All Saints Day in Beaufort, NC

All Saints Day in Beaufort, NC   ...   Thursday 1^st November 2012

I felt I had to include the NC in the title, otherwise you might all be thinking we were in South Carolina.  We spent some time working on a plan for the next few days. Mike informed me this morning that if we were to go outside from Beaufort, it would be ‘only’ 450 nautical miles to Florida.  At about six knots per hour, that’s still a long way! 

We walked back into down-town Beaufort this morning.  A sailboat that had been on its side on land yesterday was now floating at a dock.  That seemed an encouraging sign and indeed we had a much better day than yesterday.  We happened upon the Old Burying Ground.  It’s quite a lovely spot with old trees and wisteria vines.  We looked around at the graves and picked up a leaflet.  One of the highlighted burials was “girl in a barrel of rum”—the tale is of a shipboard death where the father felt he had to bring the daughter back to his wife in Beaufort.  He purchased a barrel of rum and placed the body in it.  After lunch, we visited the maritime museum and the associated shipbuilding shed. The museum is excellent and we watched a video about the pirate Blackbeard who terrorized shipping in the early 1700s and how they found his boat, the "Queen Ann Revenge", just off the coast here and are recovering artifacts. On the way back to our boat we cut through a residential neighborhood.  A young boy shouted out to us that if we would cross the street he had a surprise for us.  We crossed as requested and a Halloween scarecrow dropped out the tree next to us. We were pretty surprised.  We chatted a bit to his mother who was taking down the extensive decorations from the porch.  She claimed that some years they greeted trick-or-treaters with the sound of chain saws revving up.   This seemed to be a household that really took Halloween seriously.

Gloria

The wooden boat building shop - part of the NC Maritime Museum

Craig Wright - wooden boat builder

A house on front street Beaufort

The Halloween kid and his monster