small town in coastal N.C. I took these photos there in November 2010. The lighthouse in the big photo down below stands at Cape Lookout in Carteret County, N.C. — about 12 miles from where I was standing when I took the picture.
When I was born in Morehead City, NC, the population of Carteret County, of which it was the biggest town, was about 20 thousand. That was in 1949. When I left there to go to college in 1967 at age 18, the population had increased to about 30 thousand. Nowadays, it's about 70 thousand. You can imagine how much the area has changed over the years. Some neighborhoods in Morehead City remain mostly unchanged, but hundreds of new houses, apartment buildings, and hotels have been built west and north of the town.
Carteret County is one of the largest counties in North Carolina, with an area of 1,300 square miles. But don't be tricked. The fact is that more than 800 of those square miles are water, leaving just 500 square miles of (relatively) dry land for people to live on. In other words, 62% of Carteret Co. is under water. Wake County, 150 miles to the northwest — where N.C.'s capital city, Raleigh, is located — has an area of about 850 sq. mi., and a population of about 1.25 million. That's a different world.
What you see in the two pictures just above is the deep-water port at Morehead City. The town was founded in the middle of the 19th century because of the potential of the area to become a port accommodating ocean-going ships. It's one of the deepest ports on the East Coast of the United States.
