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:

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.