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...required over 400 miles of driving due to navigational errors. I need to NOT copy the directions to our next campground from Google Maps if we're not driving directly there. Fortunately it only cost us about 30 miles and 45 minutes. I'm gonna go with that estimation, Mike thinks it was less. We're also not getting on the road as early as we did the first week which also plays a part in tonight's 8:30 pm arrival. Enough time to write and post the blog while eating dinner, look at our route tomorrow, copy the directions (correctly this time) and update our route map before I hit the hay.
The campgrounds and states are blurring into one. I can't remember what state, let alone the city we were in this morning. Good thing I have my handy-dandy notebook. A clue! A clue! Aha...we left South Carolina this morning and now we're in Suffolk, Virginia by way of the northern portion of the Outer Banks. On a map it looks like you're driving within sight distance of the ocean most of the way. What I have to remember is that there are houses and hundreds of trees between me and what
I want to see. That means I don't have a whole lot of pictures to share. As we were making our way out to Roanoke Island and further out to Nags Head I saw the houses were built farther and farther off the ground. Most were on brick foundations anywhere from two to ten feet high. Some were just up on concrete pillars. One single-wide mobile home I saw was 8 or 10 feet off the ground on pillars! It was strange seeing a mobile home with that many stairs leading to the front door. The coasts of the Carolinas are not for people with mobility challenges, that's for sure.
We passed dozens of corn fields and at least as many of some other crop we couldn't figure out just what it was. Most were a small, leafy plant maybe a foot high, others were probably 3 or 4 feet tall with really big leaves. Mike thinks they might be tobacco plants. Sounds good to me. We'll go with that too. Yeah, that could have been what they were. I did an image search and the crops we drove by looked about the same as what came up. Okay,
tobacco it is.
The Virginia Dare Bridge taking you out to Roanoke Island is verrrryyyy loooonnnnnngggggg. Lucky for us it wasn't windy. I don't want to think about it on a windy day. Arriving on the outer Outer Banks at Nags Head we began our short tour of the island communities. They were very similar to what we saw in Myrtle Beach, SC without the plethora of real and miniature golf courses. That's not to say they didn't have their share. There's a good selection of tourist activities along the long strip of land. One thing they had that Myrtle Beach didn't is go-kart racing. We saw two or three tracks for kids and adults to channel their inner Mario Andretti.
When we got to the north end of our tour, we stopped at the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau and Rest Area. I wanted to pick up some brochures of the area. They closed just half an hour before we arrived. I took a few pictures of the historical and geographical information they had for public display outside and called it good.
I drove us back to the mainland, up to Chesapeake and over to Suffolk, VA.
I think we need to have a fundraiser for the Virginia Department of Transportation. They seem to be only posting speed limit signs once every 30 miles or so and there are zero signs to tell you how far ahead the next few towns are. Their exit and entrance ramps are EXTREMELY short and the barely helpful exit info signs are posted about a half-mile ahead of the exit. Sometimes they're even obscured by trees in need of pruning. I had to lay the brakes on pretty quickly a couple times in order to move into the right lane and exit. It was a very good thing traffic was light. We lived through it long enough to get to where we're laying our heads tonight. After a quick set-up and light dinner, Mike laid on the couch and napped until I woke him up and told him to go to bed. It's been a very long day.
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Alicia Ferris
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Long Bridge
That certainly is a long bridge. You would think that the power lines across would be a problem in Hurricane season. But maybe that's cheaper and more reliable than going under the water. The houses remind me of those in Louisiana when we were there. Have a great day. Love you.