Walking to the Outer Banks

I've gotten myself into a lot of trouble and adventures by looking at maps. One thing leads to another and the next thing I know I'm in the car -- sometimes within a matter of hours -- heading out to some godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere over a hunch that something interesting is waiting.

This time I'm about to do something especially weird. While staring at a map of Virginia (as I often do), I was thinking about what an unpleasantly long drive it is to get the the Outer Banks of North Carolina and how discouraged I have been from bothering with it for the last few years owing to the price of gas. As I stared at this map I noticed that the Outer Banks are actually part of the same spit of land that sticks out from the Virginia coast around Sandbridge in Virginia Beach.

Hmmm. Only there is no road directly connecting the two places. Virginia Beach is a very reasonable drive of a few hours from my home in Albemarle County. Corolla, NC, is another 100 miles or so. The shortest distance between Virginia Beach and Corolla would be along a stretch of mostly deserted beach and sand dunes with no roads whatever for about 22 miles.

Most single people claim to enjoy movies, children and long walks on the beach. I left the kids at their grandparents' house, but I'm going for a really long walk on the beach and I'm bringing the camera.

So here I am, checked into a motel in the city of Virginia Beach and ready to start the hike bright and early tomorrow morning. I've double-checked everything in my pack and feel very much ready. There's just two problems.

First, I haven't done any really serious backpacking in a long, long time.

I was a Boy Scout; I spent three weeks backpacking around the Smoky Mountains in Outward Bound; and I spent a year in ROTC before being medically disqualified when they found out that I was hiding a missing kidney. I've done plenty of backpacking. But its been a while. For the last ten years most of my longer expeditions have been in canoes or cars.

Perhaps it will help that I spent the past weekend walking around the West Village of Manhattan and downtown until my feet were sore and blistered. They've healed up pretty well and I should be a little tougher for this 44-mile round trip. But it is a fact that I haven't carried a heavy pack this far in over a decade. And my pack also happens to be an external frame job from LL Bean circa 1989. At least its more comfortable than my old ROTC pack.

Then another problem has reared its head this evening. I seem to suddenly be getting sick. Coughing, swollen lymph nodes in the throat, etc. Is it a cold or the flu or something else? I have no idea. But I'm getting sick the night before my big expedition and I'm not sure what to do about it.

I have an article about the trip due to a magazine by the end of this month and it would be a real embarrassment if I couldn't turn it in on time. Plus I'm already a couple of hundred bucks into the expenses on this one.

What's going to happen in the morning? I don't know.

[Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers. This is my pack, or actually an old one of my brother's which I am using for this trip, almost identical to my own which was smashed up by a black bear and has since been indisposed pending LL Bean following through with their unconditional lifetime guarantee.]