Thursday, May 28th

First in Flight

I met my downstairs neighbours at breakfast. They were equally far away from home as they were Norwegian. I couldn’t spend much time, though, as, again, I had a ferry to catch. I left town for the eight miles to the ferry terminal. It was another lovely day. Blue skies with some smear of clouds in the north, upper seventies. I wound down the window and enjoyed the drive along the banks. These really were a string of islands, separated by small canals.

About half way, I stopped at a parking lot by the beach. I climbed across the sand dunes and stood on an endless, empty, not quite white beach. The water wasn’t too cold either. But there were horse flies. Three managed to bite me within the better part of three minutes and I decided to flee.

The road kept running alongside the dune, a sign warning of ‘sand on road.’ The ferry terminal wasn’t much more than a parking lot and a dock. As I arrived, a boat was about done unloading. There were perhaps ten cars waiting plus two trucks and a large yellow heavy-load semi. The latter worried me a little, but everyone got squeezed onto the small boat, even with one or two spots to spare. Off we went.

During the one-hour crossing, we met another five boats going the other way, all packed to the gills. Perhaps the reason was that this ferry was free. Americans surely had a different opinion which services should be paid for through taxes.

Compared to the distance covered by the ferry yesterday in two hours, this little hop across Hatteras Inlet didn’t look like it would take an hour. But the boat first had to make a huge swing into Pamlico Sound before zigzagging through a series of sandbanks to get into Hatteras’ harbour. The arrival was announced by the appearance of huge, wooden palaces, about five storeys tall, painted in grey and white. This side surely was different. For one and quite shockingly, there was a traffic light at the first intersection after leaving the ferry.

It quickly became clear, that I had returned into regular American civilization. The hotel brochure in Ocracoke hadn’t lied when it claimed that the island was a now rare and different spot. May they never build a bridge.

The road kept switching between islands and banks. The former were filled to the brink with homes and businesses. At Avon there even was enough space to build a strip mall. The homes were more regular in the town centres but grew into hideous condominium palaces towards the ends where there was quick access to the endless sand beaches of the banks. These were served by appropriately named facilities such as Fatty’s Restaurant.

This surely wasn’t my kind of place. If I ever should feel tempted to buy a house here (and, really, why not?) I would go looking at yesterday’s Dawson’s Creek coast. Sealevel perhaps, or even further south.

Salvo, meanwhile, claimed to have the best tasting municipal drinking water. While I admit that taste is rather subjective, this assertion surely was hyperbole. The triple village of Salvo, Waves, and Rodanthe was the last settlement before an endless stretch of undisturbed beaches and marshes.

The road was quite busy, particularly southbound. Many cars boasted oval white stickers with the letters OBX on them, which I understood to mean Outer Banks, the name given to this string of islands and sand banks.

The road, meanwhile, crossed Oregon Inlet; not by ferry but via the rather long Herbert C. Bonner Bridge (who was a congressman for North Carolina in the 1940s to 1960s). Soon after, a traffic light marked the first opportunity to get off the banks which I forfeit and rather kept travelling north. There was two options for that, either directly along the water front or, a few blocks back, on a wide highway. I chose the latter. While it was faster it also was substantially more busy and, subsequently, annoying.

It did take me safely to King Devil Hill, though, sacred ground of aviation history. The Wright brothers came here for four years from Ohio (incidentally much the same distance I had travelled so far). The first years, they sought the steady wind for glider experiments and the soft lands for landing. But then in 1903 they added a combustion engine to their glider. On December 17, they did four excursions with their flying machine, the last one lasting for almost a minute. The age of aviation had begun for real.

Now, the ground was home to the Wright Brothers National Monument. A lawn was kept where the original experiments had happened, the distances of those four historic flights laid out by stone markers. Behind, on Kill Devil Hill, stood a sixty foot granite tower with a slight feel of Socialist Realism and pompous words. To the side was KFFA, or First Flight Airport, a three thousand feet airstrip for taking your little yellow Super Cub back to her roots.

I walked through the grounds, up to the monument, sat in the sun for a bit and watched people putting their selfie sticks to good use.

When I returned to the highway, police and emergency crews were at work dealing with an accident that had happened at the intersection. Fire fighters were just forcing open the driver’s door of one of the mangled cars. Shuddering, I drove away.

It was time to be voted off the island. The banks went on for quite a bit and even were accessible by car for another thirty miles, but I figured I had seen enough. A long double bridge took me back to the mainland. An undisturbed, endless drive through rather uninteresting land followed and fixed the sad mood I had been in all morning. This sort of driving—cruise control set, no bends, hardly any other car, nothing to see—really is very Zen, akin to meditation.

Eventually I had to wake up, though, as a large draw bridge marked the arrival at Elizabeth City. The road entered through the industrial back door and before it even reached the town proper a right turn took me out again, through another industrial back door and onto a bypass road. Beyond, the road had to make a swing around the Great Dismal Swamp, proper swampland with black, murky water and dead trees rotting away.

Once I could turn north again, I soon arrived in Virginia, state number nine. My intention was to end the day in Suffolk. Although it promoted its Visitor Centre by many a sign and claimed a historic downtown that turned not to be all too special, I only found one motel and a rather dodgy looking one at that. Plan B, then: a quick stop at the petrol station and onto the sixty miles of dead straight road towards Petersburg.

Little farming villages were spread out evenly every eight or so miles. One, Wakefield, was full of peanut stores. If an advertising board was to be trusted, this was the area where the first peanuts were grown in the U.S.

Quickly, I arrived at the Interstate. My plan was to travel north along it until signs suggested the presence of a decent hotel. I had a full tank and was prepared to use it. Consequently, the first exit announced what I was looking for and I could end the last serious driving day for a while. From now on, it was tiny states and ample time.