Next Stop North Carolina

In April of 2006 Jim was lucky enough to have to travel back east to the RTP for some training with Nortel. I took time off and flew back east with him to Raleigh. We took a day and drove down to Kure Beach, North Carolina. These pictures were taken along the Kure Beach Fishing Pier. Sadly, while we didn't take any pictures of the two us, I have these to remind me of the sunny afternoon. It was the first time I had ever seen the Atlantic Ocean and Jim got a kick out of me acting like a little kid about it. I was surprised by its color and the smell. Having grown up as a West Coast gal I just assumed that all the oceans were like the Pacific.

Jim could make friends anywhere we went. Here are a few that simply fell in love with him...

Of course it helped that he was finding scraps of garbage on the pier to feed them...

The view from the end of the pier was sensational.

Where ever we went we would spend time just watching the local people. You can learn a lot about a town from its local characters. Here were some young men fishing. The woman in the skull/ski cap is resting from the heat... but don't let her fool you... she wasn't asleep... she couldn't sleep because she'd choke on the tobacco plug in her mouth - honest to God! She's the first woman I've ever seen chew... not Jim though. He told me a story about the Ms. Lesbian Colorado asking him for a dip at the amusement park in Denver... see... he truly could make friends where ever he went...

Kure was a beautiful little town. The highway we were on dead-ended at the end of town (I know I was surprised to find we had ran out of road too!). At the end of the road was Fort Fisher. Jim and I loved, loved, loved to stop at sites like that. We spent a couple of hours in the muggy heat walking around the fort (I'm a civil war junkie) and along the sea side. We talked about how much fun it would be to travel the eastern coast and stop at the various forts and to sample the history. It was on our list of trips to take in the next year.

We were so excited at the end of this trip... we'd driven through the worse blizzards of several centuries... survived hellish flights and delays... and were none the wearier. We knew that once everything else was settled we could weather anything. Jim and I were always good that way. We never had any real arguments. Certainly never raised our voices at each other.
We are like a lost shoe that had founds its match.
Now one is lost again and the pair is incomplete.