USA: Comparisons and Overview

Speaking the same language makes visiting the US relatively easy. Well, nearly the same language, as the following selection of road signs illustrates. In the first one, standing means parking. All this is easy enough to work out except when you’re driving along and need instant comprehension.

This next one is my favourite. Beware, all you honkers!

We have some camping friends, Bob & Mavis, who are keen cyclists, and often bring a tandem down to Spain where we all meet up. Well, Bob & Mavis, let me tell you- everything is so much bigger here in the States!


Camping-wise, the average outfit is quite a lot bigger than in Europe. Our 25-foot motorhome is small compared to the typical units using the campsites we’ve stayed at in our eight weeks here. The biggest units are the bus conversions, as in the photo below. These are around 40 ft long, often towing a family car or 20 ft SUV. Notice also the slide-outs. Top-of-the-range prices: a staggering $1,750,000! I don’t think Cliff Richard’s ex-London Transport bus in Summer Holiday cost that much.

Type two are the fifth wheelers, very common here, and the biggest as big as the bus conversions. The towing vehicle is always a pickup truck mostly with the same 6 litre engine as powers our camper.

There are also caravans, but again much longer than UK/Euro standards, all twin axle, and towed by a similar truck to the fifth wheelers.

Can’t leave out all those beautifully turned out lorries that zoom past us on the highways (no special speed restrictions for trucks here). This is an example:


We have had a super time here in the Eastern US. It has all been better than anticipated: driving the rv, driving in general, the campsites, the friendliness of the Americans, and the diversity of the places to visit with their many sub-cultures.

And last but not least, we’ve had some lovely visits with Claire and family, so it would be most appropriate to finish with another family photo:

South Carolina

The Audubon Swamp: these are tupelo trees, one of the few that can grow permanently in water. The other is the swamp or bald cypress and both are common in these vast subtropical swamps that run for 1,000 miles, all the way from Virginia to Florida. I’ve used generous amounts of mosquito repellent that according to the label also sees off “chiggers”. A Google search reveals these to be biting mites that live in grass and cause severe itching. The expression, “bitten by the travel bug” is open to many interpretations!

Now we come to the shallow lake where the alligators live, in their natural habitat. We only saw them from a distance, as they are quite shy and much less aggressive than crocodiles. However, it is against the state law to feed them, so we didn’t come armed with a tin of Lassie. They are also a protected species and this is rigorously applied as we were told happened at the campsite where we’re staying. The large campsite lake had an alligator living there that one of the permanent residents baited and killed, following which he was reported and arrested by the police.

We did get a lovely close-up of this Great Blue Heron, who looks as if he’s wading through a pool of treacle.
And now to yet another plantation: Boone Hall. This one’s a bit different, as it’s been used many times as a film location. The house and avenue of trees shown below is how you would imagine a plantation house and entrance drive to be.



Those white candyfloss bits of tree catching the sunlight are Spanish Moss. It is neither Spanish nor moss. It’s a flowering plant that lives on oak and cypress trees and gets all its sustenance from the air, and is named after the early Spanish settlers' wispy beards.
The plantation is also a working farm, currently producing vegetables. From the 1880’s until 1911 it was the world’s largest pecan nut plantation, 14,000 trees. In 1911 a hurricane destroyed almost all the trees after which the plantation moved on to crops.
Boone Hall originates way back from 1681, so naturally it has a slave history, with rice as the main crop in this area. The household slaves were housed in these buildings made from reject bricks turned out by the slave brickworks. This was top housing as the field workers lived in wooden shacks near the fields, which of course haven’t survived. They were still being occupied as dwellings by poor workers up to the 1940’s.

Before coming to Charleston, we expected the town to be capitalising on all aspects of its tourist potential, including the “Charleston”, the 1920’s dance and symbol of the party set of that era. We thought some cafes would be playing the music with maybe a video, perhaps a small museum somewhere in the town. When I phone my Dad and tell him where we are, I can tell it’s a blur of places- until we came to Charleston. “Ah, that’s where that dance comes from”, he said straight away. We couldn’t find any recognition of it in the town, but we did find a poster describing its origins, surprisingly, in Boone Hall.

Would you believe it, the Charleston dance originated from the music of the Jenkins Orphanage band in Charleston. The Jenkins Orphanage was founded in 1891 by the Rev Jenkins for African American orphans. The orphanage had received donations of some musical instruments and the reverend decided to get some musicians in to teach the youngsters to play. The experiment was so successful that the orphanage developed a band culture, and by the 20’s was running as many as 5 bands some of which toured America and Europe. The song “Charleston” was written into a Broadway musical, and the dance steps appeared in another show, which all helped to broaden its popularity.

October 28th: Charleston

Charleston old town is very elegant, the lovely buildings in the historic part having been built on the profitability of the not-so-lovely slave trade and the plantations. One of the slave markets is still standing and has, predictably, been turned into a museum. As well as the usual interesting historical information and artefacts, they had actual recordings made in the 1930’s by old Negroes who had been slaves in their younger days, i.e. pre 1865. These accounts were truly fascinating and brought to life the reality and inhumanity of it all. I shouldn’t from now on complain about anything!

The streets are lined with palm trees, the palmetto palm, which is the main component of the flag of the State of South Carolina. The photo below is of the old market (not a slave one) framed by an avenue of these palms. The palmetto’s alternative name is the cabbage palm, which doesn’t sound anything like so romantic.

Charleston is a thriving container port today, located upriver of the old town. The modern bridge under which the container ships pass seems very much in harmony with the town’s elegant character, although from this distance it looks more like something an old sailor had made out of matchsticks and put in a bottle.

The harbour has other areas of interest. At the mouth is Fort Sumter where the first shots in the Civil War were fired. In early 1861 it was a Union military fort and the southern states had just formally withdrawn from the Union. The fort garrison declined to hand it over to the new Southern Confederacy, so the southerners decided to take it by force, on April 12th 1861, and in which they succeeded. It’s a National Monument, but there’s nothing much left of the original structure as it was battered extensively by the Union forces for a year before being abandoned by the Confederacy near the end of the war. It was never actually retaken.
Still on a military theme, anchored in the harbour is the floating museum USS Yorktown. This aircraft carrier was in active service from 1943 to 1970, serving in the Pacific in WW2, then Korea and finally Vietnam, but also picked up some Apollo astronauts in 1968. It looks kind of sad, as if waiting and wishing for another Japanese kamikaze attack to fend off rather than the daily Japanese tourist camera attack.

Crossing the harbour in the water taxi we saw lots of dolphins, some even leaping out of the water, but no good pictures, or of the many pelicans, except for this one which obligingly sat still on a pole to be photographed.

Aircraft Geek’s Exclusive: 25th Oct

We’re at the Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of the town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On Dec 17th 1903 an event occurred in this place the repercussions of which changed the world. It was man’s first flight, more precisely, Orville Wright’s first flight, lasting 12 seconds and covering just 120 feet. The in-flight movie didn’t even have time to get past the opening credits.
The photo below is the precise moment that the aircraft became airborne, with brother Wilbur running alongside having just let go of the wing.

The photo underneath is of exactly the same spot, and now looks nothing like it. In 1903 the area was windblown sand and dunes, now it has been grassed over and formalised, as you’d expect for a museum. What you can see is the black stripe in both pictures. This was the rail needed to launch the plane because of the soft sand, and this was the reason Wilbur was holding the wing to stop the machine tipping over before it reached flying speed.
The big rock is the launch-off point and the four “tombstones” are the distances reached in other flights on that day. The furthest one is 852 feet, in 59 seconds.

Looking the other way from the big rock in the photo above, we see the Kill Devil Hills, or hill really as there’s only one, but in the 1900’s shifting dunes there were apparently several. The monument atop commemorates the Wright Brothers not only for powered flight but also for their gliding experiments off the hill. In 1911 Orville Wright soared aloft for nearly 10 minutes and this record stood for 10 years. Much more satisfying than soaring aloft for nearly 10 years and being beaten 10 minutes later.

The brothers were bicycle engineers from Dayton, Ohio. They chose Kitty Hawk to develop their aircraft because of the prevailing wind and because the local postmaster, to whom they wrote before deciding, seemed enthusiastic in support of their project. Their working conditions were basic and the weather unpredictable: they lived in the right-hand shed whilst working in the other, for months on end. Boeing Dreamliner here we come!

Life in the Slave Plantations

The State of North Carolina runs a reconstructed slave plantation at Somerset Place, about 25 miles from where we were staying. Entry is free, and guides take conducted tours explaining the plantation under the slavery regime. In 1865 slavery was abolished when the south lost the Civil War, and the slaves were freed. For most, their new liberty brought immediate problems as the southern economy had been practically destroyed by the war so there was little work, and large numbers migrated north.

This is Josiah Collins’ house, embellished over the years by sucessive generations. He started the plantation in 1785 with partners whom he later bought out. The partnership bought 100,000 acres of swampy land and with a workforce of 200 turned it into a prosperous plantation by 1790. 167 out of the 200 were slaves, and of these 54 died in those first 5 years. Work was long and hard, as the table of days and hours worked in later years shows.

They did not work on Sundays and festivals, but on these days they were required to attend church where the sermons reinforced the preordained nature of their miserable lot, but their rewards would be generously reaped in Heaven. There can be few slaves taken in by this misrepresentation of Christian values because runaways were common and even full-scale revolts occasionally occurred.

These houses are reconstructions of the slave quarters. They don’t look too bad as dwellings, until it’s realised that 4 families lived in each house, one family in each of the 4 rooms, maybe 25 or more people altogether. The single room houses held up to 15 souls. Josiah Collins and his descendants weren’t being deliberately repressive, simply providing the minimum comforts and food necessary to achieve the best economic return from their slaves in the same way you would apply principles of good animal husbandry. The Collins’ even had a hospital on site to ensure the better functioning of their “assets”. Of course, some owners treated their slaves particularly harshly because they could get away with it since slaves had no rights in law.
Slavery was a dehumanising experience for those individuals unfortunate enough to either be born into or be kidnapped into it. Pictures from the early days of photography are rare, especially of the underprivileged classes. The photo underneath is of a couple born into slavery on the Collins’ plantation, probably taken on their wedding day and almost certainly after the northern victory, so they were free citizens (just). They pose with great dignity.

North Carolina: Oct 19th to 25th

We’re 250 miles south of Washington DC, and a world away. This is rural America, growing cotton, peanuts and soybeans. The most unusual to us is the cotton crop: you can almost hear dem 'ole pickers singing in the plantations.

It’s being harvested right now (by machine!) and left in bales in the fields before being cleaned and graded by the cotton gins and then going on to the mills. Cotton is the USA’s biggest revenue crop, and is second only to China in the world cotton production league table. Lonnie Donegan used to sing “Jump round, turn around, pick a bale-a-cotton”, etc, and you might wonder how big a bale of cotton is. It’s this big, with Jane for scale.


We are staying at the Rocky Hock Campground. It is surrounded by fields growing the three staple crops mentioned above. Nearly surrounded, that is, except for the one side that is the Chowan river, and the other boundary with the Great Dismal Swamp that stretches all the way back to Virginia, some 30 miles, and contains all sorts of nasties like poisonous snakes but also a few black bears and bobcats. In the sunlight, it doesn’t look at all dismal.

David and Keith, father and son, who own the site, have a canal cut through the swamp from the site to the Chowan river, and they took us on a boat trip to show us around. The bald cypress trees are swamp trees that happily grow out into the river that is only 4 feet deep except for a 20 ft deep channel in the middle.

The Chowan river is two miles wide at this point, more of an estuary than a river, and legend has it that Blackbeard the pirate used it as a hideaway and even buried some of his treasure in the vicinity. All good Tourist Office stuff. Here we are, nearly half way across, in the battered boat with weed fouling the props which accounts for Keith’s worried expression.

Dad David, at the back of the boat, aged mid-80’s, is a country-and-western performer, yes is, and has his own concert hall on the site. This isn’t for the campers, although they can come along, but for his C&W band and the locals. We attended the Friday concert and it was packed. The 10- piece band was excellent, all old timers apart from the drummer (David’s grandson), and they performed a full three-hour programme. So here they are, on stage. The shots of the floor full of dancers, line dancing, were blurred because of the low light so aren’t included.

The area was a great habitat for birds, many of which we hadn’t seen before e.g. mocking bird, northern flicker woodpecker, and this delightful bluebird who looks a bit cross, as if to say, “go away”, or words to that effect.

Back to Virginia: Oct 11th to 18th

A low-key week spent visiting Claire and family. So let’s do a few low-key family photos. Below we’re just out for a walk in a local park with Claire’s four dogs, Jane and Claire with two apiece.

This is Claire’s neighbourhood, plenty of trees and space. Our rv is parked in the drive waydown on the left, but you can’t see the house. There’s a picture with the first blog (now unfortunately unviewable!), which shows it to be a solid brick-built construction as opposed to the wooden majority. Less fire risk, less dry-rot etc, so cheaper insurance you would think, but no, repairs and site clearance cost more, so insurance is in fact higher.

Scott is a mechanical genius and will tackle anything. This below is Scott doing what Scott does best, attacking the huge engine in his huge truck. He’s in the process of taking the cylinder head off.

Encore Niagara Falls

Blog Issues: the photos now appear in this and the previous blog posting, but nothing before that. We’re still trying to sort it.


The power of Niagara inspired the creation of the world’s first large-scale hydroelectric power plant. Another first was the generation of this power as alternating current, developed by Nikolas Tesla, which is now the world standard for commercial and domestic electricity. Tesla’s commemorative statue above is worth reproducing as the basis for today’s quiz. Question: what is he doing? Is he engaged upon the business of the day whilst reading a copy of The Sun? If so, where is the cup of tea at his feet and the loo-roll? All blog comments gratefully received.

This looks like a futuristic block of flats, but it’s the feeder control for the US-side power station. The USA and Canada share Niagara’s water equally, and between them extract half of the river flow into huge tunnels that fill turbine reservoirs four miles downstream. So the mega falls of Niagara is only working at 50% capacity!

Going downstream from the falls a couple of miles there are some killer rapids, the highest grade of difficulty, grade 6, and are out of bounds for white water activities. It was here that Captain Mathew Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel, was drowned in his attempt to swim the length of the Niagara River (36 miles long, connecting lake Erie to Lake Ontario). The rapids then feed into a giant whirlpool, so you’ve got no chance.

There are some beautifully maintained gardens on the Canadian side of the Niagara Gorge. Here is an example, the floral clock. A new planting layout is created each season, which they are so proud of that there is a small exhibition of pictures of all previous years’ schemes. The similarity to a pizza menu is remarkable.

Canadian law allows casinos, New York State’s doesn’t. Niagara is in New York State, so all the gamblers went to Canadian Niagara and the American side lost tourist revenue. That was until someone had a bright idea. Native Americans have been treated so shabbily in the past that, as a sop to the nation’s conscience, they now have some legal recognition of their separate identity, for example, self-government in Tribal Reservations. Right, so let’s put the casino in a Tribal Reservation and then it’s outside of New York State law. Consequently, the casino, shown below, is now successfully run by the Seneca Indians, and everybody’s happy.

To get back to everyday USA, the lovely scene underneath was around the corner from the campsite, where we went for an evening stroll. To us, it was just as beautiful as Niagara in its own way although maybe not as jaw-dropping.

Oct 5th to 10th Niagara Falls

NOTE: The blog photos are not all currently being displayed. It is not your computer at fault but a Blogger system error to which I have not at present found a solution

Niagara is the world’s biggest waterfall by annual volume of water. It is impressive and magnificent. The falls split into two main sections, American Falls, unsurprisingly on the American side, and Horseshoe Falls in Canadian territory. Horseshoe Falls carries nearly 10 times the volume of water of American Falls. Here’s a photo of American Falls with Jane unsportingly refusing to dive into the cascade as I take the snap. Doesn’t look that small, does it?


The way to experience the falls hands-on is from the water, on the Maid-of-the-Mist boat trip. There are about eight Maid-of-the-Mists, numbered accordingly, and each voyager is kitted out with disposable blue bin-bag style weatherproofs. Here comes the boat we’re queuing for, with its cargo of distinctively dressed thrill seekers.

Now we’re on the boat in our designer weather gear. Jane’s got a Lacoste crocodile on hers, although it could be a blemish in the material, but we know it’s the real thing. Careful not to shove your fingers through the plastic when you’re tying it on.

We sail in front of American Falls to start with, and a distance shot gives an idea of the scale of the waterfall by comparison with the boat. The photo was taken later that day from the 500-foot Skylon observation tower on the Canadian side.

Now on to the bigee, the 173-foot drop Horseshoe Falls. The next photo is of the start of this half-mile expanse, after which it’s impossible to use the camera because of the deluge of spray.

Again, I’ll go back to a distance shot from the Skylon Tower to show where the boat goes into this foamy abyss. It’s the object in the lower centre of the picture. All the passengers have a wonderful time getting thoroughly soaked in spite of the excellence of the purpose-designed waterproofs. It was probably as well we didn’t need to use the lifeboats.

In 1960 a Maid-of-the-Mist boat saw a small figure in a life jacket bobbing in the water right below Horseshoe Falls. They pulled in a seven year old boy who had just gone over the falls. The family had been fishing from a boat in the river above the falls, far too close to the rapids, when the engine failed and the rapids capsized the boat. The boy’s sister was pulled from the river right at the edge of the falls, but the boy and a family friend went over. The family friend did not survive: very few people have. The boy became a minister of religion. I suppose if anyone ever had proof…