Greetings from North Carolina - speaktherights.com

Hello group.

It has been a good while since I put on a post. That 50 posts in 50 days was fun…but…it was not a picnic. I am delighted that I did it. If I am smart I will terminate this site around the 11th month after turning age 59.

My dear wife, Carrie, and I are in North Carolina for the week. I can say this…it has been chilly for sure. The last two days we have taken advantage of the cooler weather to go out and do some looking to the North of home base and looking to the South of home base. It has been good fun. Tomorrow the temperature is to climb high enough to spend the day comfortably on the porch to read. The next day we will probably be sweating. If a sun burn is to be had, it will be then.

Our old Buddy Carl is with us. Here we are climbing a bridge to Cedar Isle where you can put your car on a ferry boat and ride to Ocracoke. Carrie and I did that many years ago.

This is the bridge we were about to climb. At the top we stopped and it was so windy I thought my car door was going to come off it’s hinge. There was no one else around so we stopped and took a few pictures.

As I said, the wind was unreal.

On the way back from this excursion, a 103 mile trip to as far as we could go without continuing by boat, they call it the southern Outer Banks, we stopped by our favorite fish market and did quite well.

The folks at Thomas Seafood never disappoint. This is a new sign.

We always get flounder and shrimp.

The fifth tub down has the flounder in the bag. They pull out a fillet and you say “we’ll take two.” They are huge. We get the large shrimp. Jumbo shrimp is just too oxymoronish for me. Large shrimp is bad enough.

The fillets are snipped into smaller pieces. Yes, that was two fillets. And there is a modest amount of shrimp. Carrie does not eat them. But man can she prepare them!

Oh my yes! With apologizes to Alton Brown, there are good eats!

Just the two of us are here for this stay. We are in an old missile tower. Tower 5. We are in the first two floors of the white structure. It was used in the 1940s as one of the towers used to observe missile testing off the shores. You could look it up. Project Bumblebee is what it was called. The first guided missile testing in American History was here. This place changed the history of aviation and warfare. Solid fuel boosters began here and eventually found their way to the Space Shuttles.

There is one room on the lower floor that acts as living room and kitchen. Upstairs is the bedroom and nice balcony to look out at the ocean and read a book or write a song.

Today we went to Wilmington.

This is the courthouse that was used for the exterior shot of the courthouse for the TV show Matlock. I can hear Andy Griffith’s character now as he raises his arms…”And all the time, you knew better. You knew that….”