Life on Paws and Wheels

Simba and I visited the World's Largest Frying Pan in Rose Hill, North Carolina , and this is exactly the kind of bizarre roadside attraction I love finding during our travels. At approximately 15 feet across and weighing around 2 tons , the enormous steel skillet is ridiculously oversized, but the best part is that it wasn't built simply as a giant sculpture to attract tourists. This frying pan actually works. Rose Hill's giant skillet was constructed in 1963 to cook enormous quantities of fried chicken for the community's Poultry Jubilee. It can hold approximately 200 gallons of cooking oil and was designed to fry as many as 365 whole chickens at one time . More than six decades later, the pan remains an important Rose Hill landmark and a reminder of the poultry industry that helped shape Duplin County. When it isn't being used to cook chicken, the pan rests beneath a covered pavilion where travelers can stop and see it up close. Standing beside it really puts i...

Simba and I visited the Rainbow Bridge at Greenfield Lake Park in Wilmington, North Carolina , and this was one of those stops that felt completely different from the historic landmarks, roadside attractions, and hiking trails we normally explore. The brightly painted bridge is covered with collars, leashes, tags, and other small tributes left by people remembering beloved dogs, cats, and other animals who are no longer with them. Every object represents an animal that became part of someone's family and eventually left behind a person who still misses them. What surprised me most was how new the Wilmington Rainbow Bridge actually is. It officially opened on May 30, 2025 , yet the idea behind it is connected to another beloved North Carolina pet memorial hundreds of miles away. The famous Rainbow Bridge at Lake Lure had become a destination where people traveled to leave memorials for their pets, but catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene destroyed it in September 2024. The lo...

Simba and I hiked Snow's Cut Trail in Carolina Beach, North Carolina , a short waterfront trail overlooking a channel that looks surprisingly natural today. Boats cruise through the water, people fish from the shoreline, and trees line portions of the banks, but Snow's Cut isn't a natural river. It's a man-made channel excavated nearly a century ago as part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and its construction permanently changed the geography of this part of the North Carolina coast. The approximately half-mile trail follows the shoreline from the Bridge Barrier Road area toward the public boat ramp. It's an easy hike compared with many of the longer trails Simba and I explore, but there is plenty to see along the way. The natural path winds beneath trees, periodically opening to views across the water where boats pass between the Cape Fear River and the protected waterways along the coast. Knowing the history makes the scenery considerably more interesting....

Simba and I visited the grave of Robert E. Harrill, better known as the Fort Fisher Hermit , in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. His simple grave marker bears an epitaph consisting of only four words — “He Made People Think.” It's a fitting tribute to a man who rejected conventional society, moved into an abandoned World War II-era bunker, developed his own philosophy about life, attracted thousands of curious visitors, and became one of the most unusual personalities in coastal North Carolina history. Harrill spent roughly the final 17 years of his life living near Fort Fisher, surviving largely from what he could catch, gather, grow, or receive from visitors. Calling him a hermit was somewhat ironic because he eventually became so famous that people deliberately traveled to his bunker just to meet him. By the time he died there in 1972 at the age of 79, he had become a genuine local celebrity whose story was inseparable from Fort Fisher. His death added another layer to the legen...