Today we broke camp in Chocowinity and caravanned again with Ed and Susan and also with Jean and Jim from Long Island. They retired and sold their home and have been full-timing for about a year, although they recently bought a new home in upstate New York. They have exactly the same dialect. Her dialect and way of speaking reminds one of Carmela Soprano, at least to a Californian.
Much of today’s drive was through Camp Lejeune, reputed to be the largest Marine base in the world. The base is hidden behind trees on both sides of the highway, and it is huge. Nothing visible--but wait a minute—what’s that up there? An Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft in hover mode. Later we saw it in normal flight. Those are monster rotors.
We had to kill time en route so we stopped at Mayfaire Town Center, very interesting from a retail perspective. It has conventional areas, e.g. a large department store and a large Whole-Foods-like Fresh Market facing on large parking lots with outboard standalone restaurants (Macaroni Grill, Red Robin, etc.). But a smaller part is split into newly constructed city blocks with mall stores lining the streets. The streets are landscaped, wide, allow a lane of traffic in each direction, have wide sidewalks and diagonal parking. A couple blocks have condos above the stores, offered at close to $400K for 1300 feet to over $600K for larger units. North Carolina has joined California in having delusional housing pricing. Although I didn’t see examples, the mall also includes luxury apartments and single family detached dwellings, as well as office space and a hotel.
At our appointed time we checked in to our new home for the next few days, the KOA campground in Ogden, serving Wilmington NC.
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