The time has come

It's time for me to go back to France. My work here is done, LOL. My mother is on the road to recovery from her trials and tribulations. I see her getting stronger day by day. I'll miss this weather. The high temperature yesterday was 72ºF. That's just over 22ºC and would have qualified it as a warm summer day in Saint-Aignan.

Here are a few last photos of the North Carolina coast. Above, the sign for a restaurant on the beach where I've enjoyed a meal or two. You can see that the sign is home-made. The food is good, if you can keep marauding gulls from stealing it before you get to taste anything.

I've been surprised to see so many yucca plants growing in the dunes along the beaches and coasts. I don't remember so many of them years ago. Global warming? Oh no, couldn't be...

This area is now over-developed, in my opinion. There are many more houses than people, especially along the beaches, because so many of them are résidences secondaires and occupied only in summertime.

The Big Oak drive-in restaurant is a local landmark. It's on Bogue Banks in the Salter Path area, which was "squatted" in the second half of the 19th century by fishermen and their families. They just moved onto land that belonged officially so some big landowner and built their wooden shacks and houses there. I think their descendants now have title to their property by dint of having lived there for so many decades now.

Maybe you have to have lived here to appreciate it, but I enjoyed this article on a local blog devoted to the history of Carteret County and the town of Beaufort. The article describes an expedition using the new "road" leading west through the maritime forest on Bogue Banks down to Salter Path. It was a 10-mile-long sand and dirt path first opened to traffic in about 1940.