Good Morning,
If you have been following the story up until now, you may notice a trend of us staying just ahead of record breaking heat, lung busting smoke, and car destroying floods until we finally ended up in North Carolina. We visited Asheville for one whole week and had a lot of fun, and collected some interesting nuggets there, and then the smog was accumulating and we had the urge to move on so we followed the Blue Ridge Parkway into Boone, saw Clay and MaryEllen's place, camped at a wonderful spot, and then zoomed to Apex to visit Chris & Sue for a few days. We unloaded half of our junk there for safe keeping because we needed to have extra space in the van until the end of the month because of... well for several reasons.
We then drove to Cape Hatteras, a place that I had always dreamed of returning to with a girl.
I was last here when bobby and I were teenagers and we spent a lot of time with a couple of wonderful teenage girls, but we were just a little too young. We were all a little too shy, and I was not able to concentrate completely on the wonders of the environment because my hormone addled brain was concentrating way too much on the possibilities.
Well, it is still beautiful here. It is still an unbeatable place to walk when you are holding hands with a lovely girl. I love it. My brain is still hormone addled, but it can devote the time creating actual scenarios and situations and sharing the beauty and wonder of the beach and the creatures scurrying around us instead of creating thousands of possible chess moves like the teenage brain is forced to do every waking hour, and sleeping hour for that matter.
Anyhow, we were on the beach for a terrific sunset followed some hours later by a terrific sunrise. Sometimes the order of those two things can be reversed, but on this island it seems that the sunset is usually BEFORE the sunrise.
We loved it here. We went to re-up with the ranger and found that we couldn't. Gabrielle was going to visit. The campground was being evacuated. The Cape Hatteras National Seashore was kicking everybody out. Even us. Dejected, we headed North. We traveled as far North on the outer banks as we could and then right before the bridge to jump to the mainland, there was a visitor center. We stopped in for a visit. They poo-poo-ed the whole thing, said it was going to fine, it didn't look like the rest of the island was going to be evacuated, here take a coupon book, and be sure to stop at our fine sponsors, have a nice day.
We turned around, headed South again, and started looking for food. We had some great She-Crab Soup and then started looking for lodging. It wasn't so easy. All of the beach side rooms seemed to be taken by news-teams that had arrived to take pictures of the "big storm".
After 4 hours we settled for a parking lot facing room in the Ramada. The crowds in a seaside community are not "the best of humanity", more whining about that later.
After a wonderful evening of big waves, we enjoyed a wonderful morning of big waves, as we watched windsurfers go past us like Lear-Jets.
Beth wasn't aware of it, but she was due for a stress free night, but she was not happy about paying for a room at the Ramada when we had better accommodations for $20 at the campground. So I made arrangements to sneak in to a wonderful B&B for a nice comfy evening. Beth is packing the van now, as I am once again multi-tasking by typing this post at the same time as I keep repeating "Just a minute, I'm almost done here...", whew, it's amazing I can juggle all of this at the same time. The van is probably just about ready to go, so work, work, work, I suppose it's time to drive again. We are going back to our wonderful campground and enjoy one of the best beaches in the world.
Thanks for listening. I don't really have time to scroll up and see what this post was about, but I'm sure I never got there, and if I did, well good for me.
Warren, the guy chasing the ghost crabs.
