Virginia - North Carolina: Tuesday, November 3, 2022 | |
$3.11 is the best price that we have paid so far. $3.29 to $3.49 is typical. | |
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Wanda tried to turn on one of the gas stove burners to heat up some water for tea. It would light, but immediately go out. The other burner worked fine, so it wasn’t an empty LP gas tank. Duende, our bad-ass gremblin strikes again.
A quick YouTube search suggested a bad sensor. I took out the drawer underneath the gas stove top and sure enough, the wire connecting to the sensor had broken off. I spliced the wire back onto the connector, replugged the connector to the sensor, and voila, the burner worked perfectly. Thank you YouTube. Thank you Tata (our good gremblin).
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Here, I am accessing the underside of the gas stove. The wire that feeds the flame sensor broke off. If the flame sensor doesn’t sense a flame, it shuts off the gas. I had to reconnect the wire to the connector and then replug the connector to the sensor. EZ-PZ. | Warmed up by the hot tea and the warm glow of being so handy, we tackled two of the trails in the park. The Live Oak Trail caught our fancy. If they are referring to southern oaks, it would be a nice find. They were, and it was. Throw in some moss-laden cypress trees in the foggy mist down by the Pamlico River and we were in heaven. The Live Oak Trail intersected with a bunch of other loops so we extended our hike by 2 or 3 times the original length. | A good chunk of the Live Oak Trail followed the Pamlico River shoreline. The moss-ladened trees were enchanting. | How this tree with its guts rotted out can stay alive is miraculous. | Next up was the Palmetto Boardwalk Trail. We love palmettos and boardwalks, so that was a no-brainer. The boardwalk was cool, but sadly, the palmettos were rather beat up. That didn’t matter, the swamp was gorgeous even without palmettos. | I have no idea what kind of tree this is. It looks like a birch, but with big red splotches. | There was a tiny little nature museum at the park’s visitor center. It wasn’t much, however, they had some nice taxidermy specimens and a decent video. | These two stuffed bear were standing in front of a mural of a forest. At this angle, it almost looks real. |  | |
In the afternoon we drove to Bath, the first town to incorporate in North Carolina. Founded in 1705 as a port town, it hasn’t grown much in the past 317 years. The current population of Bath sits at 245. What it does have, is an interesting history. The most famous resident was Blackbeard, the pirate. There are a zillion info plaques within a 2 block area of town, with half devoted to Blackbeard. (I have included photos of some of them. If you can read them, they contain a lot of the early history of Bath).
Being on the Pamlico River, that feeds into the Pamlico Sound, that has access to the Atlantic Ocean, must have made Bath a good port city in the 1700s. My only thought was, to access the Atlantic before GPS, how did they manage to safely sail the 70 or 80 miles of shallows and shoals?
There were plenty of old buildings still standing in Bath, including the Episcopal Church built 1734 and the Van Der Veer house constructed in 1790. The former high school is being converted into a town museum. It wasn’t completed yet so we didn’t have access to it. Too bad, the town seems to take its history seriously and I bet the museum will be interesting once open.
|  |  |  | A good info plaque to get the overall town history. | The 1790 Van Der Veer house. | The 1734 Episcopal Church and graveyard. | I believe that Thomas Boyd was a preacher at this church. He lived to the ripe old age of 90. Being remembered as an honest man is an epithet anyone would be proud of. | So, I understand that this bust is from the 1500s making it a historical curiosity, but look at that frightened look on his face. He either saw a ghost, or was sentenced to some kind of horrific punishment. And why did a 16th century bust, made long before the British even arrived at Jamestown, end up here? Apparently, it has some connection to the name ‘Bath’. The one info plaque that Bath really needs was not provided. | But when it came to Blackbeard, Bath had plaques galore. | The Palmer-Marsh house, constructed in 1744, is Bath’s oldest surviving house. | The first library set up in North Carolina was in Bath around 1700. | We are now in between Halloween and Thanksgiving. |  |  |  |  |  | |
My plan was to take the Bayview-to-Aurora ferry across the Pamlico River and drive along the southern shore to the town of Washington. We had a mountain of wash to do and Washington had a laundromat that promised to be pretty decent, at least indicated by its website. Unfortunately, by this time we had missed the afternoon ferry. The next scheduled ride would have been too late.
So, we backtracked along the northern shore of the Pamlico River to Washington. The Wash House was a decent laundromat with a rather un-original name. It also had a strange payment method. The machines only operated with the special pre-paid Wash House card. You could purchase a Wash House card with a credit card, but only in increments of $1, $5, $10, or $20. So, if you paid $10 for a Wash House card and only used $8 in the machines, well, Wash House keeps the extra $2. Like a casino, the house always wins.
Tomorrow, we move on down the road, and I am determined to ride that Bayview-to-Aurora ferry.
|  | The Wash House - the name kills me. | Above: This is the machine that sells the Wash House Pre-Paid Cards. Below: This is the scanner on the washers and dryers. They do not accept coins, dollars, or credit cards. They only accept the Wash House Pre-paid Card. | |
Glossary of terms used for newcomers: 1) V-Jer. The name of our camper. 2) Saturn. The name of our Van. 3) Duende. Our mischievous gremlin that breaks things. 4) Tata. The good gremlin that helps us fix Duende’s dirty work. 5) The Black Hole. This is what we call Walmart because every time we go in for just a couple of items, we come out spending way more than we figured. 6) QT. Quaint Town. 7) Little Buddy. This is what we call our Dyson cordless stick vacuum. | | | | |
