A lesson in Weather Management

As we slowly let our guard down after our first van fiasco we tried to get a plan in order for where we wanted to go next. The weather report showed rain in every direction for a few days and lower than ideal temperatures so we decided to pay our friend a visit in Baltimore by way of Portland Maine and a few other stops along the way and then find somewhere to ride out the cold rainy weather.

We stopped by old port in Portland Maine where we had been 8 years prior and confirmed it was still there. Being that we are on a hiatus from drinking at the moment we couldn’t really figure how we spent a week here…but it was fun to go back, grab a couple $2 tacos, let our jaws drop over a $17 pack of smokes for sale behind the bar (again, amazed by the savings of not smoking or drinking anymore) and grabbed some fancy hiking socks from the aptly named “Nomad” boutique we passed. I felt I basically had to, they have mountain goats on them, I needed warm socks and we are officially nomads now, triple threat.

We drove and stopped at random Boondockers Welcome sites along the route to Baltimore. It is a surprisingly long drive from Acadia to Baltimore in case you didn’t know. A stop at Hershey’s Chocolate World was definitely a must as well as a quick pic of a house shaped like a shoe in York, Pennsylvania. The shoe was built in 1948 by a millionaire named Mr. Mahlon Haines, also known as the “Shoe Wizard of York”. The shoe spent some time as an ice cream shop as far as I can tell from Atlas Obscura, but it is now rented out on Air BnB. One question, what exactly is a shoe wizard and how do I become one?

We eventually made it to Baltimore and happily hugged and caught up with our dear friend Joel. The hustle and bustle, noise, smells and landscape of a big city such as Baltimore was certainly different from our typical venue of choice, but we thoroughly enjoyed playing with our pal’s virtual reality video game and then venturing out to a comedy show, The Roast of Poe, at the Baltimore Improv Group or BIG. I did not know that Baltimore claims Poe as their own since he spent his final years there until his death in 1849. The Baltimore Ravens, Charm City’s football team, is named after this man of the macabre and his inky bird friend which makes me like this particular sport ball team just a little bit more! (A little bit more means more than zero which is the prior amount of interest I had in any sport ball teams) The show was fantastic and so was the visit, but this outdoorsy gal was certainly breathing a sigh of relief as we exited the city. Little did I know we were about to be in a slightly tighter spot.

Remember when I said it would be raining for a while and cold everywhere we were thinking of going? We decided to go to the warmest of these rainy spots which ended up being the Outer Banks in North Carolina. At least if we had to wait out some rain we could do it in the warmest possible place within a reasonable drive. That was our logic anyways.

This notoriously nervous driver even did a spell behind the wheel on the way to the beach and didn’t even crash or anything! We were hoping to explore the Wright Brothers monument and museum but alas we hit our first roadblock due to the government shut down, the entrance was literally blocked off and we could not enter. We carried on and found the Elizabethan Gardens were still open although the lost colony and Fort Raleigh National Historic site were not.

Adult tickets to walk the gardens were $12 each and the end of October wasn’t exactly prime garden time, but it was still nice to walk around outside when it wasn’t raining (yet) and enjoy the scenery. There was a fossil dig area, for kids I would assume, but you better believe this natural history nut dug around in that stuff and found a shark tooth! That right there was worth the price of admission.

We were staying in a less than glamorous parking lot that we found on Harvest Hosts that evening so we pulled off highway 12 on the way to make some dinner and watch the sunset and kite surfers. I would like to note, this is a really awesome part of van life, having literally everything AND the kitchen sink with you all the time. Hungry- grab a snack or make a whole dang meal if you want, cold- put on your favorite hoodie or grab a blanket or even a sleeping bag if you feel like it! Everything is only an arms length away. On the flip side, this also means everything is only a couple feet away which can occasionally feel like the walls are closing in as you bump into one thing only to trip over another. But look at that view, couldn’t ask for a better dinner spot, so who cares about tripping over things and bumping into each other constantly. We housed some venison tacos and drove the rest of the way to Cape Hatteras to park it and sleep for the night.

In the morning we ventured over to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore where we had reserved a campsite for the next three nights to wait out that little bit of rain we had heard about. We were so excited that there was basically nobody else in the campground, we couldn’t believe our luck! (Can you see where this is headed?)

After a long walk on the beach, chats with fisherman and some serious beach combing/ gremlin action on my part, it started to sprinkle. In an effort to stay dry we enjoyed another meal in the van cooked at a beach pull off then struck out in search of an indoor activity which led to the Graveyard of the Atlantic museum. We noticed as we were walking along the beach there was a strange commotion in the ocean where it looked like the waves were hitting each other instead of washing up on shore, we learned quickly what that was when we went to the museum.

You see, the Graveyard of the Atlantic earned its name due to two feisty ocean currents that collide and battle it out daily right at Cape Hatteras (where our campsite was). The warm Gulf Stream from the south clashes with the cold Labrador current from the north and has caused enumerable shipwrecks. These colliding currents create unpredictable weather patterns, shifting sand bars and strong seas so it’s easy to understand why this is a shipwreck graveyard. Fast forward to 2:30 am when we woke up to the entire van swaying in gale force winds. Although there wasn’t much precipitation in the forecast, we did not account for the proximity of 22 billion gallons of water, or in other words, the Atlantic Ocean which seemed to be bound and determined to join us on the narrow strip of land that is the Outer Banks.

There was a warning on our campsite reservation that noted the campground was in a low lying flood area and as we were watching the radar go from bad to worse in the coming hours Eric had a “bad feeling about this”. We decided to get back onto the mainland which meant 2.5 hours of driving in gale force winds, blowing sand and sea foam in the dark. Shortly after the video above was shot we came to a semi-truck stopped diagonally across NC12, the only road in or out of the area. One other car was in front of us but Eric’s quick thinking got us around the wrong side of the semi and moving again before we were literally buried alive by the blowing sand that sounded like it was etching our windshield and entering every crevice in existence on Momo (it’s been two weeks since that drive and there is still sand everywhere).

We took refuge at a rest area, laid down in our clothes and slept for a few hours. Another moment where we were thankful to have all we need (or have) in one place. The other side of that coin being the incredible weight and worry of having literally everything in one- car, house, things and your person all in one metal box that could have been swept into the ocean or buried in a sand storm coming out with irreperable damage…thats a little bit scary.
We had already purchased tickets to an aquarium and to see a scary movie at the oldest privately owned theater in the country for our rainy day activities. So after careful consideration of the radar, we found the Garden Deli & Pizzeria on Harvest Hosts and had not only a place to stay for the night, but also some amazing slices that required two plates each! As it turned out NC12 was completely flooded and impassible for the next several days so we obviously were NOT going back to that campground. I was miraculously able to cancel our next two nights and actually get it refunded from the rec.gov app too so that was a small victory.

After a nice visit with the owner of the Pizzeria and a look at their Sasquatch museum, seriously you need to check this place out if you are on Roanoke Island, we headed to the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. The photo above features Big Girl and also a shark…just kidding, the sharks name is actually Big Girl. She is the largest animal they house at the aquarium, a sand tiger shark weighing around 300lbs who is 25 years old. This watery wonderland was a great way to spend an exorbitant amount of time as we had lots of it to kill until our movie at 7pm. We played a game of jeopardy put on by the staff and actually won! They gave us our choice of prizes and we scored some handy reusable bags which we seemingly cannot have enough of in the van. I use them for everything, groceries, gym bag, disguising the wee jug to take it in to empty it, carrying my paint supplies to set up somewhere, they are a very useful tool in van life as it were.

There were tons of amazing creatures at the aquarium, everything from the turtle rescue center where they had several patients on the way to recovery to otters/fresh water exhibits as well as jellyfish and lion fish. This particularly jolly looking fellow is a porcupine fish and I fell in love with his dopey face. It reminded me of a big happy puppy but in fish form. It was here in the gift shop where we learned of the NC12 closure. Good golly sakes am I glad we got out when we did. If not washed out to sea, we would have been stranded for days on that tiny spit of land with unimaginable damage to the van.

Being that it was 3 days before Halloween, the allure of seeing the original Friday the 13th in an old theater was too strong to resist, hellacious weather be damned. It did help we were on Roanoke Island which is slightly protected by the strip of the outer banks and the winds were dying down a bit. The Pioneer Theater is such a neat venue. We arrived early and were treated to a quick behind the scenes tour of the theater by the current owner where we even got to peek in the green room. The space not only shows movies, it also hosts events and concerts in an intimate setting. We enjoyed the show and then hit up our parking spot back at the Pizzeria and slept like the dead after a terrifying morning followed by a pleasant afternoon of aquatic animal viewing and ending with scary movie watching.

We definitely had reached our quota for scary with the storm still brewing, headlines told us that 5 houses literally fell into the ocean. We skedaddled, thanking our lucky stars and headed even further inland to get as far away from the coast as possible. We landed in Morganton, North Carolina at an extremely gracious Boondockers Welcome host who not only let us do a load of laundry for free, but also allowed us to stay for 5 nights as we regrouped, got rested up, blogged and adventured on the numerous trails in the area.

Staying on theme for the season we took a walk in nearby Lake James State Park and stumbled across a cemetery where the oldest graves we could make out dated back to 1854. Eric ventured out on an epic challenge of a bike ride called Two Gorges which traversed 65 miles and over 6,000′ of elevation. The ride earned him his biggest climb to date of 2,728′. Woof, these are numbers that I cannot even fathom, the bike monster strikes again with incredible feats of athleticism.

The photo above shows the view across one of the gorges to the opposing mountain ridge. These ridges are part of the Appalachian Mountains and reside within the Linville gorge wilderness area. After Eric biked all along this harrowing mountain ridge over chunky gravel, paved roads, steep climbs and even some hike a bikes we opted to hike up to the ridge you see here, together, a couple days later.

I personally think that the name of this summit “short off” was a swing and a miss when the road that leads to the trailhead is literally called wolf pit. How metal is that? Totally a missed opportunity and I will forever call this hike the “wolf pit” because it’s just too awesome of a name to be wasted on a road alone.

The bike monster pictured above is pointing to the ridge he rode atop mere days ago. It was a startling realization we came to while on this hike, the difference between biking and hiking. The overlook we hiked to came out to 6.24 miles round trip. If you remember, Eric biked 65 miles on his epic ride and it took him only two more hours of time than we spent hiking. We speculated along the way not taking into account that much of a speed difference that he probably rode to here, or there and then we actually pulled a map up with an overlay of the route he rode and we were barely at the beginning of where he went! Bicycles are amazing machines folks.

We wrapped up our stay in Morganton with this hike and planned to head on to Roanoke, Virginia to do a little hiking on the Appalachian Trail on our way to the first of our two pre-booked concerts, Dawes, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
We learned a valuable weather lesson while narrowly escaping a gale on an island that abuts a literal shipwreck graveyard and we will definitely be working towards earning our amateur meteorologist badges. Since our backyard will constantly be changing for the foreseeable future, we will be working diligently to better assess weather patterns and possible consequences/outcomes as we press on. This was not the first or last lesson to be learned while on the road and we have to say, thank you universe for scaring but not harming us and teaching us how to move forward smarter and safer!