50.3 mi / 12.7 mph / 297 ft. climbing
Home: Best Rest Inn

In 2010, I battled raccoons for three nights in a row while camping in North Carolina. Dennis and I hadn’t been sure what purpose the 7-foot-high hooks posted in each campsite served, but we quickly determined they were for hanging food to protect it from raccoons (eventually all of our panniers ended up hung from them). In 2024, more research indicates that they’re actually meant as lantern hooks, from an old-school pre-LED day, and raccoon-protection is simply a convenient side-effect.

That 2010 assumption (and use) was still stuck in my head though, so when I saw our site had three such poles, I took it as a sign of extreme raccoon-defenses (who carries three lanterns, after all?) We also have started seeing road-killed raccoons on North Carolina roads for the last several days, after seeing none throughout the more-northern states. And the garbage cans here have bear- (and presumably raccoon-)proof latches, something we haven’t seen since actual bear country in the Catskills.

Despite all these warning signs, I ended up not using the hooks, and simply kept all of our food inside our panniers with our panniers attached to the bikes. And…this long story concluded this morning as just a boring tale about a successful gamble and rejected paranoia, rather than a dramatic raccoon raid. There wasn’t a single sign that our bikes got any attention overnight (and a lack of prints, or sightings before going to bed (in addition to no mentions in Google reviews!), was part of why I made the gamble). Dumb luck, or a sign that my instincts/practices in camp are actually improving over all these years? Or maybe North Carolina agencies have just taken a more-aggressive approach toward raccoon-elimination in campgrounds this decade?

Halfway through our first thirteen miles the road got a little busier as we passed through the town of Newport (and picked up groceries), but then dropped to nothing as we took the gravel Millis Road through the Croatan National Forest for 7 mles. I had been a bit nervous about the surface quality, since despite the winds returning to our favor today, it would still be a relatively-long day for us. But it was even better than the campground access road had been, solid, smooth, and only dusty when a big line of pickup trucks squeezed by in the other direction (one driver actually yelled “sorry!” out of his window). The only other people on the road were hunters, parked on the road every quarter-miles for a stretch, standing in the backs of their pickups with their eyes fixed out into the woods. Doesn’t seem like an especially sporting form of hunting to me, but maybe they knock off raccoons too when they get bored?

When Dennis and I did this ride, we used the standard bike-touring route which runs out to a barrier island through Morehead City, along the thin water-surrounded strip for 20 miles, and then back inland at Cape Cartaret. That seems like an obvious attraction for people doing a coastal ride, but since I didn’t have any particular memories of that section, and Dennis only wrote about shopping centers, I think it’s a section that looks much more attractive on a map than on the ground. Our ride through the open forest actually ended up being a more-unique environment, and saved a bunch of miles on top of it.

The next 30 miles westward into Jacksonville were generally on low-traffic secondary roads, something that barely exists in this region heavily cut with broad rivers. We got cold drinks at a small middle-of-nowhere crossroads store that smelled like a litter box, and whose spacious unlit interior felt like it could have been in Mexico. We set up our chairs to eat in the grass around back to eat, sheltered from the normally-helpful breeze and looking out onto a harvested field.

Jacksonville is a city big enough to have three Taco Bells (we picked our motel because it’s right across the highway for one of them!), but except for the last quarter-mile on US-17, we were able to get into it fairly stress-free. The old downtown area was so utterly devoid of cars or humans that I feared the Old Bridge to get us out of it must have been closed, but no, I guess Saturday afternoon is just quiet time there.

At check-in, there was a bowl of Halloween candy, which made me think “hmm, we didn’t see many houses with Halloween decorations today…I guess people here must still be ramping up”, only to realize, no, Halloween was already two days behind us! The combination of 80-degree weather and complete absence of events on the day itself (and maybe just our recent constant state of motion) has apparently jumbled my marking of the passage of time.