CAPTAIN’S LOG — UPCOMING MISSION

Some missions begin with a historic site, a festival, a mountain road or a place we’ve never seen before.

This one begins with barbecue.

A new same-day mission is being added to Endeavour’s upcoming slate: point south from Fishersville, Virginia, cross into North Carolina, keep going east toward Wilson, eat some proper Eastern North Carolina barbecue, and turn around for home.

Yes.

We’re going to drive to eastern North Carolina for lunch.

And that is entirely sufficient reason for a mission.

In Search of Eastern Carolina Barbecue

Barbecue is one of those words that changes meaning depending on where you happen to be standing.

In eastern North Carolina, it means pork—traditionally whole hog—chopped and seasoned with a thin, vinegar-forward sauce rather than buried beneath a thick, sweet one.

And our destination is one of the old names associated with that tradition:

Parker’s Barbecue in Wilson, North Carolina.

Parker’s traces its history to 1946, when the original restaurant was established in Wilson by Ralph and Graham Parker with Henry Brewer. The Parker family tradition later expanded into Greenville, and the Parker name has been associated with Eastern North Carolina barbecue for generations.

Their barbecue remains unapologetically Eastern North Carolina: whole-hog pork, chopped and served with the vinegar-based character that defines the region.

That’s what we’re going after.

Not because Parker’s is the closest barbecue restaurant.

Quite the opposite.

The Road Is Part of the Mission

This is planned as a same-day turnaround mission.

Fishersville, Virginia.

To Wilson, North Carolina.

Eat.

Then point Endeavour back toward Virginia and come home.

There are considerably easier ways to acquire lunch.

But efficiency isn’t really the point.

A road trip with an absurdly specific objective has its own appeal. There will be miles to cover, places passed along the way, opportunities to stop if something catches our attention, and a part of North Carolina worth experiencing again on its own terms.

The barbecue gives us a destination.

The road gives us the mission.

And unlike some future expeditions that may require days of planning, hotel reservations, complicated equipment lists or carefully constructed itineraries, this one should remain deliberately simple.

Get up.

Get on the road.

Go east.

Going Home for Barbecue

There’s another layer to this one.

Eastern North Carolina isn’t merely somewhere we’re choosing because somebody put a famous barbecue restaurant there.

It’s home country.

And food has an extraordinary ability to connect us to places.

You can move away. Years can pass. Towns change, roads change, buildings disappear and people come and go.

Then somebody puts a plate in front of you and suddenly you know exactly where you are.

That’s part of what I want from this mission.

Not a restaurant review.

Not an attempt to declare the winner of the endless North Carolina barbecue wars.

I want to go east, sit down at Parker’s, order a plate of barbecue and the things that are supposed to come beside it, and see what it feels like to be there again.

Parker’s traditional barbecue plates come with the accompaniments that belong to this kind of meal—slaw, corn sticks and hushpuppies, with dinners adding a choice of vegetables. (Parkersbbq)

That’s not haute cuisine.

Thank God.

That’s Eastern North Carolina.

The Mission

Destination: Wilson, North Carolina
Primary Objective: Parker’s Barbecue
Mission Profile: Road Trip / Food / Regional Culture / Photography / Storytelling
Operational Profile: Same-Day Turnaround
Departure: Fishersville, Virginia
Return: Fishersville, Virginia

The mission objectives are appropriately uncomplicated:

Drive East. Eat Barbecue. Experience Home. Tell the Story.

We’ll photograph what catches our attention along the way. We’ll see whether the road itself gives us anything unexpected. And we’ll bring back the story of whether driving from Virginia to Wilson and back in a single day for Eastern North Carolina barbecue was a reasonable thing to do.

Although I suspect we already know the answer to that.

It isn’t.

We’re doing it anyway.

Captain’s Note

This may end up being one of the missions that best explains what Endeavour is about.

We don’t always need a bucket-list destination.

We don’t need to wait until we have enough time for a week’s vacation.

And we certainly don’t need to justify going somewhere by turning every outing into a grand expedition.

Sometimes you look at a map and realize that several hours down the road there’s a plate of chopped pork, vinegar sauce, slaw and hushpuppies waiting for you.

And you think:

I could go there.

So you do.

Mission added to the slate.

U.S.S. Endeavour · NCC-71895-A
Always Seeking the Horizon