Cruising Across Carolina: Really looking to get away? Start with these NC islands.

This is the first installment in Cruising Across Carolina, a summer series in which Martha Quillin road trips across the Tar Heel State.

Don’t tell my editor, but I’m fixing to have the best work summer ever, and I want y’all to come along.

Well, you can’t ride with me because there’s no room in my car, with the camping gear, my beach chair and umbrella, hiking shoes, my little vintage sewing machine and the yards of fabric I pick up as souvenirs everywhere I go.

My approach when traveling is to have a bit of everything in the back I might need in any situation. But you’ll be paying for your own gas so you can decide how much dead weight to carry around.

Where are we going?

All over North Carolina.

Along the interstates if we must, but mostly down the back roads, past the farm fields, through the small towns, along the water’s edge, into the woods, up the ridgebacks. Not to the fabulous main attractions that draw tens of millions of visitors every year; billboards, brochures and chambers of commerce can point you to those.

Let’s go to the places I’ve heard about or stumbled onto in 35 years of crisscrossing the state for The News & Observer, but didn’t have time to visit because I was covering the news. Places where the locals go when they have a day off. The ones where, when you walk in, people figure you took a wrong turn.

Come on.

Let’s get lost.

This week’s itinerary

The main spots: Ocracoke, Hatteras Island, Manteo.

The journey: From the Triangle to Swan Quarter, onto the ferry to Ocracoke, then Hatteras Island, Manteo and back home.

Length of trip: Four days minimum, plenty to enjoy for one to two weeks.

From just about anywhere in North Carolina, it’s a long way to Ocracoke. That’s kind of the point.

Part of the fun of traveling for pleasure is leaving everything behind, and when you go to Ocracoke, you really leave it. On the mainland. Separated from your last jangling nerve by a body of water.

The only way to get to Ocracoke is over the water. My sewing machine wouldn’t fit under the seat in a private plane, so I take one of the three state-run ferries that leave from Cedar Island, Hatteras and Swan Quarter.

From Raleigh, I prefer Swan Quarter. Driving to this commercial fishing village takes me through Eastern North Carolina, where I can see what’s happening in the farm fields that stretch to the horizon from U.S. 64. (Fun fact: U.S. 64 is the longest numbered route in the state, running 604 miles from the Tennessee line to the Outer Banks, connecting Murphy to Manteo.)

When you know your travel dates, reserve space at a motel, bed & breakfast, cottage or campsite on the island, then make a ferry reservation online, understanding that your $15 ticket to paradise is not guaranteed. The state cancels ferry runs in high winds, sudden shoaling or if a boat has mechanical problems. If an earlier ferry gets canceled, riders with reservations can be put on a later one. So make sure you have a reservation, check the day of travel to see if the ferries are running, and get to the terminal an hour early to claim your spot. Same-day reservations are not accepted.

A road food stop

About an hour and 45 minutes east of Raleigh, near Jamesville, you’ll see signs for Mackey’s Ferry Peanuts, featuring one of those crops sometimes visible from the highway. Watch for the business on the westbound side, and make a U-turn to get to it. There’s a small gift shop with the usual scented soaps and flip-flop Christmas tree ornaments, but you’re here for the boiled peanuts, the blister-fried peanuts and the ones dipped in dark chocolate.

Don’t eat them yet. Those are for later.

Make another U-turn and resume traveling east on U.S. 64 about 10 miles, then follow the signs off the highway into the town of Plymouth on the Roanoke River. Plan to get here around lunchtime so you can get a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich at the Riverview Cafe or a bite at neighboring Stella’s, which promises “The Best Desserts Possible.”

Leave time to peruse the handful of downtown shops, then get back to the road. The last ferry for Ocracoke leaves at 4:30 p.m. and you need to be there an hour ahead.

The ferry terminal at Swan Quarter has bathrooms and drink machines. You can skip the snack machines because you have local delicacies in the floorboard to sustain you while waiting for the ferry and during the two-hour-and-forty-minute boat ride across Pamlico Sound.

The magic starts to happen when the ferry leaves the dock. Over the next 24 nautical miles, the stress of work and undone chores and delinquent car taxes seems to fall overboard and get left in the wake. Your shoulders begin to uncoil.

Slip out of your car and climb to the upper deck of the ferry if the weather is good, or sit in the air-conditioned passenger lounge and wait for the Ocracoke Lighthouse to come into view.

The Swan Quarter ferry lands at the edge of the Village of Ocracoke, the occupied part of the island that takes up just 4 square miles on the southern end and holds all the lodging, restaurants, shops and other businesses, along with the homes of the fewer than 1,000 full-time residents. Check in where you’re staying, then figure out supper.

Hurricane Dorian changed some things

If you’ve been to Ocracoke before, it might look different this time. Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 swamped the island with up to 7 feet of water from the sound. Since then, some of the older homes have been razed, others lifted onto taller foundations. The interior of nearly every building in the village has been renovated or is under reconstruction now.

And yet, the cedar shakes and the unpainted clapboard exteriors remain on many of the houses and older commercial buildings. Gnarly survivor trees — live oaks, cedars, wax myrtles, yaupon — still shade the streets and sandy walking paths and the village retains the charm of a seaside summer camp without the institutional food.

During my visit in early May, I spent two nights at the Crews Inn, a B&B run by Alton Ballance, an Ocracoke native who loves the island’s history so much he published an authoritative book about it. The inn, in a house built at the turn of the 20th century, has five rooms, a small separate cottage and a wraparound porch with swings. Breakfast is served on the screened back porch. Ballance will probably cook it.

On the island, you can rent rooms, condos, cottages or campsites where you can cook your own meals, including fresh fish you buy at Ocracoke Seafood Company. But don’t miss out on the local cuisine, and don’t be surprised that prices reflect the fact that nearly everything served has to be imported from somewhere else.

The grilled veggie tacos for lunch at Eduardo’s Taco Stand are revelatory. Have the Blue Plate Special at the outdoor bar or a patio table at Dajio’s, share a pound of shrimp or a plate of fried oysters at Howard’s Pub, or a pizza at Jason’s. If you can find a jar of the island’s signature fig preserves at a gift shop or restaurant, buy it to take home.

If you slept through breakfast, Ocracoke Coffee Company is a calm place to wake up slowly with a fresh cup and a cinnamon roll. They sell great souvenir mugs.

Wherever you go, tip as generously as you can; it’s been a tough couple of years for islanders, and they make most of their annual income in a few short months. Also remember it’s a small town, and they’ll talk about you when you’re gone if you don’t act right.

Getting around on Ocracoke

If the food sounds decadent, don’t worry, you work off a lot of calories on Ocracoke because the best ways to enjoy the island are walking and riding a bike — yours or one you rent by the hour, day or week at the Slushy Stand or another vendor. The Slushy Stand’s website is still displaying a price sheet from 2016. Whatever. You’re on island time.

Golf cart rentals are available too. All are preferable to driving a car that, because of the scale of the village and limits on parking, makes you feel like a gas-guzzling Gulliver in Lilliput.

There’s also a seasonal, free island tram that runs a continuous 30-minute loop to eight stops around the village.

The car will come in handy when you’re ready to go shelling, fishing or sunning on the beach, which runs 16 miles from just outside the village to the northern tip of the island.

The beach at Ocracoke is legendary and consistently ranks among the finest in the nation. Because it lies within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, managed by the National Park Service, it’s void of commercial development. So take everything you’ll need for a day in the sun, including a bathing suit. Rangers know the island is a reputed haven for nude sunbathers, and officers patrolling by air and in four-wheel-drives are trained to look for tan lines.

Whatever you take onto the beach, bring it back, and don’t trample the vegetation or you’ll be a “dingbatter” in the eyes of the locals. They explain that term in a cool video on the Ocracoke dialect at the visitors center.

For the past several years, the state has run a passenger-only ferry from Hatteras that drops visitors at the Village of Ocracoke, unlike vehicle ferries from Hatteras that land at the island’s north end, 12 miles from the village. Except for locals who sometimes use the passenger express, it’s mostly for day-trippers. A day on Ocracoke is like one nibble off a dark chocolate sea salt peanut cluster from Mackey’s Ferry Peanuts: just enough to make you want more.

Sunsets and Blackbeard

With a few days or a week to fully embrace the island vibe, you can sample nearly everything Ocracoke has to offer, including surf lessons, clam raking, horseback riding, ranger programs with the National Park Service, kayaking and fishing trips. Or you can just sit on the beach all day, then go look for the best spot to photograph the sunset. Hint: in that pink light, the whole place is a postcard and anybody with an iPhone is Ansel Adams.

The Ocracoke Island Visitors Center, near the southern ferry landing, has information and exhibits on the obvious must-sees such as the British Cemetery, the lighthouse and grounds, the Ocracoke Pony pen and the island’s most infamous regular, Blackbeard.

While you’re on the island, walk or bike to the 122-acre Springer’s Point Preserve, the closest you can get without a sloop to where Blackbeard probably hung out in the 1700s. Saved from development, the windblown maritime forest, the red cedars and the marsh probably look much as they did when Blackbeard lost his head in a final fight close by.

As you’re moving around the island, notice the many family cemeteries, some well kept, some covered in brambles. The dates and the names on the stones reflect the continuity of the island’s occupation. Despite isolation, having to make do, and getting punished by hurricanes and nor’easters, families with the same names still live on Ocracoke today. The way the cemeteries are incorporated into the town, into people’s backyards, contributes to the sense of the past always being with us.

When it’s time to move on, travel north from the village on N.C. 12 to catch a ferry to Hatteras. Along the way, you’ll pass one beach access area after another, each one beckoning: Wait. Don’t go yet.

Don’t fall for that siren call. There will be a long line for ferries to Hatteras, and for this ride, there are no reservations. You have to wait until there’s room for you on a boat.

I landed on Hatteras with two nights and two days left to adventure. After my relatively luxurious stay at Ocracoke, I was ready to spare some creature comforts and pitch a tent within earshot of the ocean.

Camping is not everybody’s thing, but I have a 1966 camping trailer I call the Mermaid Mobile because I like to take it to the beach. I didn’t haul it on this trip because it has the drag coefficient of the granite Wright Brothers Monument and gas was more than $4 a gallon.

So I pulled out a “three man” tent I had bought at Walmart when I thought I was going to camp on Ocracoke for a story after Hurricane Dorian. It cost $20 at the time, which suggests it might not provide durable shelter on an Everest expedition, but when I set it up on my back porch before this trip, it looked fine.

Spectacular view (but giant mosquitoes)

Having watched three ferries leave Ocracoke before I got waved on, I arrived at Hatteras Island with about an hour of daylight left and started checking out campgrounds. Hatteras Sands was tempting, with its cabins that look like Charleston’s Rainbow Row and its nice bathhouse with hot and cold running water. But I traveled north another 13 miles and pulled into Frisco Campground, one of four campgrounds in the 70-mile-long Cape Hatteras National Seashore that runs from Ocracoke Inlet to Nags Head. I had passed the entrance at least 20 times before and never pulled in.

Even in the dimming light, it was spectacular: stretching a half-mile along the ocean with 127 sites tucked into the dense shrubs and trees that can survive constant exposure to salt, wind and sand. Open April to late November, it has bathhouses with toilets and showers. No hot water, no electrical hookups and, if there is no breeze, mosquitos big enough to need their own “three-man” tent.

But it has sites that snuggle against the dunes near the surf and, farther back, sitting on a high bluff with views across the tree tops all the way to the sea.

Reservations are required and can be made online, which I did on my phone after I found an open spot I liked.

A weather app on my phone pinged me that a storm was coming. I set up the tent against a 12-mph wind, tucked the Walmart tag underneath and wondered if those pencil-thin metal stakes would hold the thing down long enough for me to go find bigger ones that could get a bite on the soft sand. I didn’t want to go rolling down the dune in a thunderstorm at midnight zipped up in a three-man Walmart body bag.

A convenience store/tackle shop across from the entrance to the campground was still open and had contoured plastic stakes I figured would keep me alive through the night. Back to the campground, I stuffed an inflated air mattress into the tent (I’m cheap, I’m not stupid), made my bed and went looking for supper.

The Tavern on 12 less than a mile to the north was still serving crab cake sandwiches and burgers.

The worst part of the storm missed the Frisco Campground that night, but when it stopped thundering and sprinkling rain, I noticed what I thought was very rhythmic lightning.

I realized later it was the sweep of the Hatteras Light, 8 miles away.

The biggest I-told-you-so story ever

The next day, I packed up and backtracked south to Hatteras Village to visit the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, one of the state’s three maritime museums. The building itself is made to look like the weathered bones of the shipwrecks to which it pays homage. I spent an hour on the exhibits, which include the 1854 Fresnel lens from the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse; a tribute to the early Livesaving Service; and maybe the least known, biggest I-told-you-so story ever.

On the night of April 14, 1912, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s Hatteras station logged one of the first distress calls when the HMS Titanic reported its coordinates and announced, “have struck iceberg.” The supervisor at Hatteras immediately relayed the message to New York but was reprimanded for “junking up the lines” with the implausible claim. The museum still has the call log.

From there I meandered up N.C. 12, the bituminous backbone of the Outer Banks, stopping at will. Many places had not yet opened for the season or their proprietors had left notes saying they were on errands and would return soon. To my delight, Kyle Oden of the Scratchmade Snackery was still at work, selling sticky buns and chocolate croissants as fast as he could wrap them. The shop at nearby Oden’s Dock has a fun collection of T-shirts and ball caps and the dock serves as home base for eight charter fishing services offering half- and whole-day trips.

Oden’s is adjacent to the Breakwater Inn, which has a restaurant and two kinds of lodging: “deluxe rooms” overlooking the sound, and “fishermen’s quarters.”

Along Hatteras island, most hotels are like this one, single- or two-story buildings, often with a swimming pool but always acknowledging that the main attraction is the beach. Real estate companies list house and condo rentals, most of which let for a week at a time.

Before leaving the island, I stopped at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which I had not seen in person since it was moved 2,900 feet to keep it out of the ocean in 1999. It’s undergoing repairs and may not be open this year for climbing, but it’s worth stopping to see the scale of the structure and marvel at the engineering feat of picking it up like a 193-foot-tall wedding cake and setting it down without breaking it.

The highly recommended, non-profit Frisco Native American Museum was not open when I stopped. But the Hotline Thrift Store was, and the unnecessary household items I bought there were in support of the charity’s aid to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

When I go back, I plan to search for the best bowl of Hatteras-style clam chowder, and get a pound of house-made yellowfin tuna salad to go from Harbor House Seafood Market.

Relishing my success at the Frisco Campground, I opted to spend the last night of this journey in the Oregon Inlet Campground, the northernmost of the four within the national seashore. There are many commercial campgrounds too.

Unlike the ones at Frisco, Oregon Inlet sites are close enough that your next-door neighbor can probably read the word “Walmart” on your tent tag. But if you need help raising the structure, at least there is someone to ask.

This is the only campground of the four that has hot showers and some sites with electrical hookups. The former would be less important in July or August than it was in early May.

Coffee from a camp stove

A cold front with a steady wind and big gusts blew through that night, but thanks to my after-market stakes, I didn’t lift off the ground like one of the sails the kiteboarders use at Canadian Hole, on the sound, and in the surf off Hatteras Island. They’re fun to watch from several of the beach access areas along N.C. 12, where parking is free.

After a very civilized cup of coffee made on my trusty camp stove, I packed up again and went off to see how much I could squeeze in before starting home. I managed the Bodie (pronounced BAH-dee) Light, which is open for climbing once you buy tickets online; Kitsch ‘N Dishes thrift store in Rodanthe; Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head, where $2 lets you walk out over the ocean and ask the fishermen what’s biting (they love that); and a meal at Basnight’s Lone Cedar Cafe on the causeway between Nags Head and Manteo.

The food was good, but I ate at the bar and was completely distracted by the active osprey nest visible right outside the window where parents were feeding their insatiable young. Hope I left a good tip.

There’s a whole other Outer Banks world north of Nags Head: Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, Duck, Corolla, all with their unique charms and attractions.

I had to get home, but instead of taking the U.S. 64 bypass that goes around Manteo, I took an extra minute and went into town, all the way to the waterfront. It was jammed with people, most of them sitting at outdoor tables waiting for lunch and drinks. Maybe later they planned to tour the Elizabeth II or visit the Fort Raleigh Historic Site.

The historic site includes a feature that many overlook, maybe because it doesn’t fit with the emphasis on early colonization. It’s the 2.25-mile Freedom Trail, named for the liberty offered to enslaved people who could make their way to Roanoke Island after Union forces took control there.

The trailhead is in a parking lot at the end of National Park Drive, and the National Park Planner website says, “It is mainly flat and smooth, and there is no chance of getting lost.”

Guess we’ll have to try harder next time.

Coming up: The next installment of Cruising Across Carolina will be on June 22.

This story was originally published May 25, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Cruising Across Carolina: Really looking to get away? Start with these NC islands.."

Martha Quillin

The News & Observer

919-829-8989

Martha Quillin writes about climate change and the environment. She has covered North Carolina news, culture, religion and the military since joining The News & Observer in 1987.