Civil War Battlefield Tour

August 4–12, 2011

On August 3, 2011, my friends Joyce and Torrey Curtis flew into RDU from Oklahoma. The next morning I took the train from Kannapolis, and they met me at the station in Cary. This is the index page to my pictures from the trip. You can click on locations on the map or on the links at the bottom of this page to navigate to the pictures.

Torrey had emailed me to see if I would like to go on the trip with them. They wanted to do a loop through Civil War battlefields and then wind up on the Outer Banks. We had time constraints in terms of our schedule. Joyce needed to be back in Weatherford to teach at the university on August 15. That coincidentally was my mother's ninetieth birthday, and I was having a party for her on Sunday the fourteenth in Shelby, where she lived. I needed to get home and finish getting things ready for the party.

The itinerary sounded ambitious. To Oklahomans it sounded more reasonable, I'd expect. People from my part of North Carolina tend to think of the Outer Banks as being somewhere on the outskirts of France. We scoffed at the movie Brainstorm, I think it was, where the final chase scene goes from Durham to Kitty Hawk in no time. When I visited Bath, England, I thought about how much easier it seemed for me to be there than ever to get back to Bath, NC, which I once passed through briefly in 1970, and thought it would be a neat place to visit some time. I still haven't been back.

So I outlined an itinerary as a proof of concept of how ridiculous the idea was, and Torrey wrote back that it sounded great, and we soon had lodging reservations. We spent the first night at New Market, then two nights at Gettysburg, two nights in Richmond, and finally two nights at Kill Devil Hill. On Friday we drove to Rocky Mount. We ate lunch, and then they dropped me off at the train station and headed back to South Boston to see the last two performances of the play their son Christopher was directing.

To see some of my pictures from the trip, click on the links below or in the map above.

 

Appomattox

Antietam

Gettysburg

Manassas and Fredericksburg

Richmond, Petersburg, and the Peninsula

Outer Banks

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