I really wanted to visit Dismal Swamp on the border of North Carolina and Virginia, simply because it has such a great name. There's a long-established Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge that's accessed from Virginia, and also a recently-established Dismal Swamp State Park that's in North Carolina. We briefly visited parts of both, starting with the state park. There wasn't much swamp in the part of the state park we traipsed through, but I did see this most excellent snake, which more than made up for the lack of seeing any other interesting herps.