Most of our traveling decisions boil down to "accept less to do more." In lodging terms, this means we accept less comfortable quarters, where we know we aren't going to spend a lot of time, and focus instead on what we are going to do with the balance of our time and money. This leads to a lot more cabins and tent camping than hotel rooms; we save hotel rooms for days where we know that a good night's rest is an absolute priority (at the end of a 15-hour drive) or when the room itself is part of the experience (the Cape Lookout cabins, or the Fairmont Empress in Victoria, BC).
When we do choose something beyond basic, spartan accommodations, the first factor that influences the decision is the experience: is the place we are staying something that can be easily replicated somewhere else? For instance, from the first trip, we felt it unlikely that we would find an Airstream easily unless we went out and purchased one ourselves, and while the interior accommodations were about the same as any other hotel room in the same price range, the exterior was more interesting than any of those would have been. If it seems just as likely that we're going to be just as happy in another setting, we generally move down the list.
The second factor that influences us is travel distance. If we are looking at a long-haul kind of day, longer than twelve hours of projected travel time, chances are we will choose a hotel, all other options being equal. There are exceptions - we camped inside Grand Canyon National Park rather than take a hotel, never mind that this added several hours to an already-long driving day - but these are generally covered by "the experience," above. If we're talking about a shorter day, but still likely to arrive at an hour where we are unlikely to want to set up a tent, we generally choose a cabin. If we are talking about a short day, usually six to eight hours' projected travel time, we generally go with a tent.
The third factor is generally cost. Experience shows that hotels are more expensive than the other options, but the cost difference between tents and cabins may be small enough that we're willing to splurge on a cabin just to avoid the extra half-hour involved in setting up a campsite, and the security of having a roof overhead in case the sky opens up or the temperature drops unexpectedly. Sometimes the difference is so significant (such as within most National Parks) that there had better be a pretty significant experience edge to the cabin over tents.
A further factor that influences our planning, but is unlikely to influence most people's, is proximity to a military base. Since military installations' on-post lodging is guaranteed to be at local government rate, and therefore significantly less expensive than off-post, we consider that an acceptable price to pay. Often, the nearest military installation is an hour or so out of town, such as Camp Parks outside San Francisco, but reasonable overnight lodging costs trump being five minutes away from everything under the sun. The Department of Defense has made a concerted effort to improve and standardize lodging post-to-post, most of those being under the IHG umbrella in the Army, meaning that the average military installation's temporary lodging feels more like a Holiday Inn than anything else, because it is a Holiday Inn. There are also more flexible lodging options on most installations if you do a little digging - the Marines' Camp Pendleton, outside Oceanside, has two hotels, both of reasonably good quality and excellent customer service, and an array of beachfront cottages, which, if you qualify, are cheaper than the hotel rooms for more amenities, better view, and greater privacy.
The last significant factor on the planning side is proximity to our route. This is last because generally we can find something conforming to the three other criteria somewhere on our route, so how far out of the way we have to go to get there becomes a last-case sorting criterion between otherwise equally good options. For instance, we have at least once chosen to push on another two hours rather than set up tents, because we knew there was a hotel available slightly farther down the road, and we knew the quality of rest we would get tenting was not good enough to justify the cost savings. In this case, we were willing to push a hundred miles further down the road to position ourselves better for the next day.
Finally, because we do a considerable amount of traveling each year by normal standards, we wind up sticking to particular brands. Our experience has been that Hilton hotels, specifically in the Hampton Inn budget line, tend to meet our needs pretty well. The breakfast is never spectacular, but it's reliable. The rooms are consistent across the brand; newer rooms tend to be better, but we've never had an experience where we would refuse to stay if we went back to any particular Hampton Inn. It does not hurt that typically they are available at government rate. Same goes for anything in the IHG family, which, at the moment, has the Army's on-post temporary lodging concession. Our preference off-post and outside hotels is first for camping in state and national parks or forests, and second for KOA, which, like the hotel chains, tends to have at least a minimum threshold of acceptable, and go up from there. Since KOA cabins can run half the price of a room at the expense of an in-house bathroom, we've gotten used to the short hike over to the communal bath. Tenting is even cheaper, and if you have an RV, you don't even have the problem of hiking to the bathroom. KOA is the only one of the options listed that has a fee on its rewards program, but that fee, as of 2015, is $26, for 10% off. If an average cabin is $50, that pays itself off in five nights. Our family-visit trips tend to run three nights minimum of travel in each direction, so it pays itself off in a single trip for us.
Again, the principle is "accept less to do more." Since we don't tend to stay in one place more than one night at a time, and we tend to be moving rather than static, we are willing to accept compromises in lodging quality that might not be for everyone. However, we find that this works well for us. It lets us stretch further in what we can do, and puts us in a better situation to sustain that pace of five hundred miles a day.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
The First Trip - Places and Lessons
There are two major components to this post. The first is free advertising for places I visited. The second is lessons learned from the planning and execution of our first major trip.
PLACES
National Parks Service Installations
1. Cape Hatteras National Seashore - http://www.nps.gov/caha/index.htm - 1401 National Park Drive, Avon, NC 27915. Cape Hatteras is the better-known of North Carolina's two national seashores. This is because it is fairly easily accessible, has lovely beaches, and has the nation's tallest lighthouse. Because it is accessible by road, it's a good starter point or entry point to the National Park system, especially if you like lighthouses or you just like beaches. There is camping, but it's summer-season only, so wasn't an option for us and we weren't quite ready in any case.
2. Cape Lookout National Seashore - http://www.nps.gov/calo/index.htm - 131 Charles Street, Harkers Island, NC 28531. Cape Lookout is a hidden gem of North Carolina. Hatteras is better known, which means Lookout is less well-funded as an installation, but also much less crowded. It is harder to reach, but there are a number of sites that are only accessible by boat that make it worth the visit, like the lighthouse itself, the wild horse herd, the cabins, and the old town of Portsmouth. A family could stop for a morning, a whole day, several days, or a week, and not truly run out of stuff to do here.
3. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site - http://www.nps.gov/fora/index.htm - 1401 National Park Drive, Manteo, NC 27954. The site is fairly small, easily walked even for children. The visitor's center has a handful of interesting displays, most notably their rebuilt Tudor room. During the summer, the local historical society performs a play down by the shore nightly. This is a site that a family can do in a couple of hours, or can stay longer, by preference.
4. Wright Brothers National Memorial - http://www.nps.gov/wrbr/index.htm - 1000 North Croatan Highway, Kill Devil Hills, NC 27948. A fine art-deco visitor's center that hasn't changed much in thirty years, a large 1930s memorial atop the launch hill, and the reconstructed Wright facilities are the main attractions here. You could spend an hour or two, or a full day, here, so if you're looking for a quick stop, this is a good one.
National Wildlife Refuges
1. Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge - http://www.fws.gov/refuge/alligator_river/ - 100 Conservation Way, Manteo, NC 27954. Alligator River NWR straddles the road on the way from Manteo to Cape Lookout, and, I am told, has bears. I refuse to believe this without seeing proof, same as I refuse to believe that there are bison at Yellowstone or bears at Yosemite. They either don't exist, or they're laughing at me. I am willing to believe either.
2. Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge - http://www.fws.gov/refuge/pea_island/ - 15440 NC-12, Rodanthe, NC 27968. Pea Island fills in the interstitials between Kitty Hawk and Cape Hatteras. It's literally a can't-miss on the way to Cape Hatteras, since you drive right through the middle of it. It's also difficult for me to tell you what the scenery looks like, since NC-12 is a sunken road right through the middle of it. I understand the birding is excellent, but I'm equally willing to believe the birds built berms blocking my view.
National Forests
1. Croatan National Forest - http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nfsnc/null/recarea/?recid=48466&actid=63 - 141 East Fisher Avenue, New Bern, NC 28560. Croatan fills most of the public land on the peninsula leading to Cape Lookout. We didn't spend much time exploring it, but passed through. It has several campsites, though I can't vouch for the facilities as that wasn't our destination.
Attractions
1. Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo, North Carolina - http://elizabethangardens.org/ - 1411 National Park Drive, Manteo, NC 27954. The Elizabethan Gardens are colocated with Fort Raleigh, so walking from one to the other is possible, though not recommended with small children or bad legs. The gardens themselves are well-provided with benches, and with admission at less than $10 a head for adults with no other discounts, it's worth the visit just to take a very pleasant walk.
Restaurants
1. Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina - http://www.awfularthursobx.com/ - 2106 North Virginia Dare Highway, Kill Devil Hills, NC 27948. Good seafood, but a bit pricey. Both of the times we've visited, waitstaff have been very helpful, even recommending against an order rather than covering up when something wasn't as fresh as they'd like. Family-friendly despite "bar" in name. Recommend the crab and butter for its absolute simplicity. It's crab meat... and butter. That's it.
2. Froggy Dog, Avon, North Carolina - http://www.froggydog.com/ - 40050 NC-12, Avon, NC 27953. I honestly do not remember what we ordered, what with it being two years ago. I think it was breakfast foods, but service was pretty good and they held on to one of our park passport books when it got lost, so they get points for that.
3. No Name Pizza and Subs, Beaufort, North Carolina - http://www.nonamepizzaandsubs.com/ - 408 Live Oak Street, Beaufort, NC 28516. I recall ordering their Greek burger, which was very good, and we all had a Greek salad. However, reconstructing it is difficult at two years' remove and with at least one menu revamp on their part in the middle. It was exactly what we needed at the time, and left us all feeling satisfied in a way that only the right food at the right time can. I would happily go back again.
4. Virginia Diner, Wakefield, Virginia - http://www.vadiner.com/ - 408 County Drive North, Wakefield, VA 23888. This place is an institution; it's been there since before the Depression, and it serves reliably good Southern cuisine with reliably good service. Mrs. Traveling Matt prefers the fried chicken, I prefer the country-style ham, as I feel no one in my experience does ham better than Virginia. Breakfast, dinner, and dessert are all reliably good, and I feel the buffet, while good enough and certainly shovel-ready, is the weakest point of the experience. For quality, I'd order off the menu; for quantity, the buffet's hard to beat if you're there when it's going. In any case, in more than a year of regular visits, we never had a bad meal there.
Lodging
1. Cape Hatteras KOA, Rodanthe, North Carolina - http://koa.com/campgrounds/cape-hatteras/ - 25099 Highway 12, Rodanthe, NC 27959. When we came through, Cape Hatteras KOA was still recovering from Irene. It was the first KOA we stayed at, and it pretty much set the pattern. The facilities were all in good shape, the staff were friendly, and it was noticeably different from a chain hotel. These were all good points in my eyes. I understand they have finished their post-Irene renovations. Unfortunately, the Airstreams appear to have been phased out in favor of more classical beachfront cabins. This is a loss, as the Airstream wasn't much different from a furnished cabin, price-wise was probably the same, and there's a certain panache lost with them.
2. Cape Lookout Cabins, Great Island, Cape Lookout NS - http://www.nps.gov/calo/planyourvisit/lodging.htm - Location Varies, Cape Lookout National Seashore, NC. The cabins at Cape Lookout are a good introduction to slightly rougher camping if your family is used to hotels. There's no guarantee of electricity unless you bring your own generator, and air conditioning may not be there, but with a stiff sea breeze, you may not need it. They're rustic without being run-down, and the inclusion of cooking surfaces, running water, and a full bathroom makes life much easier than straight "roughing it." The only drawback is that they are only accessible by a separate paid ferry, so the up-front reservation costs are higher than just reserving a cabin. Otherwise, they're a great way to get away from the real world for a few days.
LESSONS LEARNED
The largest lesson of this trip was that we could do this kind of thing. We were never going to be under tighter financial, time, or health restrictions than this first trip, because we were unlikely to take another grand road trip with twins expected in the near future, my job is such that I am unlikely to take a pay cut, between professional registration and the way government employment works, and we were unlikely to face a tighter timeline than "one week, maximum." This wasn't quite the worst-case scenario, but in worst-case scenarios, frankly, people shouldn't go on vacation.
The second lesson was the value of planning. Each night, even if we had to stretch to get there, we knew exactly where we were sleeping. In two cases, we knew exactly where we were eating. We had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do between eating and sleeping, with the exception of one sick kid. That allowed us to budget for fuel, for food, for recreation, all up-front, both in terms of money and time. This particular trip was probably one of our cheapest; because I like to get souvenirs, they've gotten a lot more expensive since, but this one was pretty stripped-down because we hadn't really hit our stride quite yet.
This first trip also had one significant difference from all subsequent, and a few previous, road trips: the legs were short and manageable. Subsequently, we've tended to put a whole lot more in our days, with the result that sometimes we reach where we're staying at three in the morning, after significant cuts. This one wasn't over-ambitious, and when we decided to cut a leg out, we had a fallback plan all ready to roll.
If this trip had a weak point, it was that we didn't really have a plan for the distant end, and we failed to take into account a couple of potential stops on the way, either because of lack of interest, or because we were low on energy. Looking at our Wilmington plan, it, unlike the travel days, was wildly over-ambitious. It would have taken two or three days of real time to accomplish, as opposed to one day of planning time. This would be a regular feature of future trips, and the one area that always needs improvement. We routinely under-estimate how much time it would take, for instance, to visit a given museum, even a small one - Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historic Site took two and a half to three hours to visit, when I had budgeted an hour and a half. A more realistic appraisal of what we could and could not do in a given timeframe is an ongoing issue.
There are more comments I could make, but they belong in a more substantive setting, where I can discuss lodging choices, feeding choices, and must-have equipment for any road trip.
PLACES
National Parks Service Installations
1. Cape Hatteras National Seashore - http://www.nps.gov/caha/index.htm - 1401 National Park Drive, Avon, NC 27915. Cape Hatteras is the better-known of North Carolina's two national seashores. This is because it is fairly easily accessible, has lovely beaches, and has the nation's tallest lighthouse. Because it is accessible by road, it's a good starter point or entry point to the National Park system, especially if you like lighthouses or you just like beaches. There is camping, but it's summer-season only, so wasn't an option for us and we weren't quite ready in any case.
2. Cape Lookout National Seashore - http://www.nps.gov/calo/index.htm - 131 Charles Street, Harkers Island, NC 28531. Cape Lookout is a hidden gem of North Carolina. Hatteras is better known, which means Lookout is less well-funded as an installation, but also much less crowded. It is harder to reach, but there are a number of sites that are only accessible by boat that make it worth the visit, like the lighthouse itself, the wild horse herd, the cabins, and the old town of Portsmouth. A family could stop for a morning, a whole day, several days, or a week, and not truly run out of stuff to do here.
3. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site - http://www.nps.gov/fora/index.htm - 1401 National Park Drive, Manteo, NC 27954. The site is fairly small, easily walked even for children. The visitor's center has a handful of interesting displays, most notably their rebuilt Tudor room. During the summer, the local historical society performs a play down by the shore nightly. This is a site that a family can do in a couple of hours, or can stay longer, by preference.
4. Wright Brothers National Memorial - http://www.nps.gov/wrbr/index.htm - 1000 North Croatan Highway, Kill Devil Hills, NC 27948. A fine art-deco visitor's center that hasn't changed much in thirty years, a large 1930s memorial atop the launch hill, and the reconstructed Wright facilities are the main attractions here. You could spend an hour or two, or a full day, here, so if you're looking for a quick stop, this is a good one.
National Wildlife Refuges
1. Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge - http://www.fws.gov/refuge/alligator_river/ - 100 Conservation Way, Manteo, NC 27954. Alligator River NWR straddles the road on the way from Manteo to Cape Lookout, and, I am told, has bears. I refuse to believe this without seeing proof, same as I refuse to believe that there are bison at Yellowstone or bears at Yosemite. They either don't exist, or they're laughing at me. I am willing to believe either.
2. Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge - http://www.fws.gov/refuge/pea_island/ - 15440 NC-12, Rodanthe, NC 27968. Pea Island fills in the interstitials between Kitty Hawk and Cape Hatteras. It's literally a can't-miss on the way to Cape Hatteras, since you drive right through the middle of it. It's also difficult for me to tell you what the scenery looks like, since NC-12 is a sunken road right through the middle of it. I understand the birding is excellent, but I'm equally willing to believe the birds built berms blocking my view.
National Forests
1. Croatan National Forest - http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nfsnc/null/recarea/?recid=48466&actid=63 - 141 East Fisher Avenue, New Bern, NC 28560. Croatan fills most of the public land on the peninsula leading to Cape Lookout. We didn't spend much time exploring it, but passed through. It has several campsites, though I can't vouch for the facilities as that wasn't our destination.
Attractions
1. Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo, North Carolina - http://elizabethangardens.org/ - 1411 National Park Drive, Manteo, NC 27954. The Elizabethan Gardens are colocated with Fort Raleigh, so walking from one to the other is possible, though not recommended with small children or bad legs. The gardens themselves are well-provided with benches, and with admission at less than $10 a head for adults with no other discounts, it's worth the visit just to take a very pleasant walk.
Restaurants
1. Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina - http://www.awfularthursobx.com/ - 2106 North Virginia Dare Highway, Kill Devil Hills, NC 27948. Good seafood, but a bit pricey. Both of the times we've visited, waitstaff have been very helpful, even recommending against an order rather than covering up when something wasn't as fresh as they'd like. Family-friendly despite "bar" in name. Recommend the crab and butter for its absolute simplicity. It's crab meat... and butter. That's it.
2. Froggy Dog, Avon, North Carolina - http://www.froggydog.com/ - 40050 NC-12, Avon, NC 27953. I honestly do not remember what we ordered, what with it being two years ago. I think it was breakfast foods, but service was pretty good and they held on to one of our park passport books when it got lost, so they get points for that.
3. No Name Pizza and Subs, Beaufort, North Carolina - http://www.nonamepizzaandsubs.com/ - 408 Live Oak Street, Beaufort, NC 28516. I recall ordering their Greek burger, which was very good, and we all had a Greek salad. However, reconstructing it is difficult at two years' remove and with at least one menu revamp on their part in the middle. It was exactly what we needed at the time, and left us all feeling satisfied in a way that only the right food at the right time can. I would happily go back again.
4. Virginia Diner, Wakefield, Virginia - http://www.vadiner.com/ - 408 County Drive North, Wakefield, VA 23888. This place is an institution; it's been there since before the Depression, and it serves reliably good Southern cuisine with reliably good service. Mrs. Traveling Matt prefers the fried chicken, I prefer the country-style ham, as I feel no one in my experience does ham better than Virginia. Breakfast, dinner, and dessert are all reliably good, and I feel the buffet, while good enough and certainly shovel-ready, is the weakest point of the experience. For quality, I'd order off the menu; for quantity, the buffet's hard to beat if you're there when it's going. In any case, in more than a year of regular visits, we never had a bad meal there.
Lodging
1. Cape Hatteras KOA, Rodanthe, North Carolina - http://koa.com/campgrounds/cape-hatteras/ - 25099 Highway 12, Rodanthe, NC 27959. When we came through, Cape Hatteras KOA was still recovering from Irene. It was the first KOA we stayed at, and it pretty much set the pattern. The facilities were all in good shape, the staff were friendly, and it was noticeably different from a chain hotel. These were all good points in my eyes. I understand they have finished their post-Irene renovations. Unfortunately, the Airstreams appear to have been phased out in favor of more classical beachfront cabins. This is a loss, as the Airstream wasn't much different from a furnished cabin, price-wise was probably the same, and there's a certain panache lost with them.
2. Cape Lookout Cabins, Great Island, Cape Lookout NS - http://www.nps.gov/calo/planyourvisit/lodging.htm - Location Varies, Cape Lookout National Seashore, NC. The cabins at Cape Lookout are a good introduction to slightly rougher camping if your family is used to hotels. There's no guarantee of electricity unless you bring your own generator, and air conditioning may not be there, but with a stiff sea breeze, you may not need it. They're rustic without being run-down, and the inclusion of cooking surfaces, running water, and a full bathroom makes life much easier than straight "roughing it." The only drawback is that they are only accessible by a separate paid ferry, so the up-front reservation costs are higher than just reserving a cabin. Otherwise, they're a great way to get away from the real world for a few days.
LESSONS LEARNED
The largest lesson of this trip was that we could do this kind of thing. We were never going to be under tighter financial, time, or health restrictions than this first trip, because we were unlikely to take another grand road trip with twins expected in the near future, my job is such that I am unlikely to take a pay cut, between professional registration and the way government employment works, and we were unlikely to face a tighter timeline than "one week, maximum." This wasn't quite the worst-case scenario, but in worst-case scenarios, frankly, people shouldn't go on vacation.
The second lesson was the value of planning. Each night, even if we had to stretch to get there, we knew exactly where we were sleeping. In two cases, we knew exactly where we were eating. We had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do between eating and sleeping, with the exception of one sick kid. That allowed us to budget for fuel, for food, for recreation, all up-front, both in terms of money and time. This particular trip was probably one of our cheapest; because I like to get souvenirs, they've gotten a lot more expensive since, but this one was pretty stripped-down because we hadn't really hit our stride quite yet.
This first trip also had one significant difference from all subsequent, and a few previous, road trips: the legs were short and manageable. Subsequently, we've tended to put a whole lot more in our days, with the result that sometimes we reach where we're staying at three in the morning, after significant cuts. This one wasn't over-ambitious, and when we decided to cut a leg out, we had a fallback plan all ready to roll.
If this trip had a weak point, it was that we didn't really have a plan for the distant end, and we failed to take into account a couple of potential stops on the way, either because of lack of interest, or because we were low on energy. Looking at our Wilmington plan, it, unlike the travel days, was wildly over-ambitious. It would have taken two or three days of real time to accomplish, as opposed to one day of planning time. This would be a regular feature of future trips, and the one area that always needs improvement. We routinely under-estimate how much time it would take, for instance, to visit a given museum, even a small one - Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historic Site took two and a half to three hours to visit, when I had budgeted an hour and a half. A more realistic appraisal of what we could and could not do in a given timeframe is an ongoing issue.
There are more comments I could make, but they belong in a more substantive setting, where I can discuss lodging choices, feeding choices, and must-have equipment for any road trip.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
The First Trip - Cape Lookout and the Return Leg
We stayed at the Great Island cabins for roughly two and a half days, spending two nights in the cabins and doing precious little with most of our time. Mostly our son played outside, our daughter recovered from being sick, and I caught up on my reading and did a little swimming. It was a quiet period for the most part, with only one great adventure built into it.
That adventure was our drive down to the Cape Lookout lighthouse. It was about ten miles away, over no paved surfaces. We had little off-road experience at this point, but we had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and something to see, and we'd taken air out for driving on sand, so how hard could it be? It turns out the answer is somewhere between "the end of the world" and "not very," but most of the stress in this case came from lack of experience with it and the constant sensation that something was going to go horribly wrong. There are two basic routes from the cabin to the lighthouse, one along a well-compacted road at the rough centerline of the island, the other along the beach. The beach route is much more scenic and less crowded, but the centerline road is well-traveled and as a result well-compacted. It is also one lane wide, with traffic in both directions and no regular, official pull-outs.
We put Traveller in four-by and headed down the beach to start with. Knowing it was eight or ten miles down the beach, we watched the odometer nervously, certain that we were going to hit a soft spot and get mired at any moment. This was the first of many white-knuckle drives in that vehicle, though in this case the worst-case scenario was someone would have to hike back up the beach for an hour and change to civilization and arrange a tow. It is, in retrospect, astounding that we were so concerned about it! We made it about two-thirds of the way down the beach before nerves gave out and we cut to the inland road, but looking back, we could probably have made it all the way without that detour.
The gift shop was locked up, but the old keeper's house was occupied by an elderly couple of volunteers who were trading personal time for park access. I'd like to take a moment to say that my experience with Park Service volunteers has universally been good. There is something about doing something you want to do, for no more reward than the ability to do that thing in the first place, that keeps people from being surly or difficult, and the setting very rarely produces a bad day. They allowed us more or less the run of the place, even opening up the gift shop so that we could stamp our passport books. The only thing we weren't allowed to do was climb the lighthouse, because it, like Hatteras, is only open for the summer season.
Having survived the ordeal of driving down, having seen the lighthouse, and having dealt with the very helpful volunteers, we loaded back up and tried to head back north along the island. This, of course, was when I discovered something new that I had somehow overlooked about good old Traveller on the southbound leg: Placing the vehicle in four-by required handling the gearshift in the reverse of automatic transmission. In other words, to access the four-wheel-drive gears, the driver shifts all the way down to first, then presses forward, rather than pulling toward the back of the vehicle. The process of discovering this, after the stress of driving down, probably took a month off my life, as I was certain I had somehow broken the vehicle.
If the process of putting it in gear took time off my life, the drive back up took time off of poor Mrs. Traveling Matt. We decided not to chance the beach and instead go up the "keel" road. The one piece of offroad driving advice I knew was that, when in doubt, don't slow down, and that is precisely what I did. Now, O gentle reader, remember that Mrs. Traveling Matt was six months pregnant with twins, and "compacted" does not mean "smooth." We took that road at a dead sprint most of its length, reaching the staggering speed of thirty-five miles an hour! Nineteenth-century naysayers of the railroads said that men simply could not stand the pressures associated with such speeds, and I am happy to report that even women six months pregnant who are being jounced around like pinballs can survive it. They can even survive the shock of seeing an oncoming vehicle on a one-lane road with no pull-outs. We pretty much manufactured our own pull-out for that one, for which I apologize to the Park Service for any damage we may inadvertently have caused the sea oats on the dunes.
The other new experience for us was our first stab at camp cooking. We had planned ahead of time for a lamb dinner for Easter, and my wife made lamb skewers and grilled them up on the beach. This is also where I confess to you, O gentle reader, that she does all the grilling. I suppose I can, I certainly understand the principles, and grilling is about the least complicated form of cooking out there, but she does it so much better than me that I just let her tackle it. So we had lamb and vegetable skewers on the beach for Easter, and, overall, had a very pleasant, peaceful time of it. Once our time on Great Island was up, we loaded everything back in Traveller and saddled up once more to return to the mainland.
The morning was more stressful than we might like. We went to the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor's center on Harkers Island, with the weather threatening to turn ugly on us, only to discover that we had missed all the reasonable options for going and looking at wild horses on Shackleford Bank. We also saw our friendly volunteers returning from the lighthouse at the same time, and then we turned back toward home. The homeward leg started off a little rocky, with everyone worn and in a bad mood, but we stopped at a place called No Name Pizza and Subs in Morehead City that pretty much fixed everything. I honestly do not remember what we ordered, but I remember that the food was great, and that it dissipated a considerable amount of stress while feeding all four and two-halves of us quite effectively.
The return leg to Virginia was fairly low-stress. I managed to avoid any further traffic tickets. The only remotely stressful part was when the low-fuel light came on south of Petersburg, and rather than chance it we pulled off and got gas. Low-fuel lights are a routine part of long road trips, I'm afraid, so this caused quite a bit more stress on this trip than it would on a later trip, especially considering that Virginia-North Carolina Tidewater region has been settled for four hundred years and change, and therefore finding fuel is pretty easy. The same is not true, say, in the middle of the Mojave... not that I would know anything about that.
So there you have it - our first significant road trip. Unfortunately we hadn't gone camera-crazy yet, and pictures of that trip are in surprisingly short supply. Next up I'll provide links to all of the places we visited, so that you, O gentle reader, may see for yourself, and plan accordingly if you decide you need to do any of these things, and we'll discuss some of the lessons of that first trip. Meantime, take a break. We've come by it honestly.
That adventure was our drive down to the Cape Lookout lighthouse. It was about ten miles away, over no paved surfaces. We had little off-road experience at this point, but we had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and something to see, and we'd taken air out for driving on sand, so how hard could it be? It turns out the answer is somewhere between "the end of the world" and "not very," but most of the stress in this case came from lack of experience with it and the constant sensation that something was going to go horribly wrong. There are two basic routes from the cabin to the lighthouse, one along a well-compacted road at the rough centerline of the island, the other along the beach. The beach route is much more scenic and less crowded, but the centerline road is well-traveled and as a result well-compacted. It is also one lane wide, with traffic in both directions and no regular, official pull-outs.
We put Traveller in four-by and headed down the beach to start with. Knowing it was eight or ten miles down the beach, we watched the odometer nervously, certain that we were going to hit a soft spot and get mired at any moment. This was the first of many white-knuckle drives in that vehicle, though in this case the worst-case scenario was someone would have to hike back up the beach for an hour and change to civilization and arrange a tow. It is, in retrospect, astounding that we were so concerned about it! We made it about two-thirds of the way down the beach before nerves gave out and we cut to the inland road, but looking back, we could probably have made it all the way without that detour.
The gift shop was locked up, but the old keeper's house was occupied by an elderly couple of volunteers who were trading personal time for park access. I'd like to take a moment to say that my experience with Park Service volunteers has universally been good. There is something about doing something you want to do, for no more reward than the ability to do that thing in the first place, that keeps people from being surly or difficult, and the setting very rarely produces a bad day. They allowed us more or less the run of the place, even opening up the gift shop so that we could stamp our passport books. The only thing we weren't allowed to do was climb the lighthouse, because it, like Hatteras, is only open for the summer season.
Having survived the ordeal of driving down, having seen the lighthouse, and having dealt with the very helpful volunteers, we loaded back up and tried to head back north along the island. This, of course, was when I discovered something new that I had somehow overlooked about good old Traveller on the southbound leg: Placing the vehicle in four-by required handling the gearshift in the reverse of automatic transmission. In other words, to access the four-wheel-drive gears, the driver shifts all the way down to first, then presses forward, rather than pulling toward the back of the vehicle. The process of discovering this, after the stress of driving down, probably took a month off my life, as I was certain I had somehow broken the vehicle.
If the process of putting it in gear took time off my life, the drive back up took time off of poor Mrs. Traveling Matt. We decided not to chance the beach and instead go up the "keel" road. The one piece of offroad driving advice I knew was that, when in doubt, don't slow down, and that is precisely what I did. Now, O gentle reader, remember that Mrs. Traveling Matt was six months pregnant with twins, and "compacted" does not mean "smooth." We took that road at a dead sprint most of its length, reaching the staggering speed of thirty-five miles an hour! Nineteenth-century naysayers of the railroads said that men simply could not stand the pressures associated with such speeds, and I am happy to report that even women six months pregnant who are being jounced around like pinballs can survive it. They can even survive the shock of seeing an oncoming vehicle on a one-lane road with no pull-outs. We pretty much manufactured our own pull-out for that one, for which I apologize to the Park Service for any damage we may inadvertently have caused the sea oats on the dunes.
The other new experience for us was our first stab at camp cooking. We had planned ahead of time for a lamb dinner for Easter, and my wife made lamb skewers and grilled them up on the beach. This is also where I confess to you, O gentle reader, that she does all the grilling. I suppose I can, I certainly understand the principles, and grilling is about the least complicated form of cooking out there, but she does it so much better than me that I just let her tackle it. So we had lamb and vegetable skewers on the beach for Easter, and, overall, had a very pleasant, peaceful time of it. Once our time on Great Island was up, we loaded everything back in Traveller and saddled up once more to return to the mainland.
The morning was more stressful than we might like. We went to the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor's center on Harkers Island, with the weather threatening to turn ugly on us, only to discover that we had missed all the reasonable options for going and looking at wild horses on Shackleford Bank. We also saw our friendly volunteers returning from the lighthouse at the same time, and then we turned back toward home. The homeward leg started off a little rocky, with everyone worn and in a bad mood, but we stopped at a place called No Name Pizza and Subs in Morehead City that pretty much fixed everything. I honestly do not remember what we ordered, but I remember that the food was great, and that it dissipated a considerable amount of stress while feeding all four and two-halves of us quite effectively.
The return leg to Virginia was fairly low-stress. I managed to avoid any further traffic tickets. The only remotely stressful part was when the low-fuel light came on south of Petersburg, and rather than chance it we pulled off and got gas. Low-fuel lights are a routine part of long road trips, I'm afraid, so this caused quite a bit more stress on this trip than it would on a later trip, especially considering that Virginia-North Carolina Tidewater region has been settled for four hundred years and change, and therefore finding fuel is pretty easy. The same is not true, say, in the middle of the Mojave... not that I would know anything about that.
So there you have it - our first significant road trip. Unfortunately we hadn't gone camera-crazy yet, and pictures of that trip are in surprisingly short supply. Next up I'll provide links to all of the places we visited, so that you, O gentle reader, may see for yourself, and plan accordingly if you decide you need to do any of these things, and we'll discuss some of the lessons of that first trip. Meantime, take a break. We've come by it honestly.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
The First Trip - The Second Day, Rodanthe to Cape Lookout
Day two of that first trip was where things got a little more complicated. From Rodanthe, we first went south, to Cape Hatteras, to see the lighthouse, then north again to the Virginia Dare Bridge, westbound on US 64 and south to New Bern, then east via increasingly minor roads to Davis, North Carolina, where we caught a ferry to the cabins on the island. By road, this was a little over 250 miles.
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has a special place to me as an engineer; in 1999, with the shore fifteen feet from the base of the lighthouse and foundation damage obvious, the Parks Service decided to move it half a mile. This was done by excavating and bracing, then inching a crawler similar to those used to move rockets at Cape Kennedy under it. Once it was fully supported by the crawler, it was then moved slowly enough that vibration and lateral stresses on the structure were effectively zero. As a masonry structure, it would not have withstood them very well, but instead shaken itself apart. Once it was in position, a new foundation was built, and the load transferred carefully from crawler to slab, leaving it whole and undamaged after the move. It was called "the move of the millennium," and justly won a string of awards for engineering and structural relocation. It is also the tallest lighthouse, at 208 feet from base to lantern, in the United States. However, it is also closed to direct access for half the year, including when we were there, so the best we were able to do was visit the keeper's quarters and museum. While we were there, we saw an osprey, also known as a fish eagle, which is unique among raptors for its gull-like wings, which form an arch rather than staying rigid like an eagle's or drooping toward the torso like a hawk or falcon's.
After Cape Hatteras, we turned northward once more, stopping for lunch at a place called Froggy Dog, in Avon. I remember little of the food, though I remember that they'd lined most of their spare wall space with bookshelves filled with cheap paperbacks. I have nothing against cheap paperbacks, and am a fan of books in general, so that didn't bother me terribly. The most interesting part of that particular meal was that our son lost his National Park passport book, and discovered it about ten miles down the road. He was in tears, but when we returned, it turned out another family had seen it fall out of the car, had taken it inside, and the bartender had held on to it for us on the supposition that we'd be back for it, so they get points for good customer service on that.
We crossed over into Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge almost as soon as we were back on the mainland, and here began the first of many disappointing non-encounters with local wildlife. You may think, O gentle reader, that Yellowstone has bison, that Yosemite has bears. I know better. I know that any time a place advertises wildlife of a specific type, what they really mean is that said creatures will turn shy and reclusive until the very moment you depart, at which time three bears will be seen feasting on the carcass of a dead bison. That is not an exaggeration; that happened at Yellowstone the week after we passed through. At Alligator River, there were signs up every few miles saying "BEAR CROSSING." It should be no great trick at this point to guess how many bears I saw, but it was a number commonly drawn in an oval. All of the bears I saw belonged to the null set. The bear population of Alligator River NWR, for our brief passage through, apparently turned sideways and hid behind the trees, averting their snouts from our passage and snickering at the rube who thinks "BEAR CROSSING" means that he will see a bear crossing the road.
That said, it was about as pretty a country as can be expected from a swamp that used to be softwood timberland, complete with rustic, abandoned sawmills, decaying farmsteads, and, you guessed it, swamps. This sounds like I am criticizing it, but the truth is that it was very pretty country, and in the hands of the right painter would be spellbinding. Unfortunately, I am not a painter, and I was still upset about the bears. Mrs. Traveling Matt didn't know this at the time, as I didn't know then that it would become a recurring theme of my life, and that the only way I would ever see wildlife in a park was if they somehow got their signals crossed and accidentally herded themselves to the top of a mountain to get away from me, only to find that someone had inconsiderately placed a road across their mountain, and I happened to discover the road.
We turned south and crossed through New Bern, and about then my daughter started feeling queasy, and we started feeling uneasy about the ferry across to Cape Lookout and the cabin. The combination of queasiness and timing led to some very questionable driving decisions, culminating in going about eighty miles an hour down a rural two-lane full of winding turns and cane fields on either side so that vision was obscured. A local police officer kindly pointed this out to me, also that the speed limit in the area that he stopped me was thirty-five, and that even on the interstate in North Carolina, the speed limit was not eighty. He also pointed out the turn the locals would have taken to get to the ferry a little faster, and a gas station at the corner that had free water. He did not, however, arrest me, as the reason we needed water was because my daughter had erupted, Vesuvian, all over the back seat, coating the books we had gotten at Wright Brothers, her brother, the back seat, the floorboards, the back of my seat... it would, in point of fact, be easier to list the areas of the car upon which she had not vomited, which were mostly exterior. The smell, and my obviously harried state, were sufficient incentive for the officer to lower the ticket to simply twenty miles per hour over, which did not require a subsequent in-person appearance, and didn't require my automatic arrest. Under the circumstances, I was grateful for the reduced ticket, the water recommendation, and the shortcut.
As it happened, they held the ferry for us. The ferry from Davis to the island is a single-vehicle, maybe a two-vehicle, contraption, with two crew, and feels for all the world like a bass boat that carries a car. Normally the waters of Core Sound are fairly flat, but occasionally they get a storm that whips them up pretty well. I've seen a few videos of their more exciting crossings, but the day's excitement had passed for us by now. The fine people who operate the ferry service there stayed a full hour and a half to two hours past closing time, waiting for us, were considerate and polite about the entire thing, and cheerfully ferried us over. We took a quick head count and made sure they got an excellent tip out of the entire thing. We checked into our cabins, deflated our tires to accommodate driving on sand, and settled in for the night.
The cabins at Cape Lookout are fairly spacious; even with a much larger family they would easily accommodate all of us. Ours had three sets of bunk beds and a folding table with a couple of chairs, a screened-in porch, and a lovely beach view, but then, they all had lovely beach views. They have propane stoves, flush toilets, and running water, but no electricity. That was a sacrifice which I was willing to make under the circumstances. We discussed it and almost immediately, as I recall, decided to cancel the Wilmington leg, stay here an extra day, and let our daughter recuperate. I thoroughly enjoyed the extra time, but what we did with it will have to wait for another day. Meantime, get out your blanket and pick a bunk.
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has a special place to me as an engineer; in 1999, with the shore fifteen feet from the base of the lighthouse and foundation damage obvious, the Parks Service decided to move it half a mile. This was done by excavating and bracing, then inching a crawler similar to those used to move rockets at Cape Kennedy under it. Once it was fully supported by the crawler, it was then moved slowly enough that vibration and lateral stresses on the structure were effectively zero. As a masonry structure, it would not have withstood them very well, but instead shaken itself apart. Once it was in position, a new foundation was built, and the load transferred carefully from crawler to slab, leaving it whole and undamaged after the move. It was called "the move of the millennium," and justly won a string of awards for engineering and structural relocation. It is also the tallest lighthouse, at 208 feet from base to lantern, in the United States. However, it is also closed to direct access for half the year, including when we were there, so the best we were able to do was visit the keeper's quarters and museum. While we were there, we saw an osprey, also known as a fish eagle, which is unique among raptors for its gull-like wings, which form an arch rather than staying rigid like an eagle's or drooping toward the torso like a hawk or falcon's.
After Cape Hatteras, we turned northward once more, stopping for lunch at a place called Froggy Dog, in Avon. I remember little of the food, though I remember that they'd lined most of their spare wall space with bookshelves filled with cheap paperbacks. I have nothing against cheap paperbacks, and am a fan of books in general, so that didn't bother me terribly. The most interesting part of that particular meal was that our son lost his National Park passport book, and discovered it about ten miles down the road. He was in tears, but when we returned, it turned out another family had seen it fall out of the car, had taken it inside, and the bartender had held on to it for us on the supposition that we'd be back for it, so they get points for good customer service on that.
We crossed over into Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge almost as soon as we were back on the mainland, and here began the first of many disappointing non-encounters with local wildlife. You may think, O gentle reader, that Yellowstone has bison, that Yosemite has bears. I know better. I know that any time a place advertises wildlife of a specific type, what they really mean is that said creatures will turn shy and reclusive until the very moment you depart, at which time three bears will be seen feasting on the carcass of a dead bison. That is not an exaggeration; that happened at Yellowstone the week after we passed through. At Alligator River, there were signs up every few miles saying "BEAR CROSSING." It should be no great trick at this point to guess how many bears I saw, but it was a number commonly drawn in an oval. All of the bears I saw belonged to the null set. The bear population of Alligator River NWR, for our brief passage through, apparently turned sideways and hid behind the trees, averting their snouts from our passage and snickering at the rube who thinks "BEAR CROSSING" means that he will see a bear crossing the road.
That said, it was about as pretty a country as can be expected from a swamp that used to be softwood timberland, complete with rustic, abandoned sawmills, decaying farmsteads, and, you guessed it, swamps. This sounds like I am criticizing it, but the truth is that it was very pretty country, and in the hands of the right painter would be spellbinding. Unfortunately, I am not a painter, and I was still upset about the bears. Mrs. Traveling Matt didn't know this at the time, as I didn't know then that it would become a recurring theme of my life, and that the only way I would ever see wildlife in a park was if they somehow got their signals crossed and accidentally herded themselves to the top of a mountain to get away from me, only to find that someone had inconsiderately placed a road across their mountain, and I happened to discover the road.
We turned south and crossed through New Bern, and about then my daughter started feeling queasy, and we started feeling uneasy about the ferry across to Cape Lookout and the cabin. The combination of queasiness and timing led to some very questionable driving decisions, culminating in going about eighty miles an hour down a rural two-lane full of winding turns and cane fields on either side so that vision was obscured. A local police officer kindly pointed this out to me, also that the speed limit in the area that he stopped me was thirty-five, and that even on the interstate in North Carolina, the speed limit was not eighty. He also pointed out the turn the locals would have taken to get to the ferry a little faster, and a gas station at the corner that had free water. He did not, however, arrest me, as the reason we needed water was because my daughter had erupted, Vesuvian, all over the back seat, coating the books we had gotten at Wright Brothers, her brother, the back seat, the floorboards, the back of my seat... it would, in point of fact, be easier to list the areas of the car upon which she had not vomited, which were mostly exterior. The smell, and my obviously harried state, were sufficient incentive for the officer to lower the ticket to simply twenty miles per hour over, which did not require a subsequent in-person appearance, and didn't require my automatic arrest. Under the circumstances, I was grateful for the reduced ticket, the water recommendation, and the shortcut.
As it happened, they held the ferry for us. The ferry from Davis to the island is a single-vehicle, maybe a two-vehicle, contraption, with two crew, and feels for all the world like a bass boat that carries a car. Normally the waters of Core Sound are fairly flat, but occasionally they get a storm that whips them up pretty well. I've seen a few videos of their more exciting crossings, but the day's excitement had passed for us by now. The fine people who operate the ferry service there stayed a full hour and a half to two hours past closing time, waiting for us, were considerate and polite about the entire thing, and cheerfully ferried us over. We took a quick head count and made sure they got an excellent tip out of the entire thing. We checked into our cabins, deflated our tires to accommodate driving on sand, and settled in for the night.
The cabins at Cape Lookout are fairly spacious; even with a much larger family they would easily accommodate all of us. Ours had three sets of bunk beds and a folding table with a couple of chairs, a screened-in porch, and a lovely beach view, but then, they all had lovely beach views. They have propane stoves, flush toilets, and running water, but no electricity. That was a sacrifice which I was willing to make under the circumstances. We discussed it and almost immediately, as I recall, decided to cancel the Wilmington leg, stay here an extra day, and let our daughter recuperate. I thoroughly enjoyed the extra time, but what we did with it will have to wait for another day. Meantime, get out your blanket and pick a bunk.
Monday, August 3, 2015
The First Trip - The First Day, Richmond to Rodanthe
We established early on for that first trip that we wanted to go down the North Carolina coast; as I said already, our stated goal was originally Wilmington, but we built around the concept of coastal travel for that one. One of the nice things about the Tidewater country is that there's a tremendous wealth of stuff to do within easy reach. I recall a coworker describing the area as "two hours east, you're at the beach, two hours west, you're in the mountains," and that pretty much describes it, though I personally consider the ocean as a swimming pool and a place to get away from everyone, not a tourist destination.
For the purposes of this description, since I want this to be as generally applicable as possible, we started in Richmond. The plan for the first day was to travel via Norfolk to VA/NC 168, which is a toll road, joining US 158 just south of South Mills, North Carolina, then to take US 158 eastbound onto the islands. Our first planned stop was the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk, followed by lunch, then Fort Raleigh National Monument and the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, followed by a drive south to our final destination at the Cape Hatteras KOA in Rodanthe.
Road distance, this was about two hundred miles, with one toll road, two-plus national park facilities, and one roadside tourist trap. It included two planned meals and one catch-as-catch-can in Rodanthe. It wasn't a terribly complicated trip, and with everything that we included could have been executed as one very long day trip. Later, we did do basically this trip as a day trip, but didn't capture anything after Kitty Hawk in it because of one of the great imponderables of road trips: traffic.
The first stop of the day was the Virginia Diner, in Wakefield, Virginia, which was a staple point for all of our various wanderings in the Tidewater country. Virginia Diner is a peculiar combination of restaurant and roadside tourist stop. It really requires no directions beyond "in Wakefield," since there's not a lot of Wakefield and Virginia Diner, like Rock City, advertises from miles away. They serve traditional southern food, which means it ranges from pulled pork to fried chicken. My wife says the fried chicken is excellent, but because it's in Virginia I always get something ham-based, usually two orders of ham biscuits with mustard and pickles. For my money, no one in the United States does ham like Virginia; Virginia feels about ham the way that Texas feels about beef. There are legal restrictions on what can be called a Smithfield ham, including a radius from Smithfield and methods of execution. A Smithfield ham is therefore a salt-cured ham prepared within an area about fifty miles across. This serves as a pretty good indicator of how seriously Virginia takes ham. Ham biscuits are exactly what they sound like, biscuits with thin-shaved ham. Two orders sounds excessive, but is cheaper than any of the other common entree items, and is just about perfect to fill the belly, and has the added advantage of being napkin-portable without needing more. I've also had their biscuits and gravy, and their pulled pork, so I can confidently say that everything I've ordered off their menu has been up to my occasionally picky standards. If I were going to make specific menu recommendations, the carrot souffle is something unique to them in my experience, the ham biscuits are hands-down my favorite (followed closely by the all-you-can-eat biscuits and gravy, though most people could do well with a single order of biscuits and gravy), and the chocolate peanut butter silk pie is good enough that my eldest daughter, who dislikes pie, did not refuse it instantly. Additionally, though not on this trip, we have showed up five minutes before closing time, and they have cheerfully seated us, served freshly prepared food, and raised absolutely no fuss about a party with children showing up at the very tail end of the day, so their service has been, in my experience, beyond reproach. The restaurant also has a gift shop, which includes a variety of knick-knacks, never purchased, and peanut-based products, occasionally purchased, as they are almost as proud of their peanuts as they are of their ham. The peanuts are, so far as I'm concerned, peanuts, but who am I to turn down chocolate-covered nut clusters?
Once we were in North Carolina, we stopped at Wright Brothers National Memorial first. The main visitors' center has changed very little since I first visited in the 1980s with my family. To the new visitor, this may mean it has a slightly dated feel, but to me it meant a sense of comfortable wear. The visitor center itself is a National Historic Landmark, built in art deco style in keeping with the forward-thinking, futuristic implications of the first heavier-than-air flight. Outside is exposed-aggregate concrete and metallic trim, inside is wood paneling and more exposed-ag concrete. Within, there is a full-sized mock-up of the Wright Flyer in one area, a discussion of the Wrights and their experimental process in another, and mock-ups of wind tunnels, gearing, and controls in yet another. The site offers a junior ranger program, and regular talks in the area with the mock-up of the plane. Throughout are "hall of fame" pictures of influential aviators, some famous, some less so. Lindbergh, Earhart, Doolittle, Mitchell, Curtiss, Hughes, Yeager, Armstrong... all of them have pictures up on the wall, as do many less famous names. Some of them died in the process of getting on the wall. One of the recurring themes here is going to be that nothing great comes easy, and the wall at Wright Brothers, like Fort Raleigh, like the astronaut wall at Johnson Space Center, is a reminder that sometimes the price is very steep indeed.
Outside the visitors' center, there are new exhibits about life at Kitty Hawk from 1900 to 1903, which are housed in inflatable tent buildings, and on general aviation. There is a brief film over on that side of the complex, but it was not the main attraction. The main attraction is what was once a sand dune, since stabilized and sculpted better to accommodate visitors, called Kill Devil Hill. Atop is a granite monument in the shape of a stylized wing, dating to 1932 and inscribed thus:
From this monument runs a metal rail, a reconstruction of the original rail used by the Wrights. It terminates at a granite monolith with a brass plaque on it, marking the point where the Wright Flyer left the ground for each of its flights. There is a picture of me, with my father, standing at this marker, the oldest surviving object on the site, as it was dedicated in 1929. There's also a picture of me out there with both of my at-the-time children at this spot. As you, O gentle reader, can tell by the number of words I have spent on it, it is one of my favorite memories.
From Wright Brothers we stopped for lunch at Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, in Kitty Hawk. My father-in-law had recommended it from a previous visit, and we said we would check for him to make sure it was still there, so this was no mere spur of the moment visit but a planned feature of the trip. This is the original Awful Arthur's, though there are others in the greater Hampton Roads-Outer Banks area. The menu is about what one would expect for a place called Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, heavy on fried seafood with a side of drinking, but on both of my visits, they were very child-friendly and had menu options that didn't involve frying things. The first time I recall my wife ordering some sort of grilled fish, but that may be a mistake on my part; I definitely ordered crab bisque and crab and butter, with orders of calamari, crab balls, and hush puppies for everyone to share. I don't recall what the kids ordered, because their food tends to be pretty predictable. It was all quite good, good enough that two years later I can remember exactly what I ordered, but the standouts were the crab balls, because crab meat, packed into a ball and then fried, is one of the secret joys of the universe. The crab and butter is exactly what it says: lump crab meat (not imitation, definitely actual crab), with butter. It is elegant and delicious in its simplicity. The only drawback to Awful Arthur's is the price; even ordering much more modestly than we did could be an expensive meal. However, since part of the purpose of this is to encourage people to do things for the experience, not just the cost, I would, and did, still go back without reservation.
After lunch we hooked back inland slightly via the Virginia Dare Bridge to Manteo, an island community that is neither seedy and dirty-feeling, nor excessively overdeveloped. I suspect it's not a cheap place to live, but it looks neither particularly bad, nor particularly amazing. It is a nice, sleepy-looking town; if Hobbits had a beach town, it would be Manteo, North Carolina. The Virginia Dare Bridge sums the town up pretty nicely: nice, not terrifying, but also not spectacular in the way that, say, the Astoria bridge over the Columbia, or the Earl Long I-10 bridge in Baton Rouge, is. Manteo is home to Fort Raleigh National Monument, the site of the first English-speaking settlement in the Americas. Little is known of what happened to the settlers, other than the marking "CROATOAN" carved into a doorpost. There's no record of their disappearance; in 1587, they were there, in 1590 they were not, and the colony had obviously been abandoned for some time. As settlements go, it made even less of a splash than Vinland or Port Isabella. Its real main contributions to history were as part of the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh, reputed lover of Queen Elizabeth, as the source of lost-colony myths, and as the home of the first English subject born in the New World, Virginia Dare, who vanished with the colony before she could properly be called an English-speaker. The settlement site is surprisingly small, encompassing a four-bastioned star fort smaller than any house I've lived in since having children. Nevertheless, to a military eye all the elements are there: a perimeter wall, including probably a log palisade atop the earthwork, a shallow dry moat, a sallyport, and likely firing positions for four cannon. It is a small fort, but the expected threat wasn't the Comte de Vauban.
Fort Raleigh also holds a large wood and concrete amphitheater with the Sound at its back, host to a play called "The Lost Colony" since 1937; its most famous attendee was Franklin Roosevelt. The play only runs during the summer, so we did not attend. Of more interest to me personally were two of the displays in the visitors' center. First of these was a Tudor chamber, reconstructed from original materials purchased in Britain and transported across the Atlantic to display what a finished house of the period would have resembled. The interest here was not in Tudor architecture, which is full of heavy, dark woods, thin lead-lined diamond-paned windows, and half-timbered exteriors finished with mud and painted for maximum contrast; it was in the measures taken to ensure accuracy, as the entire thing was filled with materials dating back to the 1500s. The other display was on the Civil War history of Roanoke. The island was used as a freedmen's colony after Burnside captured New Bern. At first called contrabands, indicating their status as seized assets of a warring power, they were later called freedmen after the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in military-controlled areas. They streamed into the Union lines from the swampy coastal areas, fleeing the plantations and establishing lives strikingly similar to those they knew on the plantation. Freedmen cabins were small, cramped, little better than hovels, but where elsewhere they might have ordered their lives by someone else's plan, here they set their own. Large numbers were not quite drafted by the Union army as laborers, unloading ships, carrying cargo, building corduroy roads, expanding the South's meager rail lines. They were paid a pittance, but their wages were theirs. Still more became soldiers, joining the US Colored Troops. They knew the risks they faced bearing arms against the Confederacy, and still thought that it was worth it.
The last stop at Fort Raleigh was the privately owned Elizabethan Gardens, owned by the North Carolina Garden Club. This is meant to mimic an Elizabethan garden of the late Tudor period, but in reality probably bears more resemblance to a fantasy of an Elizabethan garden than anything else. Paths meander through it, there are several bronze statues, including one life-size of an artist's Sexy Virginia Dare Halloween costume concept (keep in mind, she vanished before she was three; we have no idea what she would have looked like as a young adult!) and one larger-than-life of Elizabeth I. I am not a huge garden enthusiast, but even so I enjoyed it, and I regret not picking up roses when I had the chance. One of the varietals they have is the Queen Elizabeth, bred for the visit of Queen Elizabeth II on the quadricentennial of the establishment of Fort Raleigh in 1987 by crossing New World strains with strains from the Buckingham Palace rose garden.
That brought us to the middle of the afternoon, so we turned southward once more, going back out to the outer islands and proceeding through Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge towards Rodanthe. The road was one of the more unnerving experiences of the trip, because it was constructed at much lower grade than the surrounding dunes are now. Therefore, it gives the impression of driving through a cut in the dunes along much of its length. This produces a sort of highway hypnosis that I encounter frequently driving through scenery that does not materially change for mile after mile, a less than thrilling condition when groundwater occasionally seeps from beneath the dunes to flood the road. The one stop we made prior to Rodanthe was at the Bodie Island Lighthouse, the northernmost unit of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The rest of the family was restless and uninterested, so I swung in, looked around, stamped our park passport books, and came back out. It was just as well; the attendant seemed annoyed at our presence.
We finally pulled in at the Cape Hatteras KOA in Rodanthe with the sun still above the horizon, got our Airstream keys, and set up for the night. The Cape Hatteras KOA was still recovering from Hurricane Irene two years previous, but even so, the facilities were good, the beach was a very short walk away, and there was a resident murder of fish crows. One advantage of an Airstream or other luxury cabin at a KOA is that the facilities are not communal, which you don't get with a standard camping cabin or tent in most places. I have a great deal more to say about lodging types and styles, but that deserves its own full-length discussion, not as an appendix. So take off your shoes and put your feet up, we're sleeping here tonight.
For the purposes of this description, since I want this to be as generally applicable as possible, we started in Richmond. The plan for the first day was to travel via Norfolk to VA/NC 168, which is a toll road, joining US 158 just south of South Mills, North Carolina, then to take US 158 eastbound onto the islands. Our first planned stop was the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk, followed by lunch, then Fort Raleigh National Monument and the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, followed by a drive south to our final destination at the Cape Hatteras KOA in Rodanthe.
Road distance, this was about two hundred miles, with one toll road, two-plus national park facilities, and one roadside tourist trap. It included two planned meals and one catch-as-catch-can in Rodanthe. It wasn't a terribly complicated trip, and with everything that we included could have been executed as one very long day trip. Later, we did do basically this trip as a day trip, but didn't capture anything after Kitty Hawk in it because of one of the great imponderables of road trips: traffic.
The first stop of the day was the Virginia Diner, in Wakefield, Virginia, which was a staple point for all of our various wanderings in the Tidewater country. Virginia Diner is a peculiar combination of restaurant and roadside tourist stop. It really requires no directions beyond "in Wakefield," since there's not a lot of Wakefield and Virginia Diner, like Rock City, advertises from miles away. They serve traditional southern food, which means it ranges from pulled pork to fried chicken. My wife says the fried chicken is excellent, but because it's in Virginia I always get something ham-based, usually two orders of ham biscuits with mustard and pickles. For my money, no one in the United States does ham like Virginia; Virginia feels about ham the way that Texas feels about beef. There are legal restrictions on what can be called a Smithfield ham, including a radius from Smithfield and methods of execution. A Smithfield ham is therefore a salt-cured ham prepared within an area about fifty miles across. This serves as a pretty good indicator of how seriously Virginia takes ham. Ham biscuits are exactly what they sound like, biscuits with thin-shaved ham. Two orders sounds excessive, but is cheaper than any of the other common entree items, and is just about perfect to fill the belly, and has the added advantage of being napkin-portable without needing more. I've also had their biscuits and gravy, and their pulled pork, so I can confidently say that everything I've ordered off their menu has been up to my occasionally picky standards. If I were going to make specific menu recommendations, the carrot souffle is something unique to them in my experience, the ham biscuits are hands-down my favorite (followed closely by the all-you-can-eat biscuits and gravy, though most people could do well with a single order of biscuits and gravy), and the chocolate peanut butter silk pie is good enough that my eldest daughter, who dislikes pie, did not refuse it instantly. Additionally, though not on this trip, we have showed up five minutes before closing time, and they have cheerfully seated us, served freshly prepared food, and raised absolutely no fuss about a party with children showing up at the very tail end of the day, so their service has been, in my experience, beyond reproach. The restaurant also has a gift shop, which includes a variety of knick-knacks, never purchased, and peanut-based products, occasionally purchased, as they are almost as proud of their peanuts as they are of their ham. The peanuts are, so far as I'm concerned, peanuts, but who am I to turn down chocolate-covered nut clusters?
Once we were in North Carolina, we stopped at Wright Brothers National Memorial first. The main visitors' center has changed very little since I first visited in the 1980s with my family. To the new visitor, this may mean it has a slightly dated feel, but to me it meant a sense of comfortable wear. The visitor center itself is a National Historic Landmark, built in art deco style in keeping with the forward-thinking, futuristic implications of the first heavier-than-air flight. Outside is exposed-aggregate concrete and metallic trim, inside is wood paneling and more exposed-ag concrete. Within, there is a full-sized mock-up of the Wright Flyer in one area, a discussion of the Wrights and their experimental process in another, and mock-ups of wind tunnels, gearing, and controls in yet another. The site offers a junior ranger program, and regular talks in the area with the mock-up of the plane. Throughout are "hall of fame" pictures of influential aviators, some famous, some less so. Lindbergh, Earhart, Doolittle, Mitchell, Curtiss, Hughes, Yeager, Armstrong... all of them have pictures up on the wall, as do many less famous names. Some of them died in the process of getting on the wall. One of the recurring themes here is going to be that nothing great comes easy, and the wall at Wright Brothers, like Fort Raleigh, like the astronaut wall at Johnson Space Center, is a reminder that sometimes the price is very steep indeed.
Outside the visitors' center, there are new exhibits about life at Kitty Hawk from 1900 to 1903, which are housed in inflatable tent buildings, and on general aviation. There is a brief film over on that side of the complex, but it was not the main attraction. The main attraction is what was once a sand dune, since stabilized and sculpted better to accommodate visitors, called Kill Devil Hill. Atop is a granite monument in the shape of a stylized wing, dating to 1932 and inscribed thus:
In commemoration of the conquest of the air by the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright conceived by genius achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.
From this monument runs a metal rail, a reconstruction of the original rail used by the Wrights. It terminates at a granite monolith with a brass plaque on it, marking the point where the Wright Flyer left the ground for each of its flights. There is a picture of me, with my father, standing at this marker, the oldest surviving object on the site, as it was dedicated in 1929. There's also a picture of me out there with both of my at-the-time children at this spot. As you, O gentle reader, can tell by the number of words I have spent on it, it is one of my favorite memories.
From Wright Brothers we stopped for lunch at Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, in Kitty Hawk. My father-in-law had recommended it from a previous visit, and we said we would check for him to make sure it was still there, so this was no mere spur of the moment visit but a planned feature of the trip. This is the original Awful Arthur's, though there are others in the greater Hampton Roads-Outer Banks area. The menu is about what one would expect for a place called Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, heavy on fried seafood with a side of drinking, but on both of my visits, they were very child-friendly and had menu options that didn't involve frying things. The first time I recall my wife ordering some sort of grilled fish, but that may be a mistake on my part; I definitely ordered crab bisque and crab and butter, with orders of calamari, crab balls, and hush puppies for everyone to share. I don't recall what the kids ordered, because their food tends to be pretty predictable. It was all quite good, good enough that two years later I can remember exactly what I ordered, but the standouts were the crab balls, because crab meat, packed into a ball and then fried, is one of the secret joys of the universe. The crab and butter is exactly what it says: lump crab meat (not imitation, definitely actual crab), with butter. It is elegant and delicious in its simplicity. The only drawback to Awful Arthur's is the price; even ordering much more modestly than we did could be an expensive meal. However, since part of the purpose of this is to encourage people to do things for the experience, not just the cost, I would, and did, still go back without reservation.
After lunch we hooked back inland slightly via the Virginia Dare Bridge to Manteo, an island community that is neither seedy and dirty-feeling, nor excessively overdeveloped. I suspect it's not a cheap place to live, but it looks neither particularly bad, nor particularly amazing. It is a nice, sleepy-looking town; if Hobbits had a beach town, it would be Manteo, North Carolina. The Virginia Dare Bridge sums the town up pretty nicely: nice, not terrifying, but also not spectacular in the way that, say, the Astoria bridge over the Columbia, or the Earl Long I-10 bridge in Baton Rouge, is. Manteo is home to Fort Raleigh National Monument, the site of the first English-speaking settlement in the Americas. Little is known of what happened to the settlers, other than the marking "CROATOAN" carved into a doorpost. There's no record of their disappearance; in 1587, they were there, in 1590 they were not, and the colony had obviously been abandoned for some time. As settlements go, it made even less of a splash than Vinland or Port Isabella. Its real main contributions to history were as part of the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh, reputed lover of Queen Elizabeth, as the source of lost-colony myths, and as the home of the first English subject born in the New World, Virginia Dare, who vanished with the colony before she could properly be called an English-speaker. The settlement site is surprisingly small, encompassing a four-bastioned star fort smaller than any house I've lived in since having children. Nevertheless, to a military eye all the elements are there: a perimeter wall, including probably a log palisade atop the earthwork, a shallow dry moat, a sallyport, and likely firing positions for four cannon. It is a small fort, but the expected threat wasn't the Comte de Vauban.
Fort Raleigh also holds a large wood and concrete amphitheater with the Sound at its back, host to a play called "The Lost Colony" since 1937; its most famous attendee was Franklin Roosevelt. The play only runs during the summer, so we did not attend. Of more interest to me personally were two of the displays in the visitors' center. First of these was a Tudor chamber, reconstructed from original materials purchased in Britain and transported across the Atlantic to display what a finished house of the period would have resembled. The interest here was not in Tudor architecture, which is full of heavy, dark woods, thin lead-lined diamond-paned windows, and half-timbered exteriors finished with mud and painted for maximum contrast; it was in the measures taken to ensure accuracy, as the entire thing was filled with materials dating back to the 1500s. The other display was on the Civil War history of Roanoke. The island was used as a freedmen's colony after Burnside captured New Bern. At first called contrabands, indicating their status as seized assets of a warring power, they were later called freedmen after the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in military-controlled areas. They streamed into the Union lines from the swampy coastal areas, fleeing the plantations and establishing lives strikingly similar to those they knew on the plantation. Freedmen cabins were small, cramped, little better than hovels, but where elsewhere they might have ordered their lives by someone else's plan, here they set their own. Large numbers were not quite drafted by the Union army as laborers, unloading ships, carrying cargo, building corduroy roads, expanding the South's meager rail lines. They were paid a pittance, but their wages were theirs. Still more became soldiers, joining the US Colored Troops. They knew the risks they faced bearing arms against the Confederacy, and still thought that it was worth it.
The last stop at Fort Raleigh was the privately owned Elizabethan Gardens, owned by the North Carolina Garden Club. This is meant to mimic an Elizabethan garden of the late Tudor period, but in reality probably bears more resemblance to a fantasy of an Elizabethan garden than anything else. Paths meander through it, there are several bronze statues, including one life-size of an artist's Sexy Virginia Dare Halloween costume concept (keep in mind, she vanished before she was three; we have no idea what she would have looked like as a young adult!) and one larger-than-life of Elizabeth I. I am not a huge garden enthusiast, but even so I enjoyed it, and I regret not picking up roses when I had the chance. One of the varietals they have is the Queen Elizabeth, bred for the visit of Queen Elizabeth II on the quadricentennial of the establishment of Fort Raleigh in 1987 by crossing New World strains with strains from the Buckingham Palace rose garden.
That brought us to the middle of the afternoon, so we turned southward once more, going back out to the outer islands and proceeding through Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge towards Rodanthe. The road was one of the more unnerving experiences of the trip, because it was constructed at much lower grade than the surrounding dunes are now. Therefore, it gives the impression of driving through a cut in the dunes along much of its length. This produces a sort of highway hypnosis that I encounter frequently driving through scenery that does not materially change for mile after mile, a less than thrilling condition when groundwater occasionally seeps from beneath the dunes to flood the road. The one stop we made prior to Rodanthe was at the Bodie Island Lighthouse, the northernmost unit of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The rest of the family was restless and uninterested, so I swung in, looked around, stamped our park passport books, and came back out. It was just as well; the attendant seemed annoyed at our presence.
We finally pulled in at the Cape Hatteras KOA in Rodanthe with the sun still above the horizon, got our Airstream keys, and set up for the night. The Cape Hatteras KOA was still recovering from Hurricane Irene two years previous, but even so, the facilities were good, the beach was a very short walk away, and there was a resident murder of fish crows. One advantage of an Airstream or other luxury cabin at a KOA is that the facilities are not communal, which you don't get with a standard camping cabin or tent in most places. I have a great deal more to say about lodging types and styles, but that deserves its own full-length discussion, not as an appendix. So take off your shoes and put your feet up, we're sleeping here tonight.
Sunday, August 2, 2015
The First Trip, Part I: Background
Our very first "real" trip was constrained by time and money because Mrs. Traveling Matt was very pregnant, we had not hit our current income level, and we only had a week for spring break. Nevertheless, that trip provided the blueprint for all the trips we have taken since. Since it was the first example of what we've since considerably refined, it bears laying out.
In 2013, we were living in Tidewater Virginia, a lovely country where the transition from rural to suburban or even full-blown urban is basically a screen of trees. The area is full of small farms, shaded roads, and, perhaps best for me, history. We had made a number of day trips from our home, going to Jamestown, Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Fort Monroe on the Peninsula, Richmond to the north, Appomattox Courthouse to the west, and Norfolk and Virginia Beach along the south shore of Hampton Roads. We had initially bought a pass to Petersburg National Battlefield Park before we realized that where we were, a Petersburg-specific pass would simply not do, so we bought a federal lands interagency annual pass, which at the time was $75 and has since risen to $80.
The first piece of advice, O gentle reader, that I shall give you is to buy that pass. If you are disabled or senior, it will cost you between nothing and $10. If you are active military, again, it will cost you about $10. If you are a normal person, it will cost you about $80, assuming that the Department of the Interior doesn't raise their rates annually. Even if they do, the Interior interagency pass is a superb value. Admission for a week to a large park like Yellowstone or Yosemite will run you about $25-30, before camping or anything else. Smaller parks like Little Big Horn National Battlefield will run you about $10 to $15. Therefore, only three visits per year to a larger park, or six to eight visits to smaller parks, will completely pay off the initial investment. That only refers to National Park Service facilities. The Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Forest Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service also fall under Interior, and any of their facilities that charges admission will be covered by the interagency pass. It is, in short, a superb investment and since your purchase goes directly to Interior's land-management programs (NPS, NFS, FWS, BLM, et cetera), you can be fairly certain that your purchase is going to a good cause.
Now, having given that advice, back to the trip. In planning, we were far too ambitious, and wound up discarding a lot of what we planned by the end of the trip. We had originally planned to travel down the Outer Banks, with the outbound terminus at Wilmington and the homeward leg only stopping at Moores Creek National Battlefield. As it happens, Wilmington was just beyond what we could realistically do with the time available and would have taken a couple days in any case to see everything we wanted to see - and that was at our usual dead-sprint pace! Wilmington aside, we planned to be very active. For the first day we planned to come through Norfolk, with no stops since we visited Norfolk pretty regularly, then follow the coast to Nags Head and see the Wright Brothers memorial, cut inland slightly, and see Roanoke and the neighboring Elizabethan Gardens. After this, the plan was to overnight at a KOA in Rodanthe, then see Cape Hatteras, cut back to mainland, and go to Cape Lookout National Seashore. We had considered camping at Cape Hatteras, but we were not then the solid campers that I consider us to be now. We decided that we would take a cabin at Cape Lookout for a couple of days, then go back to the mainland and see Wilmington, then go home.
Having thus described the trip itself, I will now describe for you the setting. My wife jokes that my stories have a tendency to wander back to the beginning of geologic time, then meander back to reality, so rather than wander back, I will begin at the beginning, when the rock were new.
The Outer Banks, in this case broadening the term to include the Crystal Coast region that stretches almost to Wilmington, are a series of barrier islands. Runoff from the Appalachians carried large volumes of sand and gravel out into the waters of the Atlantic, where the riverine flow was stopped by the Atlantic currents running perpendicular to the coast. When the river water stopped moving, it dropped its load of sands, silts, and gravels. The sands, as they were dropped, formed large sandbars and shifting tidal conditions just offshore, and the sandbars eventually turned into full-blown islands, often so narrow that on one side you can see the Atlantic, and on the other the bays of Pamlico and Albemarle Sound, from ground level. The shifting tidal conditions in the Sounds, where river current warred with Atlantic current, produced unstable cuts between the islands, tremendous navigational hazards that made the area ripe for smugglers and pirates; indeed, this is where Blackbeard was brought to ground, at Ocracoke, at the south end of modern Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The winds that come tearing in off the Atlantic pretty much year round also made this a difficult place for unfamiliar sailors, leery of being trapped on a lee shore with no good landmarks.
Little grows on the islands, as they are too sandy for proper agriculture and too wind-swept for anything but the hardiest families of trees. Pines take root here, as do grasses, anchoring the dunes. The local economy has been driven since before white men were here by fishing and shellfishing. The Indians used the islands as temporary camps, and no one particularly seemed interested in living in such a difficult to access area except those who had reason to prize the difficulty, pirates, smugglers, and eccentric hermits. The first Englishmen to try to settle on the east coast came here under Walter Raleigh, who struck a sandbar and had to beach at Ocracoke for repairs. Raleigh's attempt to set up a colony at Roanoke, on modern Manteo at Fort Raleigh National Monument, failed for reasons that have never been fully understood, but probably had much to do with a combination of poor manners and poor planning. The greatest contribution that Roanoke gave America was probably Virginia Dare, who was the first English subject born in the New World. There is a statue of Virginia Dare as imagined by 19th Century sculptors at Roanoke today, but it bears little resemblance to the girl who vanished from history before she could properly walk or speak. Otherwise, Roanoke, like many of the early colonial attempts by everyone from Leif Ericsson to Columbus, is at best a footnote.
However, Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds contain excellent fishing, and the soils are wet, rich with organic material, excellent farming soils if they can just be drained, so settlement was inevitable. Treacherous waters and shifting currents may be the enemy of long-haul shippers who do not know every bay and current, but they are a godsend to smugglers, pirates, and others with an interest in less officially sanctioned commerce. By the early 1700s, Ocracoke had become a pirate haven, home to Edward Teach, of the forty-gun frigate Queen Anne's Revenge. History knows him better as Blackbeard. He was run to ground by the Royal Navy just outside of modern Morehead. Recent archaeological work has found remains of Queen Anne's Revenge, which unfortunately I did not know in 2013 when we were passing through, and even if I had, by the time we reached Morehead on the return trip we were fairly well burned out.
The difficulty of navigation in this region made the Outer Banks one of the first places where an extensive network of lighthouses were developed by the federal government. Cape Hatteras has the most famous, which was recovered by a spectacular engineering project from falling into the sea. As an engineer, the story of the movement of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is close to my heart; I worked on a project once where a similar proposal was considered for German fortifications in Normandy. Despite being the most famous, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is not the only one, nor indeed the only one within Cape Hatteras National Seashore. At each lighthouse was stationed a keeper and his family; rarely were lighthouse keepers solitary bachelors. Frequently also they were accompanied by a detachment from the Lifesaving Service, which was eventually folded into the Coast Guard, as was the Lighthouse Service.
Shifting sands and difficult waters made the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound area significant in other ways. In 1862, needing a victory of some sort, Abraham Lincoln ordered an invasion of the North Carolina coast, and the site chosen by General Ambrose Burnside for landing was New Bern. The Union troops almost refused to board the makeshift fleet in New York, until Burnside chose the meanest, least seaworthy-looking vessel for his headquarters. They came ashore in early March of 1862, bypassing the Confederate river defenses in the mouth of the Trent, and captured the city after a short, sharp fight. Losses on both sides ran to about five hundred killed and wounded each, a near miracle for a Civil War battle. Burnside's beachhead became the center of a recruiting complex, for the difficult, swampy coast was a natural lure for runaway slaves, it being so difficult to pursue them into it. The slaves gathered, upwards of ten thousand of them by the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, in a colony located not a stone's throw from Fort Raleigh. Many worked as laborers for the Union army for pittance wages - but wages nonetheless. Many more chose to enlist in the US Colored Troops, and would go on to prove Frederick Douglass right:
Those same soft sands and hard offshore winds that made the Outer Banks treacherous to casual visitors made it the perfect place for the development of heavier-than-air flight. When they were looking for a place to test their tethered gliders, Orville and Wilbur Wright found the weather reports from the Nags Head weather station, showing sustained year-round offshore winds. The Wrights decided that the combination of beach sand, offshore winds, and dunes high enough to launch gliders from were the perfect place for their work, and from 1900 to 1903, Kill Devil Hills, just south of Kitty Hawk, was where they put their equipment through its paces. This culminated in the launch and flight of the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903. The airport at Kitty Hawk is still open, nominally the oldest in the world, serving small civil and commercial aviation.
That's the geology and the history, then. Unfortunately, one cannot see history, and geology is not always interesting even when you can see it. So - why would anyone choose to visit a windswept sandbar?
Because it is beautiful.
The average high ground is about ten, fifteen feet off the water, maximum, with clean white sand beaches. If you can get away from the tourist areas, and go out to a campsite off the beaten path, the beaches are even cleaner. The dunes are marked by dense growth of sand oats, which, if you find the right island, feed populations of wild horses. Scrubby, thorny shrubs also help bind the dunes down, and if you find a place where the islands are wide enough that they aren't going to be cut in half by the first hard storm, there are stands of pine trees that swallow any sound not directed straight at you, creating this impression of quiet and tranquility even when you know that on the far side of the trees is a fishing harbor. There are birds enough for anyone's heart, including all the seagulls you can throw rocks at, at least three species of corvid (common crow, raven, and fish crow) and two of raptor (osprey, red-tailed hawk) if you're lucky. The fishing is good even now (this from a non-fisherman; I know this because I love seafood). If, like me, "nothing" is not in your makeup, there are things to do and see. The Atlantic is right there to swim in, cold year-round without being freezing except in winter, as I've already laid out there is plenty of history, and walking the beach is its own kind of relaxation. There are enough different species of shellfish that after this trip we were set for soap dishes, using seashells under the reasonable-take signs that the NPS puts out at Cape Lookout.
Over the next few days I intend to describe the trip phase by phase, including wherever possible recommendations from the stops made that day for anyone who cares to repeat the trip. In the meantime, get out the tent, and make sure the inverter works for the air mattress. I'll just sleep on the ground if it's all the same.
The first piece of advice, O gentle reader, that I shall give you is to buy that pass. If you are disabled or senior, it will cost you between nothing and $10. If you are active military, again, it will cost you about $10. If you are a normal person, it will cost you about $80, assuming that the Department of the Interior doesn't raise their rates annually. Even if they do, the Interior interagency pass is a superb value. Admission for a week to a large park like Yellowstone or Yosemite will run you about $25-30, before camping or anything else. Smaller parks like Little Big Horn National Battlefield will run you about $10 to $15. Therefore, only three visits per year to a larger park, or six to eight visits to smaller parks, will completely pay off the initial investment. That only refers to National Park Service facilities. The Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Forest Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service also fall under Interior, and any of their facilities that charges admission will be covered by the interagency pass. It is, in short, a superb investment and since your purchase goes directly to Interior's land-management programs (NPS, NFS, FWS, BLM, et cetera), you can be fairly certain that your purchase is going to a good cause.
Now, having given that advice, back to the trip. In planning, we were far too ambitious, and wound up discarding a lot of what we planned by the end of the trip. We had originally planned to travel down the Outer Banks, with the outbound terminus at Wilmington and the homeward leg only stopping at Moores Creek National Battlefield. As it happens, Wilmington was just beyond what we could realistically do with the time available and would have taken a couple days in any case to see everything we wanted to see - and that was at our usual dead-sprint pace! Wilmington aside, we planned to be very active. For the first day we planned to come through Norfolk, with no stops since we visited Norfolk pretty regularly, then follow the coast to Nags Head and see the Wright Brothers memorial, cut inland slightly, and see Roanoke and the neighboring Elizabethan Gardens. After this, the plan was to overnight at a KOA in Rodanthe, then see Cape Hatteras, cut back to mainland, and go to Cape Lookout National Seashore. We had considered camping at Cape Hatteras, but we were not then the solid campers that I consider us to be now. We decided that we would take a cabin at Cape Lookout for a couple of days, then go back to the mainland and see Wilmington, then go home.
Having thus described the trip itself, I will now describe for you the setting. My wife jokes that my stories have a tendency to wander back to the beginning of geologic time, then meander back to reality, so rather than wander back, I will begin at the beginning, when the rock were new.
The Outer Banks, in this case broadening the term to include the Crystal Coast region that stretches almost to Wilmington, are a series of barrier islands. Runoff from the Appalachians carried large volumes of sand and gravel out into the waters of the Atlantic, where the riverine flow was stopped by the Atlantic currents running perpendicular to the coast. When the river water stopped moving, it dropped its load of sands, silts, and gravels. The sands, as they were dropped, formed large sandbars and shifting tidal conditions just offshore, and the sandbars eventually turned into full-blown islands, often so narrow that on one side you can see the Atlantic, and on the other the bays of Pamlico and Albemarle Sound, from ground level. The shifting tidal conditions in the Sounds, where river current warred with Atlantic current, produced unstable cuts between the islands, tremendous navigational hazards that made the area ripe for smugglers and pirates; indeed, this is where Blackbeard was brought to ground, at Ocracoke, at the south end of modern Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The winds that come tearing in off the Atlantic pretty much year round also made this a difficult place for unfamiliar sailors, leery of being trapped on a lee shore with no good landmarks.
Little grows on the islands, as they are too sandy for proper agriculture and too wind-swept for anything but the hardiest families of trees. Pines take root here, as do grasses, anchoring the dunes. The local economy has been driven since before white men were here by fishing and shellfishing. The Indians used the islands as temporary camps, and no one particularly seemed interested in living in such a difficult to access area except those who had reason to prize the difficulty, pirates, smugglers, and eccentric hermits. The first Englishmen to try to settle on the east coast came here under Walter Raleigh, who struck a sandbar and had to beach at Ocracoke for repairs. Raleigh's attempt to set up a colony at Roanoke, on modern Manteo at Fort Raleigh National Monument, failed for reasons that have never been fully understood, but probably had much to do with a combination of poor manners and poor planning. The greatest contribution that Roanoke gave America was probably Virginia Dare, who was the first English subject born in the New World. There is a statue of Virginia Dare as imagined by 19th Century sculptors at Roanoke today, but it bears little resemblance to the girl who vanished from history before she could properly walk or speak. Otherwise, Roanoke, like many of the early colonial attempts by everyone from Leif Ericsson to Columbus, is at best a footnote.
However, Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds contain excellent fishing, and the soils are wet, rich with organic material, excellent farming soils if they can just be drained, so settlement was inevitable. Treacherous waters and shifting currents may be the enemy of long-haul shippers who do not know every bay and current, but they are a godsend to smugglers, pirates, and others with an interest in less officially sanctioned commerce. By the early 1700s, Ocracoke had become a pirate haven, home to Edward Teach, of the forty-gun frigate Queen Anne's Revenge. History knows him better as Blackbeard. He was run to ground by the Royal Navy just outside of modern Morehead. Recent archaeological work has found remains of Queen Anne's Revenge, which unfortunately I did not know in 2013 when we were passing through, and even if I had, by the time we reached Morehead on the return trip we were fairly well burned out.
The difficulty of navigation in this region made the Outer Banks one of the first places where an extensive network of lighthouses were developed by the federal government. Cape Hatteras has the most famous, which was recovered by a spectacular engineering project from falling into the sea. As an engineer, the story of the movement of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is close to my heart; I worked on a project once where a similar proposal was considered for German fortifications in Normandy. Despite being the most famous, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is not the only one, nor indeed the only one within Cape Hatteras National Seashore. At each lighthouse was stationed a keeper and his family; rarely were lighthouse keepers solitary bachelors. Frequently also they were accompanied by a detachment from the Lifesaving Service, which was eventually folded into the Coast Guard, as was the Lighthouse Service.
Shifting sands and difficult waters made the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound area significant in other ways. In 1862, needing a victory of some sort, Abraham Lincoln ordered an invasion of the North Carolina coast, and the site chosen by General Ambrose Burnside for landing was New Bern. The Union troops almost refused to board the makeshift fleet in New York, until Burnside chose the meanest, least seaworthy-looking vessel for his headquarters. They came ashore in early March of 1862, bypassing the Confederate river defenses in the mouth of the Trent, and captured the city after a short, sharp fight. Losses on both sides ran to about five hundred killed and wounded each, a near miracle for a Civil War battle. Burnside's beachhead became the center of a recruiting complex, for the difficult, swampy coast was a natural lure for runaway slaves, it being so difficult to pursue them into it. The slaves gathered, upwards of ten thousand of them by the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, in a colony located not a stone's throw from Fort Raleigh. Many worked as laborers for the Union army for pittance wages - but wages nonetheless. Many more chose to enlist in the US Colored Troops, and would go on to prove Frederick Douglass right:
Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.
Those same soft sands and hard offshore winds that made the Outer Banks treacherous to casual visitors made it the perfect place for the development of heavier-than-air flight. When they were looking for a place to test their tethered gliders, Orville and Wilbur Wright found the weather reports from the Nags Head weather station, showing sustained year-round offshore winds. The Wrights decided that the combination of beach sand, offshore winds, and dunes high enough to launch gliders from were the perfect place for their work, and from 1900 to 1903, Kill Devil Hills, just south of Kitty Hawk, was where they put their equipment through its paces. This culminated in the launch and flight of the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903. The airport at Kitty Hawk is still open, nominally the oldest in the world, serving small civil and commercial aviation.
That's the geology and the history, then. Unfortunately, one cannot see history, and geology is not always interesting even when you can see it. So - why would anyone choose to visit a windswept sandbar?
Because it is beautiful.
The average high ground is about ten, fifteen feet off the water, maximum, with clean white sand beaches. If you can get away from the tourist areas, and go out to a campsite off the beaten path, the beaches are even cleaner. The dunes are marked by dense growth of sand oats, which, if you find the right island, feed populations of wild horses. Scrubby, thorny shrubs also help bind the dunes down, and if you find a place where the islands are wide enough that they aren't going to be cut in half by the first hard storm, there are stands of pine trees that swallow any sound not directed straight at you, creating this impression of quiet and tranquility even when you know that on the far side of the trees is a fishing harbor. There are birds enough for anyone's heart, including all the seagulls you can throw rocks at, at least three species of corvid (common crow, raven, and fish crow) and two of raptor (osprey, red-tailed hawk) if you're lucky. The fishing is good even now (this from a non-fisherman; I know this because I love seafood). If, like me, "nothing" is not in your makeup, there are things to do and see. The Atlantic is right there to swim in, cold year-round without being freezing except in winter, as I've already laid out there is plenty of history, and walking the beach is its own kind of relaxation. There are enough different species of shellfish that after this trip we were set for soap dishes, using seashells under the reasonable-take signs that the NPS puts out at Cape Lookout.
Over the next few days I intend to describe the trip phase by phase, including wherever possible recommendations from the stops made that day for anyone who cares to repeat the trip. In the meantime, get out the tent, and make sure the inverter works for the air mattress. I'll just sleep on the ground if it's all the same.
Dear Gobo...
Apparently I've become one of those people everyone runs into on Facebook, who has fascinating, amazing vacations that everyone else envies. This was completely by accident, as I think of myself as quite ordinary. I am by any stretch of the imagination thoroughly middle-class, a professional in a single-income family with four kids and an income within 10% of the national average.
One of the things you, O gentle reader, shall learn in this blog is that one of my interests is geology. One of the fundamental principles of geology is that if it happened before, it can happen again. The same applies here. If I, under those circumstances, can cover half of the United States in a great circle repeatedly for years and very rarely see the same sights twice, then so can anyone else. As far as there is a secret, it is planning. At least initially, this planning process shall be the main subject of this blog. That's not to say the trips themselves will get left out, but the importance of foundations cannot be overstated.
First, though, a little about your author, Your Uncle, Traveling Matt. I am, as I said, a professional (a licensed civil engineer in the state of Texas), who works as a federal employee square in the middle of the Hill Country and square in the middle of the middle class. I grew up in Texas, spent some time in the military, and saw most of the continents of the world, including brief stints in Iraq and Japan, which, prior to the last few years, were most of my travel experiences. On the way I somehow acquired a wife and four children, ages spread between two (as of this writing) and ten. If I am going to be strictly honest here, and my advice won't mean much if I fudge it, the planning genius in the family is my wife. I am much better at improvising, though I can improvise like nobody's business.
That, then, is a brief background. In depth, there have been a series of long road trips, with first two, then four kids, all in a 2007 Honda Pilot that has logged something like fifty thousand miles in the three years we've had it. My wife doesn't know it, at least until she reads this, but I've named it after Robert E. Lee's most famous horse, Traveller, which, like the car, was a mid-sized gray. We started off fairly small, taking our first two kids driving on business travel. Whenever it was reasonable, I would stack training classes back-to-back, so that driving was preferred by the budgeting people to flying me out, flying me home, and flying me out again. We saw quite a bit of the south that way. Growing up, I had seen most of the Gulf Coast, still one of my favorite parts of the country, but north of the I-10/US-90 corridor was largely a mystery. We got to see the lower Mississippi valley in pretty good detail, ate a lot of very good meals, and saw a lot of the country that I hadn't seen before. Of course, in the process we also stayed in hotels, because we were just starting out. Those trips took us through Atlanta, Montgomery, Jackson, Vicksburg, down the Natchez Trace to Natchez, through New Orleans, San Antonio, Tupelo, Atlanta, and Bristol. We saw battleships and Civil War battlefields, plantations and historical roads, roadside attractions and riverside picnic areas, and, perhaps in a way that I never anticipated, something inside me woke up. I realized I enjoyed traveling, that I enjoyed seeing new things, and I never turned back.
After that, we started considering more "serious" travel. Our first "real" road trip was the following year, when, with my wife six months pregnant, we went on a relatively modest trip. That trip only covered two national seashores, two national wildlife refuges, two national monuments, one national forest, the most unique ferry ride I've ever been on, one speeding ticket, one projectile-vomiting child (while driving, naturally), a twenty-five-mile round-trip off-road adventure down the beach to see a lighthouse, made well worth it by the two Park Service volunteers manning it that day, and a series of great meals in unlikely places.
So that's how it all started. From there, it just kind of snowballed, and at this point, I have people walking up to me at work telling me how awesome my vacation looked, and telling me how there's no way they could do all of this. Well... there's honestly no reason you can't. You just have to be willing to accept difficulty and discomfort along the way (not welcome, just accept that they're going to be there and you won't be able to dodge them if you want to do these things), and plan ahead as best you can. However, one of the rules of life is just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. So why should you travel like this?
I could give you a wide variety of reasons, but the basic, most fundamental one as far as I'm concerned is that traveling broadens you. You see and do things that you don't get to see and do back home. Spending my entire life in Texas I wouldn't have gotten to point out to my children, for instance, how the successive levels of casemate at Fort Point in San Francisco taper, with thick, squat walls at the base thinning slightly as they rise up through four levels. I wouldn't have gotten to run through the drill of loading, sighting, and firing a cannon at Yorktown with my son. I wouldn't have been able to demonstrate to my children how the rocks at the Grand Canyon show how fast or slow the river was moving at any given time in its history, or see the condors there. To that end, lots of people get trapped in this thinking that if you have children, you don't travel, because children and travel just don't mix. I have twice now driven the western United States, minimum five thousand miles a trip, with four children. If you give them a chance, people will surprise you with their endurance and stamina, and children are no exception.
That's why I'm writing this, to show you what we did and how we did it. If you're reading this, hopefully it inspires you to get up, get out, and get moving. In the process I will probably use it to document my own private Bucket List, much of which I've accidentally crossed off or augmented in the last couple years. I will also hopefully drag in a guest blogger, since she's much better informed about the planning side than I am, and the boring parts, planning and reservations and mapping, are what make the exciting parts possible (insert comment about amateurs and tactics, and professionals and logistics). So... burrow into your seat, adjust it as best you can, buckle up, and turn the air conditioner up to get comfortable, we have miles to go before we sleep.
One of the things you, O gentle reader, shall learn in this blog is that one of my interests is geology. One of the fundamental principles of geology is that if it happened before, it can happen again. The same applies here. If I, under those circumstances, can cover half of the United States in a great circle repeatedly for years and very rarely see the same sights twice, then so can anyone else. As far as there is a secret, it is planning. At least initially, this planning process shall be the main subject of this blog. That's not to say the trips themselves will get left out, but the importance of foundations cannot be overstated.
First, though, a little about your author, Your Uncle, Traveling Matt. I am, as I said, a professional (a licensed civil engineer in the state of Texas), who works as a federal employee square in the middle of the Hill Country and square in the middle of the middle class. I grew up in Texas, spent some time in the military, and saw most of the continents of the world, including brief stints in Iraq and Japan, which, prior to the last few years, were most of my travel experiences. On the way I somehow acquired a wife and four children, ages spread between two (as of this writing) and ten. If I am going to be strictly honest here, and my advice won't mean much if I fudge it, the planning genius in the family is my wife. I am much better at improvising, though I can improvise like nobody's business.
That, then, is a brief background. In depth, there have been a series of long road trips, with first two, then four kids, all in a 2007 Honda Pilot that has logged something like fifty thousand miles in the three years we've had it. My wife doesn't know it, at least until she reads this, but I've named it after Robert E. Lee's most famous horse, Traveller, which, like the car, was a mid-sized gray. We started off fairly small, taking our first two kids driving on business travel. Whenever it was reasonable, I would stack training classes back-to-back, so that driving was preferred by the budgeting people to flying me out, flying me home, and flying me out again. We saw quite a bit of the south that way. Growing up, I had seen most of the Gulf Coast, still one of my favorite parts of the country, but north of the I-10/US-90 corridor was largely a mystery. We got to see the lower Mississippi valley in pretty good detail, ate a lot of very good meals, and saw a lot of the country that I hadn't seen before. Of course, in the process we also stayed in hotels, because we were just starting out. Those trips took us through Atlanta, Montgomery, Jackson, Vicksburg, down the Natchez Trace to Natchez, through New Orleans, San Antonio, Tupelo, Atlanta, and Bristol. We saw battleships and Civil War battlefields, plantations and historical roads, roadside attractions and riverside picnic areas, and, perhaps in a way that I never anticipated, something inside me woke up. I realized I enjoyed traveling, that I enjoyed seeing new things, and I never turned back.
After that, we started considering more "serious" travel. Our first "real" road trip was the following year, when, with my wife six months pregnant, we went on a relatively modest trip. That trip only covered two national seashores, two national wildlife refuges, two national monuments, one national forest, the most unique ferry ride I've ever been on, one speeding ticket, one projectile-vomiting child (while driving, naturally), a twenty-five-mile round-trip off-road adventure down the beach to see a lighthouse, made well worth it by the two Park Service volunteers manning it that day, and a series of great meals in unlikely places.
So that's how it all started. From there, it just kind of snowballed, and at this point, I have people walking up to me at work telling me how awesome my vacation looked, and telling me how there's no way they could do all of this. Well... there's honestly no reason you can't. You just have to be willing to accept difficulty and discomfort along the way (not welcome, just accept that they're going to be there and you won't be able to dodge them if you want to do these things), and plan ahead as best you can. However, one of the rules of life is just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. So why should you travel like this?
I could give you a wide variety of reasons, but the basic, most fundamental one as far as I'm concerned is that traveling broadens you. You see and do things that you don't get to see and do back home. Spending my entire life in Texas I wouldn't have gotten to point out to my children, for instance, how the successive levels of casemate at Fort Point in San Francisco taper, with thick, squat walls at the base thinning slightly as they rise up through four levels. I wouldn't have gotten to run through the drill of loading, sighting, and firing a cannon at Yorktown with my son. I wouldn't have been able to demonstrate to my children how the rocks at the Grand Canyon show how fast or slow the river was moving at any given time in its history, or see the condors there. To that end, lots of people get trapped in this thinking that if you have children, you don't travel, because children and travel just don't mix. I have twice now driven the western United States, minimum five thousand miles a trip, with four children. If you give them a chance, people will surprise you with their endurance and stamina, and children are no exception.
That's why I'm writing this, to show you what we did and how we did it. If you're reading this, hopefully it inspires you to get up, get out, and get moving. In the process I will probably use it to document my own private Bucket List, much of which I've accidentally crossed off or augmented in the last couple years. I will also hopefully drag in a guest blogger, since she's much better informed about the planning side than I am, and the boring parts, planning and reservations and mapping, are what make the exciting parts possible (insert comment about amateurs and tactics, and professionals and logistics). So... burrow into your seat, adjust it as best you can, buckle up, and turn the air conditioner up to get comfortable, we have miles to go before we sleep.
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