Our first stop of the day was the visitor center for Cape Lookout National Seashore:

We walked a short nature trail which includes a duck blind:

We didn’t see anything moving out there, but it was pretty:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges and patches:

We would have liked to have taken the ferry out to the cape, but it was prohibitively expensive, so we continued on to visit nearby Fort Macon State Park:

The visitor center was impressive:

We walked out to the fort:

Like Fort Pulaski, which we visited in 2012, Fort Macon was a masonry fort built to withstand smoothbore cannon fire.  During the Civil War, both Fort Pulaski and Fort Macon were quickly subdued with the Union’s new rifled cannons whose more powerful rounds could penetrate the walls:

This staircase still bears the scar from an Union cannonball whose angle of approach perfectly matched the angle of the staircase:

In North Carolina, the Civil War is known as “The War Between the States”.  Personally, I prefer Queen Victoria’s “hostilities … between the Government of the United States of America and certain States styling themselves the Confederate States of America”:

The inner wall’s casemates have been converted into exhibit space:

We explored the outer wall’s casemates:

The inner wall from the moat between the inner and outer walls:

Like many other states, some North Carolina state parks have a Junior Ranger programs.  The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges:

On the way out of the state park we took advantage of the adjacent beach access:

We continued south, driving many hours to overnight at a Walmart near Charleston, South Carolina.  Along the way, we filled up on the cheapest diesel we’ve ever found:

See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.