View from the Mountain

Living The Dream

Raymond's Gut Near Our Home

We all have dreams and sometimes if you are lucky enough you get to live one.  In the summer of 2003, my wife and I celebrated our 30th anniversary by taking a trip to Beaufort, North Carolina. 

It was great to get away with Glenda and visit such a special place. That trip planted a seed that eventually blossomed into the hope that we might one day be able to live on the coast.

We were not sure where we wanted to live and had never really looked at coastal towns as anything other than vacation destinations.  We started taking short trips and trying to imagine ourselves living in some of our favorite beach areas.  We went as far north as Chincoteague, Virginia, and as far south as Southport, North Carolina.

We also visited places in beween like Virginia Beach, Nags Head, Hatteras and Ocracoke Island. We even tried a mountain destination, West Jefferson, North Carolina, just to make sure we were hooked on the coast. We kept coming back to North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  I have a long history with the area and it just felt like home.

Finding a spot on the water proved a challenge back in the days of the real estate bubble when the whole world seemed to trying to move to the coast.  We finally admitted to ourselves that we could not afford waterfront property in the Beaufort area and ended up living just off the White Oak River not far from both Emerald Isle and Swansboro.

While I would love to see a stronger economy in the area, living in Carteret County has been even better than I imagined.  In a certain respect it seems like our life was a journey that was destined to bring us here. I grew up in North Carolina, went away to McCallie, a military high school in Tennessee, and then kept going north with a stop in Cambridge for college.  Canada beckoned after college and we eventually spent ten years on the farm before getting sucked into the whirlwind of Apple.

The changes that I have found in Carteret County after growing up in North Carolina and making such a long journey to get back to where I fished in the summer of 1969 inspired me to write a short book, The Road To My Country. Before settling in Carteret County we looked at places which were not nearly as friendly.

We have found a great church, Cape Carteret Presbyterian, and a nice neighborhood in which to live.  We are close to modern services which are spread from Morehead City to Cape Carteret and Swansboro.  We have made some good friends and there are enough good restaurants to keep us happy.

More importantly I have been able to fulfill my dream of being able to slip my kayak in the water and go fishing just about any time that I want.  I still work in technology but fishing is something I try to make time to do.  My kayak and skiff are just a few steps behind the house.  With the water almost at our doorstep, I no longer have to put my kayak on top of the car to go kayaking. It is a wonderful treat to just go fishing without a lot of planning.

Fishing the Southern Outer Banks requires some dedication but the rewards are great when you do land a nice sized fish the red drum we often catch in the White Oak. When I get tired of fishing there is always boating or walking the beaches of the area. One of my favorites spots is the Point at Emerald Isle. It is the same spot I fished in the summer of 1969 with my uncle, Austin Brown.

There are a whole series of special places that I love in Eastern North Carolina.  Areas like Hammocks Beach State Park are treasures that remind us of what the coast was like before it was developed.  Where we live is such a special spot that I felt compelled to share the secrets that I have learned in a travel guide for the area, A Week At The Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide. It is available both in paperback and Kindle format. Details about the book and life on here in Carteret County are available on my Crystal Coast Life homepage.

I cannot think of a nicer place to live than where we currently have our home. We are surrounded by the Croatan National Forest and the waters of the White Oak River. Bogue Banks protects us from storms and Cape Lookout National Seashore is an easy forty-five minute drive. 

With Nags Head under three and one half hours away, the Intracoastal Waterway just ten minutes from my dock, and the Atlantic Ocean just another ten beyond that, I think that my priorities are in order.  The nearest Target or SAMs Club are thirty-five minutes away.  That is actually a little too close for my taste.

On Wednesday of this week we fished in rough water out beyond the Point in our skiff, but I also managed a couple of wonderful kayak trips including one on Friday, August 30, when I missed a nice drum on the oysters rocks.  I will probably head back out and look for him again today. It only takes me fifteen minutes to paddle there.

It has just been a little over a year since we finally sold our other home and were able to bid adieu to Roanoke, Virginia, where we lived for over twenty years after coming back from Canada. That makes it even easier to think of the Crystal Coast as home. How hard is it to love a place where summer hangs on well into the fall?

As far as I am concerned a life by Raymond's Gut is living my dream.  Seven years after moving here I think I am part of the dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories, The Steps To The Past

Near The Emerald Isle Town Line

The human mind is an amazing computer. 

It does not matter what kind of processor you have in your laptop or desktop, your mind can still do things that we have not learned how to program into computers.  I doubt computers will ever be able to make the same connections that the human mind does.

If you happen on a scene like the one in this post in person, your mind will store some associations to the image and sometimes the images will retrieve other memories that might be tied to those associations. 

I recently published a new book, The Road To My Country.  The book is all about my memories.  I did not put any images in the book.  One of the reasons is that I wanted readers to create their own mental images when reading the book.  If there were images in the book, you might well associate a passage with one of my images instead of one that you pulled from your own past.

So far I have gotten some good feedback that the book encourages people to think about their memories.  I think it is healthy to relive positive memories that are part of the quilt of our lives.

In some ways, memories are like small towns along a highway. You're in the dark until all of sudden, you round a corner onto Main Street, where the memories are waiting for you like the inviting lights in a late-night diner.

Just because we enjoy our memories does not mean we are living in the past.  I often find that a recalled memory in the right situation creates new memories and associations that make things we do today even more special because they are grounded in the past.

The sea oats in the picture that I took on July 17, 2013, are a good example.  While sea oats always make me think about being at the beach, that is not the most positive association for me.  They also bring back the memory of the days when I first spent some time with my wife, Glenda.  She had a vase with sea oats in her apartment.

Food is often associated with pleasant memories.  Ripe red tomatoes and cold fried chicken bring back memories of my mother.  She was famous for her tomatoes.  The summer that I went to school at the Grayln Estate in Winston-Salem, I ate a lot of her cold fried chicken.

Weather can also bring back memories.  Since we spent many years in Canada before we came to the Crystal Coast, it is no surprise that snow is attached to so many memories.  One of my best snow memories is tied to the birth of our younger daughter.  We had one of the most impressive blizzards of our whole sixteen years in Canada the day our daughter was born.  Just before the blizzard came, the temperature reached minus forty.  I guess I was so worried about getting Glenda to the hospital during a blizzard that the drive home through the last part of it was still a positive experience because mother and daughter were fine.  Of course my own mother had fried chicken waiting for me when I got home so there were a lot of good things about that storm.

Even being cold and wet brings back good memories for me.  Other than during my ten plus years as a farmer, I was never colder and wetter than on a fall fishing trip in Beaufort.  I would have repressed the memory if the half day of fishing had not been one of the best in my life as you can see from this picture of the catch.  The picture does not have the dozens of puppy drum that I caught and released that same morning.

If you want to take a journey down my memory lane in the hope it will spark your own imagination, give our book, The Road To My Country, a try.  You might be surprised at what memories of your own that it brings back.  Some readers have asked if there are pictures of some of things mentioned in the book.  Our other recent book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes, has many images that are described in The Road To My Country.  As I told a friend my lime green Bronco is even there.  

Each of the books are just $2.99 which considering a Sunday Raleigh News & Observer costs $2.14 including tax is pretty reasonable.  You will likely remember our book a lot longer than anything you read in the Sunday paper.

 

 

 

 

Tryon Palace, well worth the drive

There are places that you can visit where you feel like you are a tourist, and there are other places where you feel like you have taken a trip back in time.

Tryon Palace is one of those places where you do not feel like tourist.  You feel more like someone peaking through a window into the past.

We visited Tryon Palace on Saturday April 19.  The tulips were gone, but the rest of the flowers were magnificent.  Other than a couple of groups of kids to dodge, there were no crowds.

If you want a taste of history but don't need the whole tourist thing, Tryon Palace is a great place to go.  I have never seen such well done vegetable plots and beautiful flower gardens.

I put up a website with Tryon Palace, Flower, and Garden pictures.  There are three different sets of slides. To access the other pages from the main page, you have to mouse over the links which are to the right of the first link.

Tryon Palace is located in New Bern, NC which has become a major retirement area for those who want to enjoy water without being very close to the beaches.

My only comment is that you should visit on a cool day since it can be warm on the grounds.

These are hours from their website.

Regular Hours
Monday through Saturday:
9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday: 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.
The last guided tour of the Palace begins at 4 p.m. daily.

Summer Hours (Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend):
Monday through Saturday:
9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sunday: 1 to 5 p.m.
The last guided tour begins at 4 p.m. daily.
The gardens are open until 7 p.m. (Tickets are sold until 4:30 p.m.)

A perverse interest in weather

Last night we went dashing up to Cannonsgate, a new subdivision on Bogue Sound.  We were chasing sunsets again.

The channel from their marina meets the sound at a great place to catch the evening sun this time of year.

It is always beautiful watching the sun slip into the waters of Bogue Sound.

Usually it is a pleasant experience, standing out there by the water as the sun drops down below the horizon.

Last evening was a little different.  It was cold and windy.  I was looking for a place to warm my hands when I got back to the car.

When I mentioned in an email last night that I was cold at 30 degrees Fahrenheit, someone from Memphis made fun of me because it was already 16 degrees there.

Most people will agree that cold is relative.

When we lived on the farm north of Fredericton, New Brunswick, I often worked outside without any gloves until the temperatures dropped below twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit.  It was something you got used to doing.

Now I enjoy seeing what the temperatures are more than working in them.  I have a long list of weather spots that I check every morning.

Most of them are places where I have lived or traveled. Some are places where I wanted to live, like Deer Lake, Newfoundland, which I found to be a very charming spot in the early seventies, or Charlottetown, PEI, where I once opened a computer store for Datamaster when I was their sales manager.

Other spots, like Mount Airy or Halifax are places where I have lived. Reston, VA, is a former work spot where I stayed so much that I felt like a resident.

In the winter I even like to call some of  my former neighbors in Canada to find out how much snow they have on the ground.

I could just use this really neat snow cover map that I have found, but I also enjoy talking to old friends.

Speaking of old friends, one of my college roommates who moved to Pittsboro, NC from Halifax, Nova Scotia, took off on a trip yesterday to Florida.

We were instant messaging this morning, and he told me it was 19F in Cedar Key, Florida.

If you want some reasonably priced orange juice, now would be a good time to run to the grocery store if it were not so cold.

The best news that I have heard, aside from West Virginia beating Oklahoma, is that the cold weather will be over by Saturday.

When temperatures along the North Carolina's coast get back into the sixties, I might get back into my kayak.

What does it take to be rich these days?

Today the Washington Post ran George Will's article, A Lexus In Every Garage.  This afternoon I was over in Beaufort, NC.

The article talks about how hard it is to show that you are really rich.  We should invite George Will down to Beaufort for the annual migration. 

Beaufort happens to be one of the spots that the toys of the really rich visit.

The location of Beaufort and it's great deep water harbor just off the Intracoastal Waterway means that the personal watercraft of the east coast masters of the universe happen to pass through a couple times a year.

They head north during hurricane season and often start wandering south again as the hurricane season winds down.

I'm not sure I want to know much it costs to fill up one of these vessels.

As I watch one of these vessels dock today, I decided that the last thing that I need is something that requires that much effort to get to a dock.

We live  near Swansboro, which for some reason does not have the same concentration of money that you see in Beaufort.

As you walk down Front Street in Beaufort, one could end up amazed at the home prices.  Still the sand castles over on Emerald Isle blow away the value of real estate in Beaufort.

It is hard to get a feeling for the home values even through something like Trulia.  Just don't plan on buying anything much on the water side of Front Street for less than one million.

My guess is that some of this conspicuous consumption is keeping the wheels turning in Beaufort.  Harvesting a few dollars from the really rich when they pass through is good for the local economy and has been going on for years.

After all we're a little isolated from much of the modern world so we should be pleased by an occasional cash transfusion.