I crashed last night and woke up refreshed after a good night on a comfy bed with exquisite pillows. This Coastal Cottage Airbnb is one of my favorite that we’ve stayed at. It’s a quaint two bedroom with an ample kitchen area, a darling back patio with dining table, laundry, coffee, breakfast sandwiches in the freezer, and even a children’s playground. Seems like we wouldn’t need that last one, but later in the day it came in handy.
We made breakfast at “home” and headed to the Glenburnie disc golf course around 10am. We were the only ones there so we had the course to ourselves. Others may have been sleeping in after partying for NYE last night because as we finished there were a few groups starting off at hole one.
We discovered this park was once a POW camp for German soldiers. We were all confused about that, like how did Germans get all the way over here during WWII…so we googled it and we learned a lot!
From ncpedia…About 10,000 German POWs were detained at 18 military installations in the state. In North Carolina, as throughout America, German prisoners participated in compulsory work programs until their forced repatriation to Germany in the spring of 1946. The first German POWs to enter the country came from the U-352, sunk by the Coast Guard cutter Icarus off the Outer Banks on 9 May 1942. After their initial debarkation at Charleston, S.C., the survivors from the original 44-man crew were taken to Fort Bragg, NC and later transferred to locations outside North Carolina. In the spring of 1944 the federal government created a nationwide POW program to bolster a waning cadre of civilian and military maintenance workers on military bases and to assist the civilian war-related industries of farming, lumbering, and pulpwood cutting.
So this park had that sign above and that sign was what led to our Google search and learning. Wow. A German submarine was sunk right off the coast of NC and the 33 survivors were taken as prisoners of war. Who knew? Not us! Vacationing is cool like that. You can learn so much history if you are willing to look around and investigate a little.
Everyone enjoyed the course and said that they’d love to live nearby and play it regularly. It was on the waters edge and it was a pretty morning with the sun peaking out when we got out of the trees.
The area looks so much like what many of us would think was the landscape of New Orleans. And yet, it’s North Carolina! This funny moss stuff was growing in every tree in sight. Very Pirates of the Caribbean vibe.
We finished our round and quickly felt pangs of hunger in our bellies. We made plans to meet up with my sister in a bit so we grabbed some family meals from Panda Express and headed back to the Airbnb.
We made sure to ask our host first before we had everyone over, but it worked out really well to have a space for everyone to play outside and eat in the large kitchen banquet.
It was a sweet afternoon of hanging out and reconnecting. Next up was an afternoon stroll in downtown New Bern. Many shops and stores were closed for New Years which is pretty much why we planned for today to be a chill day.
The downtown area is filled with these bear statues… literally all over the place.
Which of course led us to Google their significance… There are 21 bears scattered around the downtown area and there’s a map of where to find them and why there are so many. In short, New Bern is named after a German town called Bern and bern is the Germanic word for bear, and that town was named after bears because the first animal a hunting tribe came upon was a bear.
We had a fun time walking around and seeing the old buildings. There are places here from the 1800’s and lots of brick. We were killing time and decided to geocache. If you’ve never heard of that, it’s a free scavenger hunt where you use GPS coordinates to find a hidden cache. It’s usually very small and includes a log scroll where you write down your tag name. Ours is berrybunch 😉
No comments:
Post a Comment