Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Our last national park stop on the way home was Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in North Carolina.

There is a great museum with a great collection of artifacts from the battlefield.  I enjoyed the map program, which, rather than the old-fashioned blinking light maps you might be used to, featured a film with a computer-animated map program.  Still just lines and icons on the screen moving around, but it's more interesting to watch than the blinking lights.  Thanks to playing too much Empire Total War before the trip, I could easily anticipate the bad situations developing on the battlefield.

Long story short, it was a Revolutionary War battle between Cornwallis and Greene.  The British won the field after a long day's fight, but then disengaged from their campaign in order to resupply.  So although they won the field, they were defeated in the larger sense.

It was close to closing time, so we had to quickly zip around the hiking/biking/driving loop through the battlefield.  Not much to see there, and the audio tour didn't seem to match up with what we were looking at, either.  There were plenty of recreational users walking around the park, which would be super nice if you lived nearby.

I didn't even take a picture while I was there!  So here are some.

Congaree National Park

Hidden away outside Columbia, SC is just about the only virgin stand of old-growth swamp forest in the country.  And it is a sight to behold.  Thankfully, people saw fit to preserve it as Congaree National Park, though it only recently was switched to that designation.

We had four things really going for us while we visited Congaree, and if any of them had been different, our reaction might have been different.  1) We got there before anyone else, except for one nice fellow from Vermont.  2) The water was low, so none of the boardwalk was flooded.  3)  There were no mosquitoes.  "War Zone" was one of the options on the index by the restroom.  4) Migratory bird season.

We hiked the whole boardwalk loop.  Alison had fun cleaning up the boardwalk by dropping sycamore pods over the side. It took a while because I had a hard time figuring out what little warblers were up in the tops of some of the tallest trees on this side of the Rockies.  After some work, I figured out they were northern parula warblers and yellow-throated warblers.  The parulas were everywhere.  I did most of my ID work by sound, since it was hard to get a good look at them, and that was only possible because I recently purchased the Sibley Guide to Birds for my phone, which I would totally recommend.  The only trouble was I had the program running so long while I was out there, it drained my phone's battery! 

The light wasn't great for photos and I neglected to bring my better camera, so I had to take the above pictures with my phone.  Internet to the rescue for better photos!

Source

Source

And let me finish by saying the visitor center was super nice inside, with interesting natural history exhibits, and good green-and-gray staff who patiently helped me with my bird questions.

Fort Moultrie

After visiting Fort Sumter, we drove around to visit Fort Moultrie, which actually has an even richer history than Sumter.  On paper, it's part of Fort Sumter National Monument.

There is a nice museum with a laughably old film (but still worth watching), which is a good starting point before you walk out to the fort.  There is more to explore here than at Fort Sumter as you snake around through the various magazines and gun emplacements.  Like Sumter, there is a more modern battery plunked on top of the old fort, part of the defenses arranged at the time of the Span-Am War.

 A boat-tailed grackle and Charleston harbor

Checking out one of many magazines.

The dirt piled up protects the magazine from incoming projectiles.

I liked this site more than Fort Sumter because you don't have to take a boat and fewer people are to be found here.  There's also more to see!

Fort Sumter National Monument

Fort Sumter, the site of the opening shots of the Civil War, is a pretty unique place to visit.  First off, you need a boat to reach the island the fort is on.  If you don't have your own boat, concessionaire is happy to provide a ride for a fee.  Along the way they will subject you to a prerecorded tour that talks about harbor defenses and so on.  Nothing unexpected there except the look at Castle Pinckney, which, to me, was as alluring as anything else we saw, but no stops there.

 Approaching Fort Sumter

So the NPS Volunteer on the boat "strongly recommended" the history talk with the park staff once we reached the island.  I listened to that talk for about a minute before deciding to venture out on my own. 

There are no crowds on the smug self-guided tour.

 Those people are still at the opposite side of the fort hearing about the sectional crisis while we have the whole thing to ourselves.

And now for the drunk history of Fort Sumter:  Federal troops holed up there when doo-doo was about to hit the fan in 1861, then the Rebs were like "Get out of our harbor!" and started shooting at them, eventually forcing a surrender.  Rebs held the fort even though Federal troops bombarded it nearly to rubble later on.  Only 1/3 of the height of the original wall is still there.  Then in response to the Spanish-American War, a modern battery was placed on the island, which is the huge black thing you see to the left of the above photograph.  There is a museum inside the big battery.

So it's pretty neat to go out there and be in that spot so important to American History.  But there is a time limit, and you have to get back on the boat before you get left behind.

Many Southerners sympathize with the "Lost Cause" mentality.  When I visit a place like Fort Sumter, I wonder what could have been if they never started shooting.  And, truthfully, it makes me kind of angry.  The ceremonial opening of an artillery barrage on Federal troops at Sumter precipitated a long war that would cost 600,000 lives.  But without that war, slaves might not have been freed.  That's Abraham Lincoln's doing, and of course the reason why he is so great a man.  So in a way, the firing on Fort Sumter to protect the institution of slavery opened a series of events that would lead to its very extinction.

Charles Pinckney National Historic Site

On the way there, I tried to remember who Charles Pinckney was.  I eventually recalled he had something to do with the Constitutional debates, but couldn't remember more than that, despite having read the entirety of Ratification last year.

Turns out that's about all you really need to know.  Pinckney made many contributions to the Constitution.  Unfortunately for historians, his papers were destroyed in a fire in 1861.  However, among his many contributions to the Constitution is that, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

 Big trees! It smelled nice there.

 The house on Pinckney's farm, which Pinckney never lived in.

There was a nature trail around the old farm, which we skipped not for lack of interest but for the unruly child with us.  I learned that Gullah culture was a thing, but passed on the $9 bottle of spices which were obviously mostly paprika, salt, and garlic powder.  I talked to the ranger there for some time since we had a mutual friend.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore

We spent a couple days in the Cape Hatteras area, but the weather was not very cooperative.  Most of the time, it was either raining or brutally windy, and not very warm.

First of all, I have never seen such waves in my life as I saw there.  I haven't spent a lot of time by the ocean, but these were what I would consider scary waves.  It just seems like the ocean really wants to reclaim this little strip of land.  That didn't deter surfers who were out there having a presumably good time.

Three lighthouses are located in and near Cape Hatteras National Seashore.  We couldn't go inside any of them.  Personally, I think it's pretty hard to beat the Split Rock Lighthouse in Minnesota.

 Bodie Island Lighthouse

 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

 Ocracoke Lighthouse

The wind was just brutal when it wasn't raining.  My car got sandblasted in some places, to my dismay.  We got out of the wind by taking a nature trail, where we learned about primary and secondary dunes.  Secondary dunes are better, in my opinion, because you get trees and less wind.

While in Cape Hatteras, I was able to spot several life list birds: green-winged teal, American black duck, northern gannet, Bonaparte's gull, and ring-necked duck.  I also saw loons, swans, and a tricolored heron, among others.

Oh, and thousands of cormorants.

I saw zero green-and-gray park rangers while we were in Cape Hatteras.  I don't think that is a good thing.  The locals in the Outer Banks have a sense of hostility toward the National Park Service.  One resident had a grim reaper lawn decoration indicating the NPS was there to harvest Hatteras.  The animosity stems from, as I understood it from conversations I heard, changes in regulations for off-road vehicle use.  The park needs to regulate off-road vehicles because of resource protection issues like nesting birds and turtles, but off-road vehicle use is a long-time tradition and popular use for the park.  Apparently the fees for the ORV permits are high.  It's a classic case of "use versus protection" without an easy answer.  I have always been trained that protection comes first, while allowing for use.  I won't offer suggestions how I think this situation could be better.

We got out of the Outer Banks by a ferry to the mainland.  However, the ferry we intended to take was not available due to "mechanical problems," so we ended up at a different landing than we wanted.  It wasn't a problem, but it did mean for a longer drive to Wilmington, NC, our destination for the day.

Seagulls drafting the ferry.

Willet at Wrightsville Beach, NC

Finally a chance to play in the sand!

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and NC State Aquarium

We took a rainy day to visit Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, where the first English colonists settled in the New World on Roanoke Island.  The colonists were there between 1584 and 1590, predating the enduring settlement at Jamestown.  What happened to them is a mystery, but legend holds that they moved, seemed to be completely gone when people came looking for them, and were rediscovered years later.

We checked out the visitor center and watched the movie before we ventured outside to look at the earthworks that remained from the fort.

Earthworks

We discovered the Waterside Theatre, where they evidently put on some kind of dramatic interpretation called "The Lost Colony."  Sounds Disneyish to me, but OK.  Next door was something interesting that we didn't get to see, the Elizabethan Gardens.  That did look interesting, at least from the gate, but we were kind of tired of being wet.

After lunch, we went to the North Carolina Aquarium just down the road.  We were thrilled that our Friends of the National Zoo membership didn't just give us a discount - it got us free admission altogether.  That membership, which we only bought two months ago, has already paid for itself.

The aquarium was very well done, but I thought it was false advertising on their website when it said "Interact with scuba divers, touch an alligator and feed the stingrays as you explore the 'Waters of the Outer Banks,'" since I got to do none of those things.  Nevertheless, I did like the part where I got to touch starfish, urchins, rays, sharks, and a guitar fish in the interactive exhibit.

 

Alison liked the otters, and got a t-shirt with an otter on it.

This cool little tank made it easy to look down on the fish.

Amber and Alison touch things

The aquarium has "the largest collection of sharks in the state."  They definitely had a lot!

So the aquarium turned out to be pretty cool, and since we didn't pay admission, we made up for it in the gift shop.

Wright Brothers National Historic Site

Our next stop was Wright Brothers National Historic Site, the spot in Kill Devil Hills, NC where the first powered flight occurred in 1903.

Much as would be expected, there was a steady breeze when we arrived, one of the reasons the Wright brothers picked that spot for testing their aircraft.  It was spitting rain, and close to closing time, so we had to rush around to see everything.

Walking up to the visitor center, I commented to my wife that the visitor center looked very Mission 66.  It is.  Surprisingly, the exhibits were the same vintage.  For such a high-traffic area at the entrance to the Outer Banks, I wonder why they haven't updated the exhibits by now.  There's an opportunity there for someone.  There is something charming and nostalgic about the old-style exhibits, though. We even had the same type of exhibits back when I worked at Glacier.

Alison checks out the very, very Mission 66 exhibits.

Outside, you can walk the grounds where the first powered flight occurred.  It's only 120 feet to the first marker, but by the 4th try, they went seven times farther.

We hustled through the annex to the museum, some kind of hastily-constructed exhibition building for the centennial of the first flight.  There was a lot to see in there, but we had to hurry through in order to climb the hill to the monument before closing time.

 Alison was bored by the time we ran up to the top of the hill.

I have always been fascinated by flight, so it was a spot I had wanted to stop for a long time.  It's just neat to stand in a spot where something historic happened, which is what national parks are all about.

Cold Harbor Battlefield - Richmond National Battlefield

We just wrapped up a week-long vacation and hit a number of national parks along our route. 

The first park we stumbled upon by accident while getting gas for the car.  The random gas station I chose led me right to the Cold Harbor Battlefield, which is right next to Gaines' Mill (two separate Civil War battles).  Of course, you can't drive the DC-Richmond corridor without running into a battlefield somewhere.

There wouldn't be so many parks if Lee had just given up earlier.

We toured the tiny little visitor center with its outdated exhibits and familiar battlefield map with the blinking lights.  I did not acquire any Civil War swag, but was pleased to see books I had already read on the bookshelf.

We drove the short loop road through the battlefield, winding our way through the woods.  Back there, we found the earthworks that had been dug during the battle.  What is shocking is how close the opposing sides were to each other.  Whenever I look at these maps, I imagine the troops a mile apart.  But no, you could easily toss a baseball to your opponent on that field.

Or a grenade.  Seriously, why did no one think to bring a grenade?

We were there such a short time, and it was a rainy day, so I didn't even take a good picture.  So here is one I found online:

Photo: National Parks Traveler