Fort Bragg NC

FRI July 9

I have been awaken early the last 3 morning by the sound of traffic going by on the road the RV park is just off of. But when checking out this morning I found I was wrong and the noise came from a pulping mill across the road. A pulping mill takes some of the tree scraps and chops & grinds them into a fine pulp that it then sells to plants that make plywood and the mill turns on their machines and goes to work at 5:30 AM.

Left the cool of Smokey Mountain National Park area and headed east again toward the coast with the plan in mind to spend a couple of nights and one day at Ft. Bragg, home of the JFK Special Warfare Center and home of the Green Berets. But, it didn’t take as long as I thought to get here and through a lucky mistake I really saw all I wanted to see with one small exception and so I will leave tomorrow and spend an extra day at the beach.

Entered the wrong gate to Ft Bragg and instead of turning me around and sending me to the correct gate, because I had a Retired military ID card the guard let me through and gave me detailed directions to the Special Forces Museum and on the way there I really saw most everything I wanted to see. I did not see the statue of “Iron Mike”, forgot to ask about it and forgot exactly where it was located; Forrest help me out here.

After the Museum I headed over to the RV campsite and everything was going well until one of the last turns when the road was blocked. I called the campsite, got alternate directions and turned off the GPS, “Recalculating”. The RV camp is in a wooded area near a lake, very pretty and very nice to walk around. It is also near Simmons Army Air Field and its helicopters, ah, the sound of freedom. But the road into the camp site is very washboardy and I didn’t want to drive more than 10-MPH. Nice big toilet and shower area but they are what I call Mexican bathrooms, no lip on the shower area and a simple drain in the floor and normally this drain IS NOT the low point of the room so there was standing water.

As I was walking around I noticed signs posted on some of the pine trees and I see that Ft Bragg has the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker the same as Camp Lejeune. I first heard about this woodpecker back in 1987 when I was working for GD Convair from a man named Bill Teater who used to tell us of all the problems the Marines had with training at Lejeune because of this endangered species. Bill was a southern boy who could have cared less for the bird, but he was a Marine following orders.

Tonight at the campsite I noticed that evidently I hit something, a tree branch probably, high up on the roadside front of the trailer. I don't remember coming anywhere close to a tree branch or whatever did the damage.