… the other day, North Carolina is a ferry-spotter’s paradise.
We haven’t finished with them yet by any means, because now that we are on Ocracoke Island, we still have to get off.
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and one of the ways is to take the ferry over to Cape Hatteras. We’ve done that before, but so what?
While you admire the photo of my little home-from-home, let me tell you about my night.
I was dead to the world, that’s for sure, and our first nocturnal visitor was Michel from the football club – telling me everything that had gone wrong at the football club – just like he had done once in te Auchan in Montlucon.
As for our next visitor, it was either Nerina, Laurence or Cécile.And we were in my house, or whatever house that it was where I was living. It was up forsale although you would never have thought so with the mess – and someone came to see it. It was Christiane (what is she doing here?). My partner showed her round the ground floor and abandoned me to leave me to show her around the cluttered upstairs, even though I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I took her outside and showed her the jungle that was the grounds. She said that the car parking didn’t correspond to what she needed, so I showed her my idea which would have suited her – except that I kept on getting it wrong when I was trying to explain. After she had left I was sitting in the garden when my Inuit guide from Mulligan came in. He had a chain saw and began to cut up logs lengthways ready to sut them “across”. I was thinking to myself that I could do that, and there were plenty of other things that he would have been more profitably employed in doing.
My porridge didn’t take long to cook in the slow cooker, and I was away pretty smartish by 09:15, complete with free coffee from the motel.
A leisurely drive took me down to the far end of the island where I didn’t have to wait too long for a ferry.
You don’t here, by the way. There’s a regular shuttle service and there’s quite a rapid service, especially at this time of the year.
Had I come by here tomorrow, it would have been a different matter because they are going over to the winter timetable.
One thing that takes some getting used to is the route that the ferry takes.
This distance between Hatteras and Ocracoke island doesn’t look very much, but it takes 40 minutes to do the route, because you have to go in a rather exaggerated “S” route between the islands.
The channels across Pamlico Sound are quite shallow and despite the low draught of these boats, they can still easily run aground if they get it wrong.
The channel is marked for the entire length with marker buoys and signs, like these just here.
You can’t see for the sun unfortunately, but the buoys are marked red and green, for “port” and “starboard” just like a ship’s lights, but I was convinced that on occasion the ferry was passing to the wrong side.
But the channel and the sandbanks change after each storm so that’s not a surprise.
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.
and what does a pelican have in common with an Income-Tax Collector?
Well, they can bot shove their bills up their @r$e$
Only seven or so cars on the ferry so it didn’t take long to unload. And we were soon belting off northwards up Hatteras Island.
The village of Hatteras itself is quite pretty and probably well-worth a poke around on another occasion, but i don’t have that much time.
I want to be north of Chesapeake Bay by tonight and it’s a long way to go.
We do have to stop at some point because even though we’ve seen it before, we have to go to look at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
It’s the most famous construction on the whole of the Outer Banks.
Mind you, the Outer Banks just here are quite famous if you are a mariner. Not for nothing is Cape Hatteras known as “The Graveyard Of The Atlantic” with the amount of ships that have come to grief here.
The lighthouse didn’t used to be back there. Until 1999 it was just in front of where this sign is.
You can see from the sign how the sea level has risen over the last 140 years, which prompted the romoval of the lighthouse to a safer spot.
But even though it’s so graphically laid out here, the USA Government still denies the existence of global warming and rising sea levels.
Yes, the official position of the US President is to deny clmate change, global warming and rising sea levels. Yet here on Hatteras Island the evidence is impossible to ignore.
Everywhere are signs “water on highway” and despite the absence of rain and strong winds, you can see that the sea is slowly encroaching onto the roadway.
This will all be under water in 10 years or so.
We’ve been here before of course, and I reckoned that I would show you a photo once more of Rodanthe.
It’s significant because a couple of years after I had been here in 2005, they made a film set in Rodanthe.
And much to my surprise it really was filmed here too.
And the film seems to have brought unlimited tourists to visit the area, and with it the tourist attractions.
My memory of Rodanthe was that it was a quiet, sleepy place with a few tumbledown cabins and houses.
Not any more though. The tourists are out in force and have brought wads of cash with them. So the developers have cashed in.
Here’s something else that is changing so dramatically too.
The Herbert C Bonner bridge was a quiet, sleepy bridge when we came by here in 2005.
Today, as the sea levels are rising, the bridge approaches are slowly being submerged and so they are constructing this huge mega-bridge right across Oregon Sound with its several miles of raised causeway approaches.
Not that it will do them much good because the rest of the Outer Banks will shortly be under water as we have seen.
From here, I don’t hang about. We miss out the Wright Brothers site at Kill Devil Hills (not Kittyhawk) just up the road because we have been there before, and eventually come off onto the mainland where I stop for lunch and fuel at, coincidentally,the same petrol station where I stopped in 2005.
But out haste doesn’t prevent us from yet another photo opportunity, does it?
This area is well-known for its pirate and privateer activity, and so Strawberry Moose decides to get in on the action.
Finding a suitable boat, he now tries to find a suitable crew, or else he will be all at sea.
We cross into Virginia just after here, and enter the city of Norfolk. And Norfolk is a nightmare to navigate.
There are two ways to go north – one is the I-95 and sit in traffic queues in Washington DC and Baltimore all day, or else cross Chesapeake Bay and cross the Delaware River and follow the New Jersey Coast.
But the Bay crossing in Norfolk, despite being one of the most famous in the whole of North America, is so badly signposted it’s unbelievable.
You drive around for hours down a succession of small street and eventually you see a small one-foot square blue-and-white sign.
Blink and you miss it.
Unfortunately, you can’t see it very well because there is nowhere to stop and photograph it.
For a start, it’s 23 miles long, 17 miles of which is across water, and if that’s not something of a record I’m not sure what is.
And not only that, it shortens my route by 153 kms, so the toll fee of $13:00 is a bargain when you take the cost of Strider’s fuel into consideration.
It’s not just a bridge either.
It crosses a busy shipping lane up to Baltimore and so in a couple of places it dives into tunnels. And these are quite long enough on their own.
And that was quite a shame because there were three or four mammoth container ships sailing up the Hampton Roads and I missed them.
On the other side of the river I put my foot down and move north towards the Maryland border.
But 18:00 looms up, I’m tired and I’m still in Virgnia. And at 18:10 the Shore Lodge Motel in Olney looms up out of the gloom.
The room is clean and comfortable and after much negotiating we agree on $70:00, incuding taxes, which is not unreasonable.
I do without tea yet again and crash out more-or-less straight away, but I’m awoken by a group of people chatting by the ice machine just outside the door.
After about a couple of hours of this, I’m beyond fed up, so I ask them if they wouldn’t mind going somewhere else to chat. Well, that wasn’t actually what I said, but it meant that.
But my sleep has gone now, and this is going to be a bad night.
