Manteo NC

 We traveled down the river and across the Albemarle Sound today to arrive in Manteo NC on Roanoke Island. This is the start of the Outer Banks region and somewhere I had always wanted to go. What a lovely beach town! Our marina is right next to the downtown area with tons of shops, restaurants and wineries and craft breweries and there is a brand new boardwalk that literally goes right there from our boat. We got here about 1 pm, so after we got settled we walked downtown and had lunch at the brewery. We did a quick overview of the shops and Kathy and I decided we have a date with that area tomorrow.

The wind was blowing pretty hard as we crossed the sound and was coming from the west, so we had following seas and that made it hard to steer the boat.  Combined with more crab pots than I’ve ever seen on the Chesapeake. Tom says he doubts there is a crab alive on the Albemarle Sound! How quickly do those things reproduce anyway??? It was too windy to maneuver into a slip today so we pulled up to the face dock and will move to our slip in the morning when the winds are calm. Steve and Kathy have a slip with a tiny little side pier and struggle to get on and off their boat using the swim platform, so that’s a hard no for me to get onto their boat. They brought dinner and drinks over to Orion tonight and we had margaritas and fajitas!

We took a nice walk before dark with Madison and the guys scoped out the auto parts store where Tom can buy the oil to do the oil change on the engine tomorrow and Kathy and I checked out the grocery store. Tomorrow morning we will walk back over to do a little shopping, maybe some laundry and then resort shopping downtown in the afternoon. Tom has the oil change to do and Steve is replacing a part on his generator. There is a replica of a ship that brought colonists to Roanoke that gives tours and I think that might be on the agenda for Wednesday. Looking forward to exploring Manteo tomorrow.



Sunset from the back of the boat

Lighthouse on the island

Brewery where we ate lunch


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