Greg & Camille Go Bike

We had a lot of food left and started the morning by stuffing ourselves in an attempt to finish it off. Yogurt with granola, Camille's cabbage chilli chickpea concoction and 10 eggs. By 8:30am, we were bloated but on the road. Our ride started out along the Atlantic coast following a local road parallel to route 12. We stopped off a couple times for glimpses of the water but eventually reached the bridge crossing from Bodie Island over to Pea Island. The bridge was fairly long, but had wide shoulders and we felt pretty safe.

Pea Island was very beautiful. We were on Rt 12 for it's entirety, but traffic seemed a fair bit slower than it had on Bodie Island and most of the traffic actually seemed to be going in the opposite direction. We took our time biking the length of the island enjoying dunes to our left and marshland to our right. Occasionally, the dunes would break and we wouldd catch glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean. There was also a fair amount of evidence of erosion at least one we spotted a bull dozer trying to push sand back into the dunes. We couldn't help but wonder how much longer these islands will actually exist. Will Pea Island mostly disappear within our life times?

Eventually, we crossed another smaller bridge and found ourselves on Hatteras island. We'd initially aimed to reach Ocracoke Island tonight, but that required another 40 minute ferry and 15 miles to bike the length of the island to any lodging. Even if we rushed to catch the 4 pm ferry, we'd still spend almost an hour biking in the dark. Instead we decided to book a place at the tip of Cape Hatteras just by the ferry.

The northern stretch of Hatteras had a few small towns, Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo, but it pretty quickly turned back into desolate stretches of just beach. There were turn offs for beach parking periodically but most were empty and while the rest had only one or two vehicles. We were really curious how this would look in the summer. Would our shoulder/bike lane be full of parked cars?

Eventually the desolate beach ended and we were in a more populated area again. We turned west and the slight tailwind we'd had all day quickly turned into a horrible headwind (going east by southeast). We fought the wind racing sundown and reached our hotel just in time to catch the sun setting over the harbor from the deck of our room.