56.9 mi / 13.5 mph / 411 ft. climbing
Home: Days Inn

The broad Cape Fear River swoops in on Wilmington’s west side, while the ocean carves in from the east, pinching the land into a southward-pointing funnel. Normally such a funnel would be a traffic nightmare where no bicycles should ever go, but in the case of Wilmington’s funnel, the hole at the bottom is extremely constricted: no bridge connects the flow back to the mainland, only a ferry. It wasn’t quite enough to make the morning’s ride entirely peaceful, though the mid-section was the worst. At the wide top, there were enough residential streets and even parkland bike paths to allow us to mostly stay off the busy highways, and at the narrow bottom there simply wasn’t enough population to generate significant vehicle flow. The bad was the middle section where Masonboro Loop Road collected all the suburban residential traffic heading to and from Wilmington and squeezed it onto the shoulderless two-lane road with us, but even then most of the drivers were willing to give us time and space, and it was much quieter than yesterday’s high-speed US-17.

We chose not to spend any time seeing the city of Wilmington, which was a bit of a disappointment since it was the filming location of a couple of teen-drama shows that we’re fans of: ‘Dawson’s Creek’ and ‘One Tree Hill’. At one point we crossed a bridge with a view to a warm-glowing marsh-lined bay, on whose opposite shore somewhere sits Dawson Leery’s house. That meant we were on Joey Potter’s side of the water, and it looked so “right” I might have seen her rowing across to Dawson’s even if I hadn’t looked up the filming location. Unfortunately it was also in the section of the funnel where traffic prevented me from stopping for a photo, but I can just watch an old episode if I want to remember what it looked like.

One ferry leaves Fort Fisher at 10am, and the next at 11:30am. We realized that even with a good tailwind, and getting to Trader Joe’s right when it opened at 8am, making it the next 20 miles to the ferry before 10am would be way too rushed, so we’d opted to just take our time and arrive plenty early for the 11:30am. Thus it was surprising to see how close to the ferry we were at 9:55am; if we had only tightened up our shopping a little bit, we probably could have made the 10am. But then we would have missed Fort Fisher!

A couple miles before the ferry, Rett pulled over for a drink in the shade near an attractive beachside line of trees, and only later noticed the cannons and impressive new-built visitor center marking the Civil War battlefield. It’s incredibly rare (probably too rare) for us to stop to explore something on a whim, something that catches our eye, something that we hadn’t already researched to death. But since we had the time, walking the trail around the Fort and reading all the signs was way better than just hanging out at the ferry terminal (and, we still had plenty of time for that too, eating lunch at a shaded picnic table once we bought our tickets).

On the other side we were quickly into and out of the town of Southport, and then on the busy arrow-straight arterial Southport-Supply connector road for much of the rest of the day. A massive construction project appeared to be doubling-up the two-lane minimal-shoulder road, with the new lanes separated from the existing road by a wide upsloping grass median. At some point we saw a pickup truck blast down the under-construction section above us at a surprisingly-fast clip, so we tried to stand up and see if the surface was in fact already paved. It was, and that’s when Rett realized that maybe the construction worker we’d heard yell something a few miles back had been telling us we should take the new roadway? We climbed up at the next possible access point, didn’t see any sort of barricades, so decided to go for it. It was glorious, but, only lasted for a mile or so before the project ended. Darn it, we should have gotten on sooner!

Even though the tailwinds today had looked like they’d be even better than yesterday, they ended up providing significantly less assistance. Partially the forecast changed a bit, but more importantly we didn’t have the free-flowing wind tunnel of US-17 to sail along. The more-constricted roads of the first half of the day, with more turns, traffic lights, and simply more wind protection meant that our average speed was “only” in the top 3% of our 379 riding days rather than #1. Rett’s energy fell off a cliff for the last two miles, but three different drivers hollering curiosity and excitement for us while stopped at lights helped get her across the line. The nearly 100 miles the wind has helped us bank over the last two days will now pay good dividends over the next week.