To exit the Outer Banks is no small task. The North Carolina coastline is nothing but inlets, peninsulas, and ferries, and our GPS (which we hate by the way) in fact led us to a ferry dock and instructed us to board. We were not the first touristy victims of this, however, as our predicament was immediately diagnosed by the ferry office staff the second Michelle stepped in. We got back on route 17, a road which would be our uninvited best friend all the way down to Florida, and decided we wanted to drive only as far as Wilmington that day. We arrived in the late afternoon, found a shady place to park and took a walk around downtown. Wilmington is super cute, we at first compared it to a southern Portsmouth but decided the homeless people made the place feel more like Portland, ME. I think it's the colonial thing with a southern...twist that Michelle and I liked: something we would like in the next couple cities we visited, as well.
I have an annoyingly persistent aversion to being "scammed." I'm not entirely sure where this came from or when, but it tends to steer Michelle and I away from signs on docks which read "$4 boat ride." I must have been tired or perhaps just in a good mood because we did, in fact, end up on a boat in the Wilmington harbor waiting for a 15 minute, $4 sail in one large-ish circle.
Oh, there's the U.S.S. Carolina, maybe we'll get a better view of that. Nope, time to circle back, this is as close as you're getting. We got what we paid for, lesson learned.
We don't have photos of this, which is surprising because 75% of our pictures so far are of food, but we had a great meal in Wilmington at a place called Circa 1922. We tried some of the charcuterie which was decent, but the shrimp and grits was amaaaaziiing. We're not the best judges of good grits as we're pretty inexperienced, but this bowl of southern slop was better than any I've ever had.
And on the already too long list of things we can't believe we missed, the Serpentarium. Closed. Bummer.
There's a surf/skate shop in town so I asked the young folks working there where they surf. They gave us directions to Carolina Beach and we took a ride down there to see if we could sleep by the ocean that night, assuming the area would be a state park at the end of a quiet road where we could avoid noisy crowds for a bit. No such luck. Carolina Beach is yet another tourist beach town with stores with names like Waves, Sunsations, and Eagles (that one's strange) all selling the same beach town garbage towels and hermit crabs. We felt very lucky to find a small parking lot right on the beach which was free overnight and came equipped with bathrooms and outdoor showers. As we always do we parked in the darkest corner of the lot. Then we put on our swimsuits, tucked away our shame, swallowed our pride and showered under the moonlight... and nearby terraces of vacation goers enjoying a late night beer. We once again had not showered in a few days, so although I was wearing surf trunks and we had to constantly pull on a chain to keep the water flowing, this Carolina Beach parking lot cleanse has easily made it into my top 5 showers of all time.
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