Coastal North Carolina

I took a day off from the beach in order to run down to New Bern, NC to visit an old friend and her husband and baby. I was super surprised that New Bern is a lovely old town, well-situated on the water. I only got to take one picture, though, since a downpour interfered with our walk around the town:


I was surprised that New Bern was lovely because driving through Coastal Carolina, while fascinating, was not. My mother calls it the Dismal Swamp.


I've never seen so many trailer homes.


The highway was also loaded with closed businesses and gas stations (the gas stations were confusing, because they sometimes still advertised old prices, so I almost pulled into a couple of them only to realize that they were closed, which was what accounted for the magnificently good advertised price).


What was shocking was that some of the houses that were lived in looked like they were abandoned. The really abandoned ones were absolutely overgrown with trees (sometimes trees even grew inside of those houses). This is really the only part of America that I've ever seen with ruins everywhere. Falling down barns were plentiful.


I'm also way too much of a Pennsylvanian to be okay with how flat Costal North Carolina is (I've never seen the parts with mountains, although I'd love to).