Elizabeth City

When I lived in California avidly devouring sailing magazines wishing I could sail the east coast with all its inlets and islands and that magnificent waterway, I read about Elizabeth City, a place where passing sailors were treated to free docks and a warm welcome. You never got that in California! 

Up close the city docks are still there and not terribly interesting. I’ve since motored down the waterway on a friend’s boat and found it to be quite boring, freeway travel at walking speed. That’s how your dreams crumble!  But I liked arriving by van and wandering the town and that put all my youthful fantasies to rest, finally. GANNET2 put the nail into that coffin. 

We left the Outer Banks on a frosty morning with a plan to drive toward Asheville more or less. On the way I wanted to see Elizabeth City in person and Layne was amenable and Rusty had no vote, so off we went, an hour through farmland and woods. 

I wanted obviously to walk the waterfront but first we had a destination…

It’s not the winter palace though it looks like it. It’s a free museum displaying the history of people’s lives around Albemarle Sound. Museum of the Albemarle  leads you through the changes. 

The pre-European region was viewed with high approval by the Indians who discovered forests, fertile plains and convenient river highways. 

Europeans showed up and changed the map as usual. Things didn’t go well for the people they encountered. There again pirates liked this area too and they liked the wood to repair their ships and water to drink. 

But for the most part it was boring old farming and building and procreating and banking and cooking.  The usual. 

There was fishing too of course and boat building. 

It was an impressive display of artifacts and history but it was not terribly involving. We wandered and read the information boards. 

We noted the era of slavery and reconstruction, the arrival of railroads the creators and embodiment of progress and change. 

The complexity of change was not addressed.  Productivity at what price? What benefit? It seemed a bit simplistic but perhaps I was just overthinking.  

The shad boat was a local innovation. 28 feet long and invented by a local boatwright. 

Behind the museum there is an 18th century cemetery which I felt constrained from walking through by the presence of my dog. 

Rusty spent the time aboard GANNET2 and enjoyed the sun when I was back to let him out. I enjoyed the moment too, less spectacularly, reading A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meib. It’s a discussion of the peculiar characteristics of the caracara a super intelligent bird of prey found mostly in South America. I’m not an ornithologist but the natural history of South America is fascinating. 

Downtown Elizabeth City has great bones. 

Not fans of Rusty of his handler: 

Here’s the draw, public hot showers for five bucks right next to the city docks. You get two days for free on your boat but anyone can buy a shower. Even a van lifer. 

Nice views too. We sat and looked for a while. Snowbird season must be over. We saw no boats traveling. 

The Outer Banks

The Outer Banks are a hundred mile long sandbar sticking into the Atlantic Ocean. The weird bit is driving Highway 12 you have no…

…idea the ocean is right there. 

It is actually a waterfront highway but the ocean is hidden behind a berm. 

They need the berm to keep the highway open. Blow a storm and lose Highway 12. Actually the highway was reportedly a mess over the Christmas storm last week, with water and slush ice in the roadway mixed with wind blown sand. Fantastic I’m sure, but not for me. The melted ice was looking like a lake in the road: 

I can’t help but compare Highway 12 to driving through the Keys. This is a much more rural experience as this is after all the Hatteras National Seashore. The endless commerce and neon and tropical vegetation is a total contrast to the subdued North Carolina coastline.

In midwinter there’s no traffic - and no open businesses either! - but I’m told high season is a huge traffic jam half the time. 

Ocracoke was waking up yesterday as islanders came home from family celebrations on the mainland. Tourists came off the ferry looking  to get ready for New Years Eve celebrations so we, the contrarians rode the opposite way to Hatteras (below) with just half a dozen vehicles on the ferry. 

Rusty had no interest in the whole ferry experience. I told him it was only an hour and it was free but he curled up and slept. I did a crossword. Layne complained she had nowhere to sit. 

We wanted clam chowder on a brisk 45 degree day. There wasn’t any we could find so we settled for hamburgers at a place called Bros in the village of Avon where Layne’s Rueben and my spicy burger were excellent. Good enough even with no clams in sight. 

The Buxton Woods is one of the largest wilderness areas in these sandbars and I wanted to take a walk. It wasn’t Ocracoke’s waterfront Springer’s Point with ocean views but I enjoyed the shaded woods and so did Rusty. I also found out what sedge is. That would be the damp weedy bit of marsh between the higher dry land surrounding it. This is sedge:

We walked alone as Layne had had trouble sleeping Monday night  worrying about waking up early to finish departure preparations, the problem of not trusting your alarm,  so she took a nap while we walked. Then we all stopped at the famous Hatteras lighthouse. The 275 steps were closed for construction which was a bummer. The Bodie lighthouse is closed for winter so that was that in the lighthouse visiting department. Hatteras light was pretty though, almost as scenic as GANNET2:

There you have it for Highway 12. Everything except the basics is closed. You can buy gas and groceries but tourist tat is unavailable for the winter non season. Keep driving. 

Just north of Rodanthe the highway takes a weird turn to the left. The reason is that the old road got smushed by one storm too many, so they cut their losses and built a whole new causeway in the sound next to the low lying sandbar with the old road! Odd but it works all right and gives a nice smooth ride. 

There is no channel or passageway required for boats so the causeway is level with no hump in the middle to give you a view across the marshes. For that you have to wait for the spot where the road always used to collapse at Oregon Inlet. It won’t now because they have built a serious vast modern bridge there. 

There’s a marina near the bridge and the Bodie Lighthouse so deep sea anglers get out into the ocean and the bridge is tall enough for them to get underneath and out through this inlet: 

The funny thing for us sitting on Ocracoke with nowhere to go for ten days was hearing about how the ferry wasn’t running and everyone seemed okay with that isolation. Fair enough we thought, they are used to it. Then we heard questions about whether the highway north was open! That came out of nowhere and we wondered how that happened. It turns out the strong winds blew sand onto the road but beyond that the Christmas freeze put some serious ice and even dangerous black ice on the road which is decidedly not normal. Bummer. I was therefore glad to see a mere lake which was bad enough by the time we drove through. 

By Nag’s Head the road turns into a four lane Federal Highway and the scenery becomes chain and box store countryside with a giant hospital dominating the southern end of town, that big blue box: 

Kitty Hawk sits in much larger Nag’s Head’s shadow but it shines as the place where powered flight took off a hundred years ago. We visited the spot in 2013 when we first visited the Outer Banks on Spring Break and I wrote this post about it: 

https://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2013/03/kitty-hawk-flies.html?m=0

Our plan was to spend the night at the rest area which sits at the entrance  to Kitty Hawk from the north. 

Not busy in December it worked for us as an overnight stop. There’s a monument commemorating the first flight in the rest area. 

Rusty as usual ignored the whole thing. 

I enjoyed reading the milestones listed even though I’m not a fan of flying. Modern commercial travel is horrible but the whole notion of hanging in the air being propelled by internal combustion strikes me as slightly mad. That I enjoy the perils of highway travel instead of the statistically safer realms of flight makes me not so bright I know. My hat is off to people who like to buzz about in the clouds. 

That two midwestern cyclists decided to build a flying machine and change the course of human history boggles my mind. That they succeeded takes my breath away. And they didn’t die. Good job. 

Our stop for the night. Pretty romantic I think you’ll agree.

Springer’s Point, Ocracoke

There’s not a lot to do in Ocracoke in winter when the whole place shuts down. Going for a walk is one option and in this town there is only one of everything. One mechanic, one medical facility…

…one fire station but with no sleeping quarters obviously! 

One grocery store:

…with a peculiarly low ceiling but stocked with anything you’d want from radiator coolant to vodka to sun chips.

And one well known walking trail, called Springer’s Point.

The latest land purchase made in 2021 added nine acres to the preserve which now totals 131 acres and that is a fair sized parcel on an island in a village that amounts to only 775 acres outside the National Park. 

I couldn’t figure out on line where it got it’s name but Springer’s Point is famous for one thing and that is pirates, namely Blackbeard. There is a pool of deep water named for him between the point and the channel and it is said to have been Edward Teach’s preferred anchorage. Indeed history claims there was a pirate gathering right here on the beach when a whole bunch of them anchored out for a barbecue just like a modern sailing club outing. A month later in November 1718 Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy attacked Teach’s ship and a member of his crew beheaded the pirate in the hand to hand battle that followed. In case you were wondering that doesn’t happen very often in modern sailing club outings. 

As you might imagine with that history behind it Springer’s Point has generated numerous ghost stories of a white shirted figure haunting the woods. Luckily for us we are law abiding and the trails are open only during daylight hours so we were spared any wild imaginings. 

It is a pretty spot with several trails wandering through the woods to the beach, all ghost-free in daylight. 

The place is absolutely bursting with useful signage and information about the ecology and botany of the woods. 

Judging by the repetition of the signage there is a tendency by the lawless to ride bicycles into the preserve and let dogs run off leash. 

We did neither not least because I fear rule breaking will end up banning dogs altogether from these lovely places. Also I dislike being told off for breaking perfectly reasonable rules. 

We did meet some other people who apparently did not share our sentiments. As soon as they saw us they turned away and walked the beach throwing a ball for their rather raucous dog. Rusty sat and watched because he’s perfect. 

I waved at their blank faces as we turned back into the woods and found ourselves at a well known landmark where a man and his horse were buried. 

I found out who Sam Jones was in a 20 year old online article written by the local historian who operates the Village Craftsman store and wrote  Jones’ story on this website: 

https://www.villagecraftsmen.com/history-of-springers-point/

Apparently Sam Jones made a fortune and discovered Ocracoke and spent summers here developing the village and preserving the woods at Springer’s Point.  I believe we took Philip Howard’s ghost tour in 2013. 

He was full of information about the island and made our Spring Break visit  memorable. I looked him up online and he was among many who got flooded by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. That was “merely” a Category One storm and it wrecked a third of the housing stock on Ocracoke, about 400 homes. 

Springer’s Point is a lovely walk. 

We walked back to our rental home dodging the evening commute. You’d be surprised how many cars can suddenly pop up at once on these bucolic streets. 

Happy Boxing Day everyone!