A visitor can reach Oriental by driving north to New Bern, then east; or by taking the Minnesott Beach-Cherry Branch ferry across the Neuse River. This is flat agriculture country very reminiscent of that area of the Outer banks west of Kitty Hawk. We stopped for lunch in The Silos, a little restaurant we had read about on Tripadvisor, constructed within two silos.
The proprietor was young and knowledgeable, and the place was decorated with records on the walls and ceilings. A live band plays Wednesday nights, and there is an outdoor stage, too; this looks like the place to listen to live music during the summer.
There wasn't much to see in Oriental, in all honesty - we stopped at Lou Mac Park on the banks of the Neuse river, and then drove down to the harbor, as picturesque as we expected.
It is a friendly enough place, though, and we had the feeling that everybody knew each other on a first-name basis. We stopped in a little store that had everything from nautical gear to knick-knacks. "Are you boating?" the owner asked. "No, we just drove over to visit; we've never been here before." He said we were welcome to use his bicycles (parked around the side of the building) to pedal around and look at some of the nicely-restored historic homes, which was nice of him; I had the feeling that if we had chatted much longer, or taken up his offer, we, too, would have been on a first-name basis.
There were some great photographs to take on the way back to the Minnesott Beach ferry; this little fishing shack was slowly falling into the creek.
We enjoyed the ferry ride aboard the Thomas A Baum as people do who hardly ever ride a ferry. The free ferry system in North Carolina is one of the unsung wonders of our State. We started up the stairs to the top deck, and one of the officials stopped us with a smile. "Sorry," he said. "Since 9/11, nobody is allowed in the upper cabin." What a dangerous world we live in, even here on this innocuous ferryboat.
While one of the other passengers was sitting impatiently in his car, engine running, waiting for the trip to be over, we walked around deck, dropped a quarter in the big binoculars to examine the houses lining the river, and watched the sea gulls following us closely.
There is something magical about a ferry: that we can board a simple boat and avoid miles and miles of roads, simply going from one bank to another as people have done for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. What an honorable vocation it is to be a ferryman!
"By this river I want to stay, thought Siddhartha,
it is the same which I have crossed a long time ago
on my way to the childlike people,
a friendly ferryman had guided me then,
he is the one I want to go to."
it is the same which I have crossed a long time ago
on my way to the childlike people,
a friendly ferryman had guided me then,
he is the one I want to go to."
- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
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