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!