Sleeping on a Battlefield

Greetings from Kure Beach, NC. We arrived here this afternoon. Kure Beach is the town where Fort Fisher is located, and the little inn where we’re staying is part of the northernmost reaches of Fort Fisher. It was certainly fought over during the Union assaults on Fort Fisher. It’s very cool being able to say that we’re sleeping on a battlefield, even if it has been completely obliterated. We will be here until Sunday morning, when we head for the Outer Banks. I’m speaking to the Cape Fear CWRT on Thursday night.

I spoke to the Raleigh Civil War Roundtable last night. It was a good talk, the first time I’ve done one on Monroe’s Crossroads. One fellow came up to me before the talk and handed me two small boxes of slides taken during an Army staff ride on the battlefield in 1994. He had no real use for them, and thought I might like to have them. He gave them to me as a gift. Fortunately, the AV guy was still at the North Carolina Museum of History, and we were able to use the slides in my talk, even though I was seeing almost all of them for the first time along with the audience. It made things interesting, to say the least.

The weather is not good. It’s cool and very cloudy and never got above 70 today, certainly not beach weather. However, the worst day at the beach is still significantly better than the best day at the office. That’s how I’m looking at it…..