The Outer Banks, VBT

 

The clothes are unpacked, and most are have been washed and put away.  The car has been washed and cleaned out, the film taken to the developer, the mementos and gifts given out, and still my butt is sore!  164 miles on my bike in 5 days!  It's amazing how your mind can focus in, and become obsessed with one thing, like how narrow a bike seat is.  Excuse me.  That’s a bike saddle.  Yeah a saddle is what they call it.  Sounds like something John Wayne would come riding up on.  I got news for you.... you don't sit on a bike saddle, you wear it!  Think about it.  But fortunately for us the rain, cold, 12 mph head winds and 35 mph wind gust kept our minds off of our seats most of the time.  And hey, if that didn't do it, the 2 1/2 hour ferry ride over the white capping Pimilico Sound with those same 35 mph gust, and the captain running around shaking his head and muttering, "we shouldda canceled, we shouldda canceled", will certainly change your focus.  Watching our VBT guides trying to fix a picnic lunch onboard a ferry that's swaying back and forth so hard you can't even walk, much less eat, also added some comic relief.  But the real humor was when the guy from Clemson accidentally tossed his car keys for his brand new Accura overboard.  It really helped me forget my pain when I watched them pulling his car off the ferry with a wrecker as I pedaled away, but that's a whole other story.

 

Actually we really had a great time.   It started in New Bren, NC.  New Bern is a great historic town.  It has blocks and blocks of 1700-1800 restored homes that are beautiful.   They are all are very close together and surrounded with iron and wooden fences.  The driveways are either stone or brick pavers.  The windows are all loaded with leaded and stained glass.  The porches have huge fluted or round columns capped with curly, ornate cravings on top, or either Victorian gingerbread around the handrails and friezes. New Bern is also the birth place of Pepsi.  I found that out when I tried to order a coke.  You would have thought I had just spit on the floor, or committed some other major faux pas, possibly involving a body sound.  These people are serious soldiers in the cola wars.

 

We started our tour with a 33 miler to the first ferry.  We rode over Lake Mattamuskeet. Yeap, we rode right over it.  The biggest natural lake in NC, a guzillion acres or more, and they built a road straight down the middle of it.  Not a bridge.  A road.  Straight down the middle.  Of course the lake's average depth is 2-3 feet which certainly helped in the task I guess.  Straight down the middle; I still can't get over that.  As we rode over this elevated road bed lined with heavy stone riffraff and dotted with the occasional fisherperson, I could not help but wonder what would possibly possess someone to look over this huge body of water and say, “Hey, I got a great idea.  Let’s build a road straight across the lake!”  It had to be a government project.  Oh well.  We had sunny skies and tail winds all the way.  Nice!  We capped that ride with a 2 1/2 hour ferry ride over pure glass.  Smooth as Abby's behind.  We landed at Ocracoke and headed to the Boyette House, our home for the next two nights.  We finished the day with a great meal, and went to bed under a full moon and a sky slam packed with stars.  We woke up to wind, rain, cold, and a 54 mile round trip ride to Cape Hatteras.  It was enough to make you question your sanity.  We ate breakfast, picked up our route sheets, and stepped outside to cloudy, windy, cold, but no rain.  I need to mention that the Outer Banks has just one road running up it, so the route sheet was pretty simple; ride north 27 miles, turn around, ride back.  Not too tough.  I decided to let Susan navigate this ride.  And as great a story as it would have made, we didn't get lost.  We didn't even get wet.  It rained twice, but we were either on the ferry (a short ride, 45 minutes), or eating lunch.  We even walked the beach some.  Around 6:00 that evening we were biking back into Ocracoke when the big storm started moving in against us.  We rode the last 2 miles against wind gust that actually stopped our forward motion.  Thank goodness it was only 2 miles.  The next morning things were worst and they canceled the 9:00 ferry off of Ocracoke.  I wish I had known about Brian's friend with the coffee shop, because we had given up our rooms (they didn't cancel the ferry until we had ridden our bikes to the harbor and waited in line for 30 minutes).  They let us huddle around the lobby, all 19 of us in a 12'x12' room.  Great fun.  The 12:00 ferry was a go. They decided to attempt to cross the sound.  The "attempt" part made me nervous, but hey, you gotta trust your professionals.  As we pushed our bikes onto the deck I was reminded of the film clip of that suspension bridge out west, the one with the car on it, and the bridge is turning, and twisting, and bucking, and breaking, and crumbling, and falling, and, well, I just didn't have a real warm, fuzzy feeling as I walked my bike aboard.  2 1/2 hours later we disembarked.   No lunch for me, but at least I kept my breakfast down.  Now we had 20 miles and two inter-coastal waterway bridges to go.  Those bridges.  100' off the water with 18" high guardrails.  We're talking flat, flat land everywhere around you, 35 mile per hour wind gust, and your on top of a bike a hundred feet up on a bridge with only 18"s of guardrail to keep you from swimming.  At least the wind drowned out my screams.  At 20 miles we had a van shuttle to take us into Beaufort.  They say "bow ford" here, not “beau fert” like us South Carolinians do.  A French name instead of English.  You know those French; a different word for everything.  We stayed at the Cedar Inn.   A great place that I would recommend to anyone. The folks running the place are very friendly, and the food was great.  Especially breakfast.  Eggs, sausage, bacon, you know, the regular stuff, but they also had some great cheese grits.  Thick, with lots of butter and cheese.  But the crowning glory of the meal was the butter pecan pancakes.  I mean a stack 5” thick and 6” in diameter that floated off your plate until you loaded ‘em down with big globs of blueberry syrup.   Now you know why we rode everyday.  30 something miles a day and I still gained a few pounds.  But, man, the food was gooood.

 

Thursday is our explore day and the sun is shining, and it is warm.  Susan shopped and I rode around Beaufort's historical district, and around town.  They also have some really neat homes in Beaufort.  They’re not as close together as New Bern, so they do not have the quaint little fences surrounding them.   They are not as ornate either, but they are still well worth the ride.  Besides, I had to work on those pancakes.  After lunch they have a catamaran sailing excursion planned for us.  5 hours of sailing around the same sound that tried to kill me yesterday.  After that ferry ride, no way!  I opt out for a nap.  I just can't face another picnic on a boat.  Friday morning is beautiful.  Big sun and a huge tailwind.  Susan and I pedal out of Beaufort at 9:00.  By 12:00 we have traveled 37 miles on our bikes and made a 20 minute ferry crossing.  A great tailwind!  One last picnic with our biking partners and it's back to New Bern in the van.  We stayed an extra night and the weather decided to punish us for it.  We walked about 15 minutes to a restaurant (the Chelsea, you gotta try it) under a gorgeous sky.  After our meal, a few glasses of wine, and a couple mugs of New Castle beer we started back.  That’s when the bottom fall out of the sky.  Rain, lightning, thunder; I mean big, big thunder, and that lightning that forks across the sky with jaggedy fingers shooting everywhere.  Very scary!  We tried to stay close to the buildings and under awnings but we got soaked anyway.   It seems New Bern restored everything but the gutters on their buildings, and the street drainage system.   We waded through ankle deep run-off and splashed under fire hose size streams of water shooting off of roof tops where gutters should have been.  At least I wasn't sitting on a bike "saddle". 

 

As a side note; I felt that my stent was fully road tested last week.  It worked great.  My legs and butt hurt, but my heart did fantastic. A great time was had by all, and we are already planning the next one.  Prince Edward Island look out.  Janet and Greg, it’s just up the road from you guys.  Forget California and let’s ride in Canada.

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