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.