Noyers houses (8) and my annual trip to North Carolina

Here are another couple of pictures from Noyers-sur-Serein in Burgundy. I'm winding this series down now.

Today is train day, and tomorrow is plane day. Walt will drive me up to the train station in Blois this morning, and I'll catch the train to Paris. The train takes about 90 minutes. In Paris, I plan to walk about 20 minutes from the train station to a café on the edge of the Marais neighborhood where I want to have lunch. And then I'll get another train out to Roissy CDG airport, where I have reserved a hotel room for the night. I'm headed to North Carolina, on the U.S. central east coast, 800 kilometers south of New York City.

This is not a photo I took in North Carolina, but another in the Noyers in Burgundy series.

I have no real choice but to spend the night at the airport, because my plane to Atlanta is scheduled to take off at 8:00 a.m. from CDG. That means I have to be in the terminal around 6:00 a.m. to get my suitcase checked and make my way through the security obstacle course and out to the departure gate. It's about a nine hour flight to Atlanta. There I have two hours on the ground, which will be taken up with getting my suitcase, taking it through customs, re-checking it for my connecting flight, and making it through passport control and security (again). Then, with luck, I'll have time to get to the gate for my flight to New Bern NC, which is 800 km east of Atlanta on the Atlantic coast of NC. That flight takes something like 90 minutes. From the time I arrive in the airport terminal at Paris CDG until I land in New Bern something like 12 or 15 hours will have elapsed.

A 15th century house in Noyers in Burgundy

New Bern was the British capital of NC in the 1700s. It's a nice old town (by American standards) with a population of about 30,000. It was founded by a group of Swiss and German colonists in 1710. My home town is about 40 miles southeast of New Bern, right on the coast. It's called Morehead City (pop. 10,000), and it was founded as a deep-water port and railroad terminal in the mid-1850s. Just a couple of miles east of Morehead is the old town of Beaufort, founded in 1709 — that makes it the third-oldest settlement in what is now the State of North Carolina (pop. 10 million). It was a sailing port in Colonial times. It is still an popular layover point on the U.S. Intracoastal Waterway, which is used by smaller boats and yachts from New York and points north that are headed down to Florida and the Caribbean. It might just be the most picturesque town in North Carolina.

I did several posts about New Bern NC a few years ago. You can find some of them here. And I've done several about Beaufort NC as well. Scroll down through these posts for some photos and text about this part of North Carolina.