Road Fotos 4

For the record, I’m back in the boros of NYC, but I think I’ll just catch up with the road trip one day at a time.  I also went back and corrected/enhanced the “road fotos” posts I put up with the difficult iPad.  Also, I added new fotos on the Flickr slideshow.

Out front of the Charleston Museum is a replica of the CSS Hunley, the first combat sub to sink a warship.  Actually, it sank two, one of which

was itself.  Notice the lethal tip of its bowsprit from hell.  Click here for more Hunley pix.  Label below was taken at Fort Moultrie.

With only the housetop above the surface fog, Ann Moran (I think) heads past Carnival Fantasy to meet a car carrier taking automobiles OUT of Charleston.  A series on Carnival Fantasy soon.  In the background is the 5-year-old Arthur J. Ravenel Bridge.

Near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, here is the restored 72-year-old Solomon T, a workboat built near Kitty Hawk on the northern Outer Banks.  Much more on Solomon T soon.

I had the great pleasure of a short Cape Fear River tour with Captain Bert Felton, who pointed out that this stretch of Southport NC waterfront was once the location of the sixth boro’s lightship Frying Pan.  More on this later too, but an attempt was made to create a maritime museum here using the lightship Frying Pan that for decades before had marked Frying Pan Shoals some 25 miles outside the River’s mouth.  Use the search window of this blog for more posts I’ve done about Frying Pan, the sixth boro fixture.    More Cape Fear River soon.  By the way, Verrazano, namesake of the Bridge, once visited here.

On a personal note, this trip included a stop at my personal place of the Grail . . .  Galivants Ferry, howsoever you want to spell it.  This place is sacred–or at least inspirational– to the gallivanter in me.

And finally, on another personal note,  a bird show at the southern terminus on the Appalachian Trail instructed me on my insult-of-choice for 2011.  Can you guess it from this foto?  It has nothing to do with the charming bird handler, but it does related to the avian on her left wrist.  The befuddled expression on my face . . . reflects an unpleasant discovery I’d just made.

The bird is a turkey vulture. It’s “domesticated” as a result of a farmer’s finding a large stray egg and –wondering what bird’s it was–he placed it with the clutch his hen was sitting on.  After hatching, the chick was unusually friendly, having imprinted on the farmer.  Well, it was a vulture, who wasn’t interested in eating mash.  Vultures, of course, clean up road kill and any other carrion.  My discovery and term-of-insult?  Vulture breath!  It has to be the rankest smell on the planet.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp except the last one, taken by Elizabeth, the ablest navigator and interestingest conversationalist on the planet.  She’s also talent at the stern of Hunley, above, and in spite of the illusion, she is NOT standing on the sub’s portside stabilizer.