A few pictures of Beaufort, N.C.

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

I've posted photos of the town of  Beaufort in North Carolina before, I think. Or I know I have, really because a few years ago I did a whole separate blog about N.C. and other parts of the U.S. where Walt and I have traveled. Here are a few pictures I took recently in Beaufort, a little port town founded in 1710.

The house above is located at the west end of Beaufort's Front Street, which is both the downtown and the waterfront. The street and, I suppose, the house have been known to flood in hurricanes. This old building, dating back a couple of centuries, is one of the town's best-known landmarks. It's known as the Duncan house.

Last year, I think it was, somebody from "off" — not a local family or individual — bought the house and announced he was going to tear it down. An uproar ensued. Then the man said he wouldn't tear it down, but he wanted to have it jacked up and moved back farther from the street. Another uproar put an end to those plan. The house hasn't changed since the last time I was here.

Beaufort is a stopover point for people cruising up and down the Intracoastal Waterway on the U.S. East Coast. This part of North Carolina is about half way between New York and Florida. The water on the south side of Front Street in Beaufort is called Taylor's Creek, but it's not a freshwater stream. It's salt water and it's only flow is tidal. It's a protected anchorage point.

Above is a view of downtown Beaufort (in the distance), believe it or not, and it was raining when I took the photo.

After taking the picture of the "creek" and the waterfront, I turned around and photographed these two house. One is very grand — it's a real mansion. The other is a kind of American longère — a long building divided into a series of rooms. I don't know it it has a hallway inside.

The building above with it signs made me almost think I was back in France, where the Sécurité Sociale system is called la Sécu in everyday parlance. But no, this SECU is the State Employees' Credit Union, a kind of membership bank for North Carolina's public servants. It was raining, and raining hard, when I took this picture through the windshield of my mother's car.

P.S. Our internet connection went down overnight. I don't know when this post was actually published. Anyway, everything is back up and running now.

North Carolina coastal scenes

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

Uh-oh. I can't get used to this blogging-in-the-evening schedule. I'm used to blogging in the morning. So today I forgot to write anything, and at 10:15 p.m. I just remembered. Earlier today, I did process and upload some pictures.

This was, I think, a controlled burn near the town of Cape Carteret on the N.C. coast.
It was slightly alarming to see such an impressive plume of smoke so close to a
shopping center. Cape Carteret is on the southern edge of Croatan
National Forest,  where forest fires occur frequently.

This Piggly Wiggly supermarket is in Beaufort, N.C., on the coast. Founded in 1710,
Beaufort — pronounced [BOH-furt] — is the third oldest town in North Carolina.
Piggly Wiggly is, I think, the oldest chain of self-service supermarkets
in the United States.

This is Cape Lookout lighthouse, in a photo taken from the shores of Harkers Island, N.C.
Cape Lookout is considered to be the southern end of the Outer Banks and
was the site of a whaling village in the 19th century. A series of destructive
hurricanes forced the 500 or so hardy souls who lived there to
break camp and move to the mainland around the year 1900.

Fort Mill

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family in the Carolinas. I'll be back in France soon.

Our South Carolina cousin Virginia lived for years in the town of Fort Mill, S.C., between Rock Hill and Charlotte. Fort Mill is now a large and affluent suburb of Charlotte, just a few miles to the north. It retains some of its small-town charm, as you can see from the pictures in this post.

A mural on the brick wall of the local newpaper office

A sign in the window of a downtown shop (a secondhand shop, if I remember. And we thought

 shops in France kept erratic and unpredictable business hours...

Your guess about this one is as good as mine. Established in 1968, whatever it is.

I liked the old-timey barber shop and the barber pole. I can't imagine why

so many men were waiting to get haircuts on a Tuesday morning.

After a brief tour around Fort Mill for old times' sake, we got back on the Interstate highway and crossed the border into North Carolina.

First and second cousins, X times removed

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family in the Carolinas. I'll be back in France soon.

Monday afternoon in Rock Hill, we went looking for relatives. Or at least their houses. My mother and her sister were born in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1930 and 1936 respectively. My grandfather was born there too. His sister (my great-aunt) and her clan of a family lived out, or are living out, their lives in that area. It's just 25 miles south of Charlotte, N.C., the largest city in the Carolinas.

My grandfather's sister and her husband, who were born in the 1890s, lived on a farm. They had about 200 acres of land. The first time we went to visit them was in 1960, when I was 10 or 11 years old. We found ourselves in a different world. Though we considered ourselves poor, we lived in a town on the coast, with sewer mains, running water, television, and two cars. We spoke with a brogue that a lot of outsiders still think sounds like old (Elizabethan) English.

The house Aunt Ray and Uncle Al lived in is being restored by one of their grandchildren.

First step: strip off those old asbestos shingles on the exterior walls.

The South Carolina relatives lived in what we thought were rustic (if not primitive) conditions far out in the country, and they spoke with a broad Southern drawl so strong that we at first found it hard to understand them. They had chickens, guinea hens, and dogs running loose in the yard. They milked their cows every morning and churned butter. They ate rice at every meal (an old South Carolina tradition). In the kitchen, they had a pump for cold water and no hot water at all. There was a dipper hanging on the wall over the sink that everybody drank out of. And the plumbing — well, there wasn't any. There was an outhouse (a privy) on a creek a few hundred meters from the house down an overgrown path, and there was a shower house out in a shed in the barnyard.

Aunt Ray (her name was Annie Ray) and Uncle Al (Allen), who were my mother's aunt and uncle — had four children — a girl and three boys. By 1960, all of them were in their late 30s or 40s and had children of their own. Each of the boys was given 50 acres of land by the parents when they reached adulthood, and the daughter, who became a teacher, got some money. Now only one of my mother's first cousins is still living.

At age 88, Aunt Ray, in period costume, participated in a ceremony to mark this rock as a
 local historic7 feature. Women stepped up on it to mount their horses when they left church
on Sunday mornings in centuries past. Cousin Pete is standing behind his mother.

And we found him on Monday. We went driving around in the rural area east of Rock Hill, where we knew we would be able to find Aunt Ray's house. Walt, my mother, and I had actually found it earlier, back in 2006, when we drove through on our way back from Atlanta to to the N.C. coast. The house was abandoned, the yard overgrown, the doors open. My mother and I — trespassing, I guess — walked through the house to see what condition it was in (it was a mess) inside. This time, the yard was all cut back, a new fence had been put up (to keep people like us out), and the house was obviously being worked on.

In 2006, my mother remembered where her oldest cousin, Al Jr., lived, and we went to his house. Nobody was home. This time, we didn't know what to expect. After looking at and taking photos Aunt Ray's old house (Uncle Al died in 1971), we drove on down a narrow country road to see what else we might recognize. Just a few hundred meters from the old farmhouse, my mother and aunt saw a house off to the left. "That's cousin Pete's house," they said. They weren't absolutely sure, so we didn't stop.

Cousin Pete's property outside Rock Hill, S.C.

"There was a man on a riding mower back there," my aunt said. "Let's go talk to him. Maybe he knows everybody in the area." We turned around and went back. We turned into a driveway and the man on the mower just happened to be cutting grass right here. I stopped the car and we rolled down the windows. He turned off the mower. My mother called out, "We are looking for Pete or Allen X, our cousins." The man looked perplexed. " I'm David X," he said.

"We're family," my aunt yelled out. "We've come from North Carolina."

"Well, Pete is my father," the man on the mower said. We asked if he was still living (Pete was born in 1927). "Yes, he is," the man said. "He lives just down the road." David pulled out a cell phone and called his father. "Dad, we have company. It's our cousins from North Carolina. Are you decent? Can we come over?" The answer was yes, so off we drove, following David on his riding mower.

My sister with Pete (our first cousin, once removed) and David (our second cousin) in Pete's living room,

in front of the "family picture wall"

So we met Pete (age 86), as well as David (born in 1949, the same year as me), another of Pete's sons (Dale, born in 1964), and two of Pete's grandsons. We spent an hour or so talking, getting re-acquainted. We hadn't seen Pete since the 1960s, as far as I know, even though we went to visit his mother (Annie Ray, or Aunt Ray, as we knew her) periodically through the 1970s and '80s, until she died in the early '90s at age 93.

We talked those visits of ours so many decades ago. I told David and his father about my memories of fishing in the pond on the old farmstead as a young boy and catching a snapping turtle, which Uncle Al told me to throw on the ground fast before it bit one of my fingers off. My sister related memories of going horseback riding at Pete's (he raised horses and cattle) with other cousins back in the 1960s. We learned that the other two brothers, Al Jr. and Joe (named after my grandfather, whose name was Joseph Allen Miller), are deceased, and the daughter, Virginia, too. Pete is the sole survivor of his generation, along with my mother and aunt, his only first cousins.

At 86, Pete's health is failing, unfortunately. His sons take care of him
so that he can still live in his own house.

Pete didn't say much, but he listened like a hawk as we talked with David and his brother Dale. When Dale (young at 49) arrived — attracted, I believe, by the sight of a strange car in his father's driveway — he went around the room and introduced himself to my aunt, me, my mother, and my sister. When he came to the end of the "receiving line" and greeted his father, Pete shook his son's hand and said, "Hi, I'm Pete." We all had a good laugh. He repeated the "Hi I'm Pete" joke with his two grandsons when they arrived, also attracted by curiosity about the strange car in the driveway, I'm sure.

I'm so glad my mother and aunt insisted we stop and talk to the man who turned out to be my second cousin David. The visit brought back a lot of good memories for all of us. I never knew my mother's parents, who both died young. At least I've been able to meet and get acquainted with the South Carolina side of the family one more time.

(South) Carolina barbecue

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family in the Carolinas. I'll be back in France soon.

On Monday, while we were in Rock Hill, S.C., we were riding around looking for a place to have lunch. My mother has a lot of food allergies, so we have to choose restaurants carefully. My aunt doesn't like much — she's a very picky eater.

This is the smoker, sitting out near the street next to the restaurant.

We were driving along a long boulevard near Winthrop College and downtown when I spotted The Kickin' Pig, a barbecue joint. We hadn't found anything else. I said we should stop so I could inspect the menu and see if there was anything on it that everybody could and would eat.

It's like it should be in the plural — "Carolina Bar-B-Qs."

It turned out that at The Kickin' Pig, the meat is served "naked." That means it comes with no sauce on it. It is just smoked pork, plain. (My aunt kept saying "it isn't really barbecue if it isn't basted with vinegar as it cooks.") The sauces are on the table, so you can choose the one you like or try them all. There was a mustard-vinegar sauce, a hot and spicy vinegar sauce, a mild vinegar sauce, a spicy tomato-based sauce, and a mild tomato-based sauce.

The Kickin' Pig in Rock Hill, South Carolina

My mother and aunt could eat some "naked"  smoked pork, so we were in business. Actually, the meat was fairly bland, as you can imagine. It needed salt and sauce. The portion I was served for $10 was so copious that I took half of it "home" — we had a refrigerator and a microwave oven in our hotel room — and had it for dinner that night.

The snazzy interior at The Kickin' Pig, avec bar et billards

The owner of the restaurant came by and talked to us at our table for a few minutes. He explained that since his barbecue joint is located at the confluence of three major Carolina barbecue zones, he decided to give customers a choice of sauces rather than impose a single one.

Pulled pork, cole slaw, and frites

Eastern North Carolina prefers a vinegar sauce laced with crushed red chilli pepper. Western North Carolina likes a tomato-based sauce with just a little vinegar. South Carolina, around Charleston and Columbia, goes for a sweet mustard sauce spiced up with some hot pepper.

My sister snapped this shot of me leaving the restaurant with my carry-out box.

Two thumbs up. And several sticky fingers.

"Why are you so interested in barbecue?"

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

That's what my cousin said to me today. I never thought of it that way. It must be because it's something typical of North Carolina that brings back so many good memories. Plus the fact that it's just good eats.

One of my favorite barbecue joints is Wilber's in Goldsboro, N.C.
That's my sister, Joanna, getting into the car.

When I say barbecue, I mean pulled pork with a vinegar and hot pepper sauce. No ketchup. No mustard. No tomato puree. No sugar. No Worcestershire sauce. Just vinegar, dried and crushed hot red chilli peppers, and some salt and pepper.

I liked this neon sign at King's barbecue restaurant in Kinston, N.C.

My aunt says that one of the best local barbecue cooks here in Morehead City used to put some sage in hers, for flavor. I have to try that, since we have two or three big sage bushes out in the garden in Saint-Aignan.

One of my vivid memories of my late father dates back to 1967, the first time he drove me up to Durham, N.C., to leave me at the university there. We stopped at Wilber's (see photo above) and ate barbecue together. You'll notice that "barbecue" is the Eastern North Carolina term for what "people from off" insist on calling "pulled pork."

Okay, yes, it is pork. But you know how lean pork is (or can be) these days. In Eastern North Carolina, whole hogs are slow-roasted over smoldering hickory or oak logs for many hours in smoke houses or portable smoker grills, and basted with the vinegar sauce.

If you want vegetables with your barbecue, you can order off the board on the left.

When the pork is well cooked and smoked, the meat is pulled off the carcass and bones. The bigger pieces are chopped quickly with a big knife or cleaver. Some more vinegar sauce is added. Then it's made into sandwiches with cole slaw, or packed into containers to be sold by the pound to people who want to take it home and eat it there. Or ordered by people far and wide and shipped to distant locations by air freight.

The long and winding road

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family in the Carolinas. I'll be back in France soon.

We left Rock Hill, South Carolina, at about 10:30 a.m. Our first stop was in Fort Mill, S.C., just a few miles to the north, to see if we could find my mother's first cousin Virginia's house. Virginia died fairly recently at the age of 93. Her nephew David, 64, told us she had Alzheimer's "real bad." Her white clapboard house with the nice front porch no longer exists; a little brick commercial building sits on the lot now.

After driving through the middle of Charlotte (pop. 750,000), just to admire the skyscrapers, we headed east on NC Highway 24. The road was straight, and the landscape was gently rolling. We still had 275 miles to go (that's about 450 km). My sister Joanna was taking pictures with the camera of her tablet computer as we drove along. She took the first three photos in this post.

As you can see, there wasn't much traffic on a Tuesday afternoon. I think we were between Troy and Carthage (both in North Carolina) when Joanna took these. Here in central N.C., the Uwharries are an ancient mountain range, highly eroded, and covered by a small (national) forest — therefore undeveloped. And pretty.

Later, out on the flat coastal plain farther east, we were passed by a truck hauling Maola milk products. When I was growing up, Maola was the dairy whose milkman delivered milk to our front door. Those days are long gone, but Maola milk is still sold in the supermarkets. Here, the Maola cow is "on the mooooove."

It might have been fun to be driving this old GMC pickup truck that we saw in Kinston, but we were four senior citizens in a sporty white 2013 Chevrolet Malibu. I didn't particularly like the car. It was a huge vehicle with a small interior and poor visibility out the rear window. But it got us to our destination and back just fine.

Three churches in Albemarle

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

Albemarle [AL-buh-marl] is a large town, pop. 15,000, in central North Carolina, a little east of Charlotte. It was incorporated in 1857, the same year as my home town, Morehead City. Charlotte is much older. I'd never been to Albemarle before today.

The North Carolina state flag

We were driving back home on what is called the Charlotte-Morehead City highway, NC 24. The road runs for 450 km (nearly 300 miles) east to west through the center of the state, making it the longest NC state highway. I had never driven across the state on that route before.

As in many Southern places, churches are the town's most distinctive feature. Since I posted three pictures of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris yesterday, today I thought I'd post three photos of typical southern U.S. protestant churches.

 

A Methodist church in Albemarle...

The drive home through central N.C. took about seven hours. We drove through the center of Charlotte, and then continued on to Troy, Carthage, Lillington, Dunn, Mount Olive, and Goldsboro on NC 24. Part of the drive, toward the west, took us through rolling hill country and an extensive national forest.

 

...and a Lutheran church

 The grand First Baptist Church of Albemarle

As we arrived at Goldsboro, on the eastern coastal plain, the land flattened out and forest gave way to wide fields. It's 100 miles across that plain from Goldsboro to Morehead City. The road passes near New Bern, which was the British capital of the colony before the War of Independence.

Three more photos of Notre-Dame...

...and one of Sainte Geneviève protecting Paris from eastern invaders. This sculpture is on the pont de la Tournelle, linking the Ile St-Louis to the 5e arrondissement. It was created by Polish-French sculptor Paul Landowski. The Art Déco work shows a tall Sainte-Geneviève with a child who represents the city of Paris.

I've tried blogging from my tablet computer, and I can do all-text posts, but I can't seem to upload photos. I'm traveling right now and don't have access to a full-fledged computer for blogging.

Here then a a few more snapshots of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. I took them on Easter Monday when I walked from the Gare d' Austerlitz to the Saint-Michel RER station on my way to Roissy airport.

I'll be back "live" tomorrow.

The American landscape

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

Parking lots. Miles of them. Of course France has a lot of big parking lots too — more and more of them. I was struck by the expanse of asphalt, surrounded by low commercial buildings, that you see in this photo that I took here in Morehead City.

My home town is a tourist town. A seaside resort. It has also become a big retirement center, welcoming Northerners who come here to live out their lives in the area's mild climate. The parking lots are probably full of cars in summertime. Even in April, the volume of traffic on the wide local highways is amazing compared to what we see in Saint-Aignan.

Speaking of cars and traffic, in a few hours (I'm writing on Sunday morning) we will be leaving Morehead City to drive over to the Charlotte area, to spend time in the town where my grandfather's family lived. It's actually in South Carolina, but just over the border, and it's a six-hour drive from here. The first time I ever went there was in 1960 — more than 50 years ago now.

Back then, my grandfather's sister, my great-aunt Ray (full name: Annie Ray), lived on a farm with her husband. They had raised four children. Going there was like going back to the 19th century, in a lot of ways. Ray and Al milked cows and churned their own butter, for example, every day. The didn't have indoor plumbing, but an outhouse on a creek down a path several hundred yards from the house. There was a pump in the kitchen for running water. Aunt Ray passed on at the age of 95 nearly 20 years ago now.

Crabby and blue

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

My home town, Morehead City, is located on the central North Carolina coast about half way from the Virginia and South Carolina borders, 500 miles south of New York. One of the traditional trades here has always been crabbing. People fished crabs out of the oceans, sounds, and estuaries. There were crab houses where the caught crabs were steamed in big vats (the meat is sold already cooked). And there were teams of workers, usually women from the area, who picked the cooked crab meat out of the shells and packed it into plastic tubs for shipment by refrigerated truck north to urban centers like New York and Philadelphia for sale.

A gigantic inflatable blue crab in front of the local visitors' center, advertising the N.C. aquarium

Most of that industry has now died out. There is still crabbing on a commercial scale, I'm sure, but I don't know who picks and packs the meat. Maybe the work is mechanized now. The little crab houses are all gone. For a while, back in the 1980s and '90s, migrant workers from Mexico and Central America were brought in to do the job because the local people no longer wanted to do it, or wanted to be better paid. The local crab, called the blue crab, is now more of a tourist attraction, I guess.

High-flying

I'm on vacation in the U.S., visiting family on North Carolina coast. I'll be back in France soon.

US Airways flights, which are the ones I take most of the time when I come to the U.S., depart out of the old Aérogare 1 at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, as we used to call the "new" airport north of Paris. I actually remember when the airport opened back in 1973. It was considered to be very futuristic at the time, with those conveyor-belt sidewalks in glass tubes to take passengers from one level to another inside the big round building.

Now the term Aérogare has been replaced by Terminal (anglicization) and number 1 exists in the shadow of the much larger Terminal 2 at Roissy, which Americans call CDG. I still call it Roissy, but I'm not sure how many people even understand what I mean. Older French people do, anyway. Air France's flights leave from Terminal 2, but US Airways and other foreign carriers fly out of Terminal 1. Since I've lived in France,
 I've become re-acquainted with the old building, often re-modeled, after years of flying Air France from San Francisco to Roissy Terminal 2.

Have I said often enough how much I enjoyed my CDG-CLT (Charlotte) flight on Tuesday afternoon? The plane appeared to be a brand new Airbus, with comfortable seats, enough legroom in coach, decent food, and a big seat-back video screen featuring a wide selection of movies and TV shows. All American — no French movies — but it is US Airways, after all.

Lifting off over the northern French landscape of compact villages set in farmland divided into neat, separate fields of varying shapes, we soon reached the coast and began to cross the Channel. I was seated by a window right over the wing, so I had only a partial view of the ground below us. Despite that,I noticed this wide sandy estuary and thought to myself: "That must be the Baie de Somme."  I've never been there and know it mostly from TV documentaries. I looked at the satellite view in Google maps and I'm pretty sure I've identified it correctly.

As we flew out over the Atlantic, we were also above a thick cloud cover, so there was nothing much to see besides the movies on my screen. At one point, I pulled up my window screen and saw another passenger jet flying along beside us. The two jets flew in tandem for quite a long time, and finally I took out my camera and snapped a few pictures like the one above.

At lunchtime in eastern North America, we were flying over the province of Québec, and as we were directly over Montréal I thought about what a good time Walt and I had there last May, including a nice lunch with The Beaver and her husband. Then we flew on down the Appalachian chain of mountains toward Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. I could see some snow on the mountaintops (photos above). We arrived early in Charlotte, and I breezed through passport control, customs, and security. I was moving pretty fast for a 75-year-old (!) codger.

Temperatures here on the Carolina coast are supposed to get up to 27 or even close to 30ºC (84ºF) by the end of next week, with bright sunny conditions (eat your heart out, you who live in the Loire Valley and northern France). Maybe I'll finally get out and take some pictures here in North Carolina.