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.
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