In which Sid and Doris enjoy another quiet Intra Coastal town, hear the roar of the Navy’s Hornets and rumble on to Chesapeake Bay and Maryland.
The USP is a gourmet breakfast. Hotels promise all sorts, but this is cooking. The cheese soufflé is up there with Brasserie Blanc’s and much bigger. Sadly, faced with the choice between eating the soufflé while it was hot and puffy, and pausing to take a picture… there is no picture of the soufflé. You will need to stay there.
In the morning we dawdle around town so as not to get to the North Carolina history museum before it opens at ten. On the way is the drugstore where, in 1898, what had been called Brad’s drink was renamed Pepsi-Cola. It is now a very famous fizzy drink. Was Pepsi something to do with a drugstore medicine for dyspepsia?
And there is a fire station museum. There is a very small market for out of date fire engines and they don’t do many miles so do not wear out. There are four old engines in the firehouse and to Sid’s delight there is a La France, as last seen at Sinsheim. It all joins up.
New Bern’s North Carolina History Centre is set out for school history lessons. We watch the eight minute orientation video. Museums are always about the present interpretation of the past. This feels many years behind Montgomery in considering how the economy and society developed from before the Civil War to the 1960s and now. The message to NC’s school children appears to be: “Native Americans lived here. Then brave colonists came and built towns, giving the prosperous society that you see today.” (accompanied by uncaptioned historical pictures of white people watching black people do a lot of the work.) We left feeling rather dispirited, and there are no pictures of that, either.
Next stop is at Virginia Beach, not far from Norfolk which is home of the US Navy carrier force. The beach is very long and there is a huge run of hotels facing the sea, some are picturesque and others had rooms available for this evening. Doris has picked a little flat with beach views where you can see/hear the Navy pilots at work. Not far inland is a carrier shaped runway where to practise picking up the wire.
Sid is cross with himself for failing to dip Mr Jolly’s oil early in the trip. Mr Jolly is now sometimes not so jolly and his left bank of cylinders is running hotter than the right. Doris tells him off for continuing to beat himself up. Once would be enough.
The following morning we are soon onto the Chesapeake Bay bridge and tunnel with The Silk mascotting to the best of his ability. No pictures of this because we are Old Hands at the CBB now having used it on the final stages of the Vamos! trip.
We stop for crab lunch on Chesapeake Bay at Onancock (no reference to Genesis 38:8-10), eating on the boardwalk at what was once the village store. The waterside has been rebuilt with donations from prominent citizens giving $300 for a long plank, $750 for a piling and $2,500 for a finger pontoon – and there aren’t many bits of waterside left un-donated.
The UK doesn’t do much of this. In Bishop’s Stortford a major building company gave a local school £500 and got a picture story in the Stortford Independent. We will come back to the subject of American philanthropy when we visit St Michael’s (a town in Maryland, not Marks and Spencer).
Mr Jolly makes the last few miles without drama and we are glad to park him while we have the fun of Joe and Alzbetka’s company in Oxford.