After the previous night’s assault on my bike by raccoons, I immediately packed up all my food and hung it from a hook.\u00a0 But I left the panniers on the bike.\u00a0 Shortly after we went to bed, we could hear the raccoons methodically opening garbage cans around the campground and emptying them of their tasty contents.\u00a0 Also heard plenty roaming through the campsite, but when several hours passed without incident, I figured we were in the clear.\u00a0 No such luck.\u00a0 At 4:30am, wham!!\u00a0 Down goes my bike again.\u00a0 Well, I guess that experiment failed!\u00a0 Got up and hung my panniers from the pole with the rest of our bags.\u00a0 I’ve camped in over a hundred campgrounds around the country, and I’ve never had this raccoon problem.\u00a0 I figure it must be something to do with the parks’ suburban settings and bad campers training the raccoons, but maybe it’s just an evil line of raccoons in this part of the country.<\/p>\n
Today was another day to cover miles, and our first 8 miles to our final ferry was a bit more of a race than it should have been, partly because I failed to make sure\u00a0 Dennis was awake when my 6:15 alarm went off, and partly because we didn’t do a good job of measuring or normal pack-up times.\u00a0 Still, we made the ferry with some minutes to spare.<\/p>\n
After spending 5 nights in North Carolina, we finally crossed into her southern sibling, where the roads immediately got crappier.\u00a0 The blazing heat and high traffic didn’t help matters, though the vast majority of drivers are still pretty good.\u00a0 We went through another BAC, Myrtle Beach, where the miles of oceanfront hotels make Virginia Beach seem like Murdo, South Dakota in comparison.<\/p>\n
We pressed on to Huntington Beach State Park, where we were shockingly told that there was only one site left, after a week of nearly empty campgrounds.\u00a0 It seems to be quite a retiree RV hangout, where many sites have fake maiboxes and elaborate signposts announcing the occupiers.\u00a0 Needless to say, we don’t really fit in, but at least we got a site.\u00a0 Ice cold slushies, contraband beers in our water bottles, and then a quick trip to the beach to dip our toes in the surf had the always-magical effect of relaxing away all the day’s heat and hurt.<\/p>\n
(Ok, as I was sitting at the picnic table writing this at 8:30pm, a raccoon sauntered through the campsite, apparently doing advance scouting for tonight’s action.\u00a0 Seriously?!?\u00a0 And no fancy hooks at this campground!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the previous night’s assault on my bike by raccoons, I immediately packed up all my food and hung it from a hook.\u00a0 But I left the panniers on the bike.\u00a0 Shortly after we went to bed, we could hear the raccoons methodically opening garbage cans around the campground and emptying them of their tasty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010tour"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}