Starting to think about trip to Carlsbad

Well, spring finally came and we have had a string of gorgeous days punctuated by a few days of torrential rains and high winds.  But I think that it won't be much longer until it starts to get hot.  And that is my clue that we need to start thinking about our annual summer trip to Carlsbad. We are planning to leave here at the end of May and spend a couple of days in Santa Fe and Sedona on our way out, arriving around the 5th of June.  We will be driving Val's new CR-V.  Yes we finally traded in the Acura.  It was still running perfectly and would probably have gone on for another 10 years at least, but Val needed a somewhat smaller car and one that she could really feel was her own.

Fort Sumter

We have not done too much this winter, but we did take a spring trip to Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah.  Neither of us had been to those old historic cities and we loved it.  There is a lot to see and appreciate.  Charleston was a major city where the Civil War actually started at Fort Sumter.  The fort is a little bitty island in the harbor that still stands, sort of. Charleston was also the center of the slave trade prior to the civil war and there is a museum at the old Slave Mart where this all happened.  


Beaufort is a well preserved city that the Union occupied early in the war so the city was spared the destruction of many other southern cities. There have been a lot of films made in this part of the country including Forrest Gump, Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, The Big Chill and lots of others.  It was interesting to see where some famous scenes were actually filmed.


Savannah is interesting in that it is well preserved and is built around many squares.  If you think about most towns, there is a central square.  But in Savannah there is a square about every other block.  There is a lot of wrought iron like New Orleans and brick and cobblestone streets.  The much of this material was brought from England as ballast on ships and then dumped to make room for cotton, rice, tobacco etc to go back to England.  

Before we came home we went to Charlotte, NC to see the Kings Mountain battlefield that was the site of a major revolutionary war battle where Val ancestors fought to defeat the British.  At the time the war in the north was at a stalemate, and the British were beginning to look to taking over the south.  They occupied a ridge on the SC and NC border called Kings Mountain.  The colonists who volunteered to fight were mountain men who crossed the Appalachian chain.  They used guerrilla tactics to soundly defeat the British and this changed the momentum of the war.  It was said to be the turning point.