Friday, May 19
OK, this was going to be our day to get back to the coast and see the beach in North Carolina’s Outer Banks! The thing was, it was still raining hard. But at this point we had no options and figured maybe the bad weather would keep the crowds away. We were wrong.
First breakfast, hostessed by some wonderful staff. Everyone there was very friendly, maybe a little too friendly and eager to talk to us older types from the North. We got everything packed up and stuffed into the car, ready to change to beach gear from the mountain and swamp gear we’d been using before.
If you asked Google, the Lady would tell you to get back to the Interstate and head East out 64 to get to the Outer Banks. But we wanted to see stuff, and route 264 from Greenville continues down the Pamlico River and along Pamlico Sound, which is the Southern part of the huge area of ocean bounded by the Outer Banks. We went that way instead and it was deserted and marvelous, though rainy. Endless farms and deserted swamps were on our left and off to our right were small towns with fishing fleets. We drove and drove and drove through a steady, pounding rain, under an overcast, gray-blue sky, on long, straight stretches of road with no billboards, very few other cars, and National Wildlife Refuges to our left and right. This was one of the best driving experiences of the trip.
We got all the way out past Stumpy Point in Dare County, and then turned North and eventually re-joined route 64 (with its traffic), over the bridge to Roanoke Island. In retrospect, we then should have gone up to Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, near where the famous first English settlement in North America was located, and the Virginia Dare mystery occurred. But we were determined to get to Cape Hatteras and possibly Ocracoke Island beyond that. There was an information center on Roanoke Island and after reviewing the distances, roads, and ferries involved we realized there was not enough time left in the day to do all that. But we’d see how far down the Outer Banks we could get before having to turn back North. And we hoped there’d be the possibility of a nice walk on the beach or around the dunes.
Most of the Southern part of the Outer Banks is the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, with some towns thrown into the middle of it. I’d been on a family vacation there in March of 1968(?) and remembered it as deserted and quiet. Not in 2023 however! When we turned South on route 12 in Whalebone there was tourist sprawl, expensive restaurants, highway overpasses, and gated communities as far as you could see. We’d been thinking about stopping somewhere for lunch, but the sprawl alarmed us and we decided to head South and see if we could get away from it.
After a few miles things were looking a lot more sane; this was a beach road like we knew from the Cape or the Big Island, and we started to see intriguing possibilities for a lunch stop. But it was still raining. We stopped at Bodie Island VC (which was actually closed for the Rangers’ lunch) and walked out their boardwalk into the salt marsh. We saw several nutrias in the grasses around the boardwalk and lots of wading birds in the marsh. Still raining, and no covered picnic area. We also looked across the island at Coquina Beach, hoping for a shelter with a nice view. But there was nothing there and the rain got even more intense, so we kept on South over the bridge crossing the Oregon Inlet onto Hatteras Island itself.
This was a beautiful stretch, and a few miles down Hatteras Island we saw a pretty empty parking lot for the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, where we pulled in and were able to get a parking spot where we could see out over the dunes and eat the Mexican food we had in the cooler. A microwave would have been nice, but we were hungry and the food tasted fine.
Stopped in their VC next, after getting a short view of the stormy Atlantic from their deck. No beach walk today, the onshore gale was ferocious, the heavy rain was horizontal, and the beach there would actually have been dangerous the way the waves were beating the shore. We saw something weird in the water too, inside we learned that this was the remains of one of the boilers of the Oriental, which wrecked there in 1862.
One volunteer inside had set up expensive binoculars and telescopes for viewing the wildlife in the marsh, and she pointed out a few things for us. Another volunteer had oodles of information about the wildlife and plants we could see on the Outer Banks. And the NWR has a trail system that we would have loved on a sunny day. We wanted to go bird-watching, but it was rainy and foggy and incredibly windy, so we got back in the car and headed further South. Oh well.
Miles and miles of lovely barrier island, interrupted once in a while by a beach town with run-down hotels, wildly expensive real estate, and weird restaurants. We finally made it to Hatteras Island VC itself, and the rain was as bad as ever. They had a sheltered area where we had some time to stretch and view their classy old lighthouse. Stopped in the VC for a quick visit, but soon were back on the return road for the North. The afternoon was almost gone and we had a long way to go.
When we made it back up to Bodie Island we went back into the lighthouse parking area for a bathroom break, and the VC was now open, so we stopped in. The lighthouse itself was open too, but we would have had to book tickets online and it just didn’t work out. A climb up the lighthouse was tempting, but the visibility would have been a disappointment and it would have been claustrophobic inside, so we opted out. Plenty of other people were looking for things to do in the rain too.
Back in the car and as soon as we got North of the National Seashore, the tourist sprawl surrounded us. When my family had rented a seaside shack in Nags Head in the late 60s there had been nothing there but a sleepy two-lane highway, a line of houses next to it, and then the ocean. But now the highway was two mad lanes of speeding traffic on each side, the row of houses was an endless series of gated communities, and the ocean was not in sight. We thought about stopping at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills (I remembered climbing massive sand dunes there). We saw the sign for the National Memorial, but we just wanted to keep on North and see if this oppressive sprawl would end.
Eventually the road turned West to cross Currituck Sound back to the mainland, and we left the tourist sprawl behind as we motored inland. But it was still miles and miles after that before the traffic calmed down. We stayed on route 158, West towards Elizabeth City when route 168 split off to the North towards the big cities in Southeast Virginia, and most of the traffic kept going that way fortunately. We were back on a rural highway, with huge farms dotting to the left and the right, interrupted by billboards advertising personal injury lawyers, and by small clusters of shops, always including a dollar store and usually a gun store or two.
The rain finally slowed and then stopped as we drove along, and the late afternoon started turning sunny and warming up. Then, just as we pulled into Elizabeth City after a long day of driving, we saw a sign announcing that the Potato Festival was starting that very day! You can imagine our excitement.
What is the Potato Festival you ask? Well, the next morning a local waitress (who called herself a proud Elizabeth City resident) was trying to describe it for a couple of tourists. She said, “We have a beautiful downtown you should go see, but oh, you probably shouldn’t try it today because all the streets downtown will be closed for the Potato Festival. Nobody goes to the Festival any more, it’s too crowded. But the kids love it. Some vendors give out free French fries and … well, there’s a potato peeling contest!” She pretty much summed it up right there from our experience.
Because, we went to the Festival! Kind of. Accidentally. We checked into the Fairfield Inn and Suites, decompressed and hung up our wet clothes, and looked online for a restaurant with a good beer list. The one Sarah found (the Cypress Creek Grill) was right downtown, and though streets were shut down and parking was hard to find, we got a space and managed to find the restaurant. Which as it turns out was right in the middle of the festivities. They were crowded and short-staffed (and the air conditioning was blasting there), but we got an Avdet Hazy IPA and a Raspberry Bramble, and a fine meal.
The Grill is right on the main town common, and they’d set up a stage at one end and a beer garden at the other. We crossed over to see their harbor on the Pasquotank River, which opens out onto the Albemarle Sound, the big Northern bay of the huge swath of water enclosed by the Outer Banks.
There was a band doing a very amateurish cover of John Denver’s Country Roads, and a few people in the crowd were singing along. It was a nice scene, but we didn’t spend much time there, found where we’d parked the car, and then got back to the Fairfield Inn for a game of Parks in their breakfast area.
Quite an exhausting day, but time for bed after traveling 321.5 rainy miles.
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