Carolinas-Florida Bicycle Tour

We rode 70 miles today! and yes, we are a wee bit tired. We are trying for 70 tomorrow too!

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Cheers! thunder storm time here, but dont worry because we are safe and dry. Tomorrow we will hit south carolina!

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Day 5 was to be out “short day.” We found a campground on the map on Roanoke Island and had a plan to get there early, set up camp, unlaiden our bikes, ride back to the ocean and go to the beach, and then go back to Roanoke for “The Lost Colony.” Getting to Roanoke was no easy task, however. The Washington Baum bridge going from Nags Head to Roanoke was a killer bridge. Really high and steep with a really narrow shoulder. And the worst part about it was that the crosswinds down the sound were super strong making this stretch the most harrowing so far. After crossing that bridge we concluded that we wouldn’t be going to the ocean beach that day because there was no way we were going to cross that bridge another three times, once more would be one more too many but we had to do at least that tomorrow. At the Food-a-Rama, the local grocery store, we learned that the campground we wanted to stay at no longer existed and had been torn down. Our options dwindled. Maybe this could be our first motel night, we though, and looked for a motel. The rates were not all that great but we chose the Duke of Dare motor lodge. Got the room from a woman wearing a mumu and swam in the ppol beofre going out for a bite to eat at the Weeping Radish, a German Beer hall. The food was good but it was no Zum Schneider. Then we rode up to see the play. (Again, see Kiki’s Lost Colony Entry for more info.) We actually ended up riding 32 miles on our short day but some was fully unloaded, which was really nice.

The fourth day brought us to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It also took us on the busiest roads up to that point. As the land gets narrower, there are fewer roads and we end up having to share them with all the cars that were going to the Outer Banks for the weekend. This was a Friday too, so the traffic was probably heavier than it would have been on another day. We went through towns named Maple, Aydlett, Grandy, Coinjock, and Harbinger. We all wanted to know what Coinjock was named after. We passed an inmate street cleaning crew near Aydlett. After crossing the 2-mile-long bridge into Kitty Hawk we went to the Visitors’ Center and gathered up pamphlets and brochures among which was the brochure for “The Lost Colony” symphonic drama. The Lost Colony is an outdoor play that is performed in the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site about the first English colony in America. The colony was where the first English child was born in America, Virginia Dare. And Virginia is named after Queen Elizabeth, “The Virgin Queen.” It cought our eyes, Kiki’s especially, and we knew what we were going to do the next day. (See Kiki’s Lost Colony Entry for more info.) After the Visitors’ Center we went to the Kitty Hawk Post Office to pick up the package that our roomate Dan sent to us General Delivery. Everything was there (thanks, Dan!) so we had our new tires and spare tubes. We sat down for a big late lunch at Awful Aruthur’s for some seafood. In a fit of history-making, Kiki decided to eat some bits of seafoot that she’d never eaten before: oysters and crab cakes. It may not sound like much, but this was a milestone for Kiki. I had a great teriaki grilled tuna burger. mmmm. We’ve been eating a lot on this trip and we don’t feel guilty about it either. That’s because we rode 48 miles on Day 4. We camped at Joe and Kay’s campground in Kill Devil Hills, which had its fair share of permanent residents, one of which played Madonna from his car at the late hour of 11:00 pm! In addition to eating a lot, we’re also on an earlier sleep schedule. I’m getting up earlier in the morning than I aver do, normally 6:00 or 6:30. In our first but of bike maintenance, Hillary and I changed our tires. The new ones are great, we have to say.

The route of Day 3 took us basically due east towards the coast. We apparently needed a lot of sleep so we got a relatively late start at about 9:20. We had heard that Day 3 would be the one that would make us want to die and it didn’t start well. We all had pain in our rears from the moment we put them on our bike seats. It wasn’t a good sign, but we pushed through. It turned out not to be a very hard day though as we got into it. We crossed through the Great Dismal Swamp and got a closer-than-normal look at a lot of roadkill. One deer, a few racoons of various sizes, a handful of snakes, other medium-sized rodents, and a turtle. As we ride down the back-country roads and along the sides of busier roads we get a view of the country not normally seen. It’s a great way to see things that we wouldn’t normally see. There are more things that are more worth seeing than road kill though. After the swamp we got to a small town called South Mills. This is where things got interesting. As we sat down for lunch at the only place available in town, the gas station that had a lunch counter in back, we heard a loud bang from right outside where our bikes were. As it turned out, my front tire blew out spontaneously. There was no apparent cause, and the tire itself had torn. I replaced the tube and reinflated the tire after we ate and minutes later came a loud bang of the same sort as the new tube exploded. If I had known before what I just learned then I wouldn’t have changed the tube because I would have known that the damaged tire wouldn’t have held the new tube and I could have predicted the blowout.g Hillary and I had ordered Schwalbe tires and tubes directly from the company’s North American office in Canada but they hadn’t arrived in Brooklyn by the time we left so we were spare tube-less and spare tire-less at this point. The nearest bike shop was 15 miles away in another town. A local guy named Wendell overheard us discussing our predicament and offered to drive me to the bike shop where I got a new tire and some spare tubes. The problem was that Wendell didn’t offer a ride back to the gas station. I got the tires and tubes and had to thumb a ride back. I’d never actually done this before so it was a new adventure for me. I did get a ride about two miles down the road to a 7-11 but that was as far as he could take me. So I started walking with my thumb out. Keep in mind that the heat wave was still on and I was sweating like crazy and hot as hell. Nobody stopped for about 15 minutes and I decided to stop in to an “antique store” which was more like a junk heap and ask about calling a taxi. There were two men in there with almost all of their teeth, one reading the bible and minding a baby in a playpen. They called me a taxi and gave me a Dr. Pepper and I waited for the taxi that would end up costing 25 bucks to take me back to South Mills. After that long delay we were back on the road for the 25 mile trip to Bell’s Island near Currituck. As we got closer we stopped at a farmers market and picked up supplies for dinner. We found some to-go BBQ pork and cole slaw and took that out to the camp to heat up in the camp stove. Bell’s Island is where we stayed that night. It is an “island” in the North Landing River, which is basically Currituck Sound. The vacation homes out there we really nice and many had private boat docks in their backyards that were built into a canal of sorts that led out to the sound. We set up out tents about 20 ft from the seashore and saw the sunrise over the sound in the morning. A spider had made a web inside my shoe over night. From then on I kept my shoes in my bag at night. We traveled a total of 53 miles in Day 3.

Day 2: More peanuts­ — peanut fields, that is. We made it to the border of North Carolina. There was an old concrete marker from 1887 showing the border and another nondescript traffic sign stating “STATE LINE”. No indication of what states it was the line between just that the line was there. If you have to ask… For lunch we had barbeque again in Sunbury, NC. This time it was more of what we gathered to be North Carolina style. (see BBQ entries.) The waitress said that they were the best BBQ around but had to ask her mom when I asked what exactly made it North Carolina style. We stayed at the BBQ joint for a while soaking in the a/c and got the first of many inquisitions about the bike trip. A lot of people are interested in where we’re going and coming from and we weren’t able to tell people much about where we’d come from at this point. But it is pretty cool when people ask, “Where are you heading?” and we get to answer “Florida.” Sometimes we get a positive reaction like, “Have a great trip,” or “be safe. But sometimes people ask if we’d gotten a bump on the head recently. Or as Hillary’s doctor asked, “What are you, fucking nuts?!?” We can all agree that so far it’s been an amazing trip though. So, after lunch at the BBQ place we bought a watermelon and some ears of corn from the back of a man’s pickup truck. I gave Hillary the tent, which I usually carry, and strapped the watermelon to the back of my bike and we rode to the campsite. The campsite was Merchant Millpond State Park. We all agreed that this campsite was better than the last one and we praised the state park system of North Carolina. (Now that we’ve been into this trip for seven days, we’ve learned to appreciate things that we normally wouldn’t appreciate like: state park campgrounds over small, local, private ones with permanent residents; laundry machines becase we’ve been doing all of our laundry by hand in sinks with ‘campsuds’; tailwinds; downhil slopes, even ever so slight ones; and more things we wouldn’t notice in our everday lives in NYC. We ate the watermelon and some pre-made indian food from Trader Joe’s that we got in NYC and hit the sack for a much-needed rest. Over the course of Day 2 we logged 57 miles, which wasn’t bad for the second day of the trip.

my full-loaded bike

Originally uploaded by hewins.

Here’s a picture of my bike right before we started. Note the blue tube running along my top tube. That’s my camelbak on the back and the tube runs up along to the handlebars where I can get a sip. Nice.

Road Warriors (B4)

Originally uploaded by the visual aids.

This is the firt picture of the whole group. Taken in Summit, NJ the night before we left. Thanks, Sam!

Heralded as “history’s greatest mystery” by the informational plaques in the Raleigh Fort Park on Roanoke Island, the story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke is not just a historical example of poor planning. It is also a symphonic outdoor dramatic spectacular. If I had known that its glory awaited me in the Outer Banks, perhaps the 3 or 4 long days riding through Virginia and on the North Carolina mainland would have seemed faster. As it was, it wasn’t until we reached the Outer Banks visitor’s center in Kitty Hawk on Friday morning that I even knew such a thing exisited. The promise of drama and special effects intrigued me. Posters in every store and restaurant seduced me, and I insisted that Hillary and Dan and I detour off our route a little bit to cross a bridge into Roanoke for the evening so we could see the performance. The bridge looked very innocent on the map, as straight lines do - but in reality was an arcing, windy hellride that shattered my spirit and ravaged my muscles. We got to the other side only to find out that the campground which we intended to stay at was no longer there, and that there were no others anywhere on the island. Our options were to find a motel or head back over the bridge and miss the show. The latter option to me was inconceivable so we found a motor lodge (The Duke of Dare, run by a very southern lady in a mumu) and then headed out to a bavarian beer hall called the Weeping Radish. Every waitress was dressed in a semblance of a traditional outfit, except ours, who was a dude in a polo shirt. We rode our bikes over to the park at around 6, while it was still light. We had unloaded everything in the room and we flew down the roads unburdened and free. We got to the park and headed to the box office to buy our tickets. The woman asked us if we wanted to be the indian’s side or the queen’s side - as the liberal thinkers that we are, we chose to show our support for the unjustly persecuted and displaced indians, although I think the question was intended less as a moral stance and more just as a seating preference. And then it was time for the show. The lights went down, and at least 40 people emerged from the bushes at the side of the stage, singing some colonial song, I suppose, although they looked more like druids to me so perhaps it was more mystic than historic at that point - then the narrator (also druidic, or at least monastic) launched into the story as a number of half naked indians danced and ran onto the stage. It was actually very well done and cool and not as ridiculous as I had imagined, although my excitement might have had a lot to do with the delirium that seems to set in with fatigue. There were dance sequences and fireworks and ships and songs and swordfights, and many many indians in very small loincloths, which I appreciated, as I am a bit of a dirty old lady. It ran for two hours, in which time the stage was constantly occupied by so many actors I couldn’t even believe it. All in all, it was a lot like you would imagine a Vegas style show in Reno to be like if they put on shows about colonization and history instead of splashy topless ladies.

After the show, we realized that none of us had thought to bring lights, and so we made it back to the motel in the dark. Barely.

Southern Virgina and northern North Carolina are peanut country. There are more peanut fields than I thought existed. We started riding at about 6:00 pm on Tuesday the 18th after driving down to Dendron, VA from Summit, NJ during the day. A tube blowout delayed the commencement of the ride and we waited at a local gas station while new tubes were being bought by Kiki’s dad, Richard. However, before arriving at the starting point, we ate lunch at the very first BBQ place we saw and it was a great start to what we know will be a BBQ-fueled trip. We’ll have other entries that focus more on the BBQ, for now, I’ll just catch you all up to where we are with the general story so far.

Day 1 took us 23 miles though Virginia farm country. Meandering county roads led us through peanut and corn fields and the occasional swampy area. As the sun set, we found our way to the first destination: Blackwater Campground near Isle of Wight, VA. The campground seemed normal at first, but we began to realize that some of the campers and trailers on the sites were the permanent homes to some folks. It was a little sketchy and a large barking german shepherd scared us all a bit but we got the tents put up in the twilight and went to sleep without eating. In the morning we made some oatmeal and packed up camp, still figuring out the best ways to pack out bags and load our bikes. We got a relatively early start, leaving the campground at 8:30.