Linville, North Carolina is an unincorporated community inside the Pisgah National Forest and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was founded in the 1880s and known back then as the Clay or Porcelain town in Avery County. Linville is about 45 minutes southeast of Johnson City and an hour or so northeast of Asheville. The…
Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head, Bodie Island, Whalebone Junction… just the names of these places invoke vivid images of screeching dragons, superhuman villains, and mutant sea creatures.
Ocracoke is a village on Ocracoke Island in the lower Outer Banks of North Carolina. There are no other towns or villages on the island, but it is helpful to understand the distinction. Wokokkon was first used by the Croatan and other Native American tribes as hunting and fishing grounds until British colonizers arrived in…
My younger brother is a monster truck maniac and I have taken him to few jams over the years. Not my thing, but I am always trying to come up with ideas and find events that make him happy. Recently he asked me to take him to a monster truck museum called Digger’s Dungeon, but…
This stretch of the Outer Banks has a sense of primordial abandon about it. Wild horses gallop between the ocean and gigantic sand dunes. It’s just miles and miles and miles of otherworld.
Colony Governor John White and some of his men later crossed the ocean again to gather supplies but the Spanish War was raging and they were delayed. Three years, delayed. When they finally returned to the colony, there was nothing left. Everyone and everything had vanished.
Moravians bury their dead in uniform grid patterns under flat, square, white marble gravestones. You will not find any headstones, monuments, or mausoleums in a God’s Acre.
Instead of grouping bodies together by familial bonds, they are divided and buried according to their sex and age at time of death. The intent is to express that in death all people are equal before God, and should spend the afterlife accordingly. Under that logic, I am not sure why they bother to divide the bodies at all.
Gregor Mendel, Sigmund Freud, Alphonse Mucha, Oskar Schindler, Ivana Trump, and composer Leoš Janáček are just a few notable icons that claim or are allegedly of Moravian descent.
I was hoping to catch a peek at a Neil Diamond hybrid rose, but no dice.
Downtown Hendersonville, North Carolina has a high concentration of things I like; cozy cafes, bookstores, bars/restaurants with literary themes, coffee shops, boutiques filled with crystals and witchy stuff, farmers markets, Art Deco buildings, and museums, all within a handful of city blocks.
Vance was widely praised for being ahead of his time by making huge strides in infrastructure development and socio-political reforms, but he continuously used his political power to fight against civil rights and the abolition of slavery, and his family still owned slaves so I’m not buying it.
In fact, I found it boldly secular of them to have a plaque of the quote “Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge the wing wherewith we fly…”
