Georgia East & the Carolinas

Georgia East & the Carolinas: no, silly, not the latest country-rock signing to Charm Offensive Records, but where we’ve spent the last couple of weeks. Pull up a deckchair and let me tell you about it:

Just doin' some toobin'

• After Florida we headed to the Atlantic coast. We stayed at a great state park called Crooked River, and our original plan was to catch the ferry to Cumberland Island, home of lovely beaches, wild horses, and the ruins of Dungeness, a holiday estate of the Carnegie family, who are seemingly rich enough to forget about a rather large beach castle and let it crumble. But it was fricking hot, and there’s next to no shade or air-con on the island, so we bailed out and went to the local water park instead. Both Mo and Kitty were big fans of floating down the ‘lazy river’ on inner tubes.

A prior engagement

• We headed north to Savannah, which we’d visited on the 2011 Southern roadie. It’s one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever been to, with every third or fourth block a green square lined with Spanish-moss-draped oaks. It was in Monterey Square that Bo and I got engaged, and it was fun to revisit the square 8 years later with the kids.

• The people of Savannah have good manners and dress smartly, and the town is home to SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design, whose many campus buildings are peppered about: it feels like a very proper, very smart Southern town. It’s also very well set up for tourists, with free buses and ferries to get around, which public-transport-aficionado Mo was a big fan of.

Yaaaarrrrr table is ready

• Savannah is still a working port, and has some fun maritime history, including the 1750s-era Pirates’ House, one of the oldest buildings in the state and formerly a meeting place for sailors and pirates, and now a tastefully-cheesy themed restaurant with a Southern buffet of fried chicken, collard greens, and shrimp. Mo was particularly impressed with the cutout pirate hat, earring and moustache on the kids’ menu.

I may look cute, but if you come any closer to my baby, I will rip you to shreds

• We headed up into South Carolina, where we stayed near Congaree National Park. Congaree is a swampy forest notorious for mosquitoes: they have a version of the fire danger sign for how punishing the mozzies are at that time. Fortunately, we were there on a not-so-bad day, but it was still oppressively muggy and sticky. Congaree is good for wildlife spotting: we saw a raccoon mother and baby, a sleepy snake, turtles, loads of lizards, and some monster dragonflies.

• Next stop was North Carolina, and a few days in ‘the (Research) Triangle’: the towns of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, best known for the universities of Duke, UNC, and NCSU, a load of tech companies, and an obsession with college basketball. We stayed at a state park roughly in the middle of the triangle, and had a little look around each of the three towns. We were joined by our buddies Glenn & Sarah, who’d come to Washington DC to visit family, and then driven down to meet up with us for a week.

He likes to move it, move it

• The Duke Lemur Centre in Durham has the world’s biggest population of lemurs outside of their native Madagascar, with 250 lemurs from 17 different species in a research and breeding facility in Duke forest. There’s a fun kids’ tour, which included good instruction as to how to leap like a sifaka lemur, which Mo took on board diligently.

Does the smoke from a cigarette factory chimney smell like cigarette smoke?

• The Duke family made their money in the tobacco industry, with the American Tobacco Company, now owned by British American Tobacco. Their downtown site of their old factories is now called the Tobacco District, and is home to bars, restaurants, and the stadium of the minor league Durham Bulls baseball team (of Kevin Costner fame). The centrepiece of the district is a giant Lucky Strike smokestack, and it’s all a little weird in the health-conscious modern age, but that didn’t stop me thinking it made a good photo.

• We only had time for a brief pop-in to the other towns, mainly concerned with eating and drinking: in Raleigh we stopped in at Beasley’s Chicken & Honey, which specialises in bloody brilliant chicken and waffles, and we enjoyed a pint in studenty Chapel Hill, whose main street consists largely of bars, Greek-lettered frat houses, and historic indie rock venues.

One child runs into the waves, the other runs from the waves

• Next stop was a proper little mini beach holiday for the week around 4th of July on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The Outer Banks (or OBX if you’re an acronym-loving local) are a hundred miles or so of barrier islands separating the North Carolina mainland from the Atlantic; the southern half is designated as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and has some top-notch pirate history starring the likes of Blackbeard and Anne Bonney. The beaches are lovely, and dotted with classic stripy lighthouses, and the overall vibe is half seaside hippy, half tourist cheese, with a vast array of piratey tat for sale, and Dadjoke-punny business names abounding (sample: “I got crabs at Dick’s Crab Shack”).

America took the day off in Long Cat's honour

• We stayed at the Cape Hatteras KoA, a big resort style campsite that was packed with families and retirees. We got a great spot a stone’s throw from the beach, and enjoyed a great few days hanging out with Glenn and Sarah. As well as being America’s birthday, Mo had decreed several weeks ago that the 4th was also the birthday of Long Cat, her third favourite toy and occasional alter ego, and the festivities had been discussed and planned at great length. We had a cake, and G&S brought a Paw Patrol piñata and made fairy bread to ensure that the soft toy cat had a good time.

• This part of the country has a fairly tropical climate, and the hot and muggy summers are punctuated with monster thunderstorms. We had a couple of doozies while we were there, and one of them closed the Cape Hatteras lighthouse during our visit due to lightning risk, and properly soaked G&S’s tent. The wet may have also put a bit of a dampener on the other campers’ festivities: they were rather boringly well-behaved on the 4th; I was expecting a lot more doing-a-kegstand-while-singing-Kenny-Chesney.

The annual KoA Long Cat's Day parade

• The campground has a fun holiday programme, with a different parade every day: Mo pushed Long Cat in her pram on the 4th Pirate Parade, and Kitty enjoyed waving at everybody, which she now does to anyone who walks or drives past in any situation.

• The seafood round here is very good: we had a cracking lunch of oyster po’boys and fried shrimp at a local cafe. North Carolina is also famous for Bar-B-Q, although the state is divided by a sauce civil war, with the western half preferring a tomato-based condiment, and the eastern portion going for a vinegar-based option. We were in vinegar country: Glenn is not a fan, but I dig the tangy and sweet version.

So, how do you fly this thing?

• At the northern end of the Outer Banks is the town of Kitty Hawk, where Orville and Wilbur Wright invented, built and flew the world’s first airplane. They started experimenting in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio, but were lured to the Outer Banks by its combination of wind, sand, and quiet (the historical record regrettably fails to capture their thoughts on its delicious vinegar-based BBQ sauce). The National Park Service preserves the spot where on December 17th, 1903, they made four successful flights, the distances of which are shown by markers. The first three aren’t much to look at, but the fourth was a doozy, and thus we can all enjoy convenient intercontinental travel today. As with all NPS properties there’s a good museum, including a model of the Wright Flyer III (we hope to see the original in the National Air and Space Museum in DC in a week or so), and a monument to the brothers on nearby Kill Devil Hill (cracking name, as referenced in R.E.M deep cut “So Fast, So Numb”).

Dude, your marshmallow's on fire!

• Glenn & Sarah are ace at making campfires for s’mores. Mo was very impressed, and ate her bodyweight in marshmallow. She has also been converted to batting left-handed at baseball/ cricket/ piñata-whacking by Glenn, who is suspiciously also a batting southpaw, but it seems to work, as the poor piñata will attest. We all had an awesome time hanging out with our good buddies, and after a great week we were all rather sad to see them go, especially Mo, who asked if we could cut our holiday short so we get back to Vancouver sooner to see them again.

Hey, where'd everybody go?

• Kitty is walking now, and has also gleefully acquired the skill of climbing up onto the seats on the dinette in the caravan, and can also reach up onto the kitchen bench. This is a bit of an issue – the dinette table used to be a safe zone for putting anything you didn’t want a small child to grab, like laptops or beers, but now all bets are off. And after seeing your 15-month-old grabbing a large kitchen knife of the bench, you now have to be a bit more careful with the utensils.

• There are lots of squirrels everywhere, and for some reason a few weeks back I told Mo that one of them was called Frank, and I impersonated Frank and gave him a comedy cockney accent. Now every time we see a squirrel, Mo says it’s Frank and I have to do the voice. Frank now has an intricate backstory, including a son, Frank Jr, at squirrel medical school. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.

• Next stop: Virginia, via a drive that took almost twice as long as it was meant to due to punishing post-4th-of-July-weekend traffic and various accidents and roadworks.

BEERWATCH: I’ve been mainly sticking to breweries from the state we’re in at the time, but we bought a load of classics from across the country for the 4th. So a shared bronze medal to some of the best beers from sea to shining sea: Ballast Point Sculpin, Dogfish Head SeaQuench, Stone Arrogant Bastard (which still has arguably the best back label copy ever written), Brooklyn Bel Air Sour, Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, and old faithful Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, plus some always delish Budweiser Clamato Chelada (the beer I have probably drunk the most of on this trip). Silver heads to Athens, GA, home of R.E.M and the B-52s, as well as Creature Comforts Brewing, whose “Athena” berliner weisse is tart and delicious. The gold medalist is Atlanta’s Sweetwater Brewing, whose “420” XPA is on tap everywhere across the southeast and is neither as dank or pale as the name would suggest, just tremendously quaffable.

Good cornhole form

MO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: Santee Lakes KoA, our site near Congaree National Park, is the clear winner in this edition. The pool was decent, but Mo was a big fan of the lakeside playground, and especially the “cornhole” setup (throwing bean bags into a sloping wooden target).

I really want some beer but I can't be arsed getting out of the car. Wait a minute...

ONLY IN AMERICA CORNER pt 1: Every second RV at some of the resorty campsites has a golf cart, or club car as they seemed to be called. You can rent them, but loads of people have their own: their giant RV has a garage door at the back, and the golf cart rolls out. They’re handy if you just can’t be bothered walking all the way to the showers or pool, but seem to be primarily used for cruising around the campsite drinking Bud Light.

ONLY IN AMERICA CORNER pt 2: An Outer Banks curio is the Brew-Thru, a drive-through liquor store with several locations. It’s both totally unnecessary and utterly brilliant.