Ocracoke and The Outer Banks: Motor Home on a Ferry

Life in a Motor Home on a ferry

There is a two hour ferry that takes you from the southern tip of the Outer Banks in N. Carolina, a small, picturesque seafaring town called Ocracoke to Cedar Island and the bridge to the mainland. Our ferry was to depart the next morning and so we had time to explore the town. 

We found a small inexpensive motel off the beaten path and down a quiet lane. The female owner of the motel had two adoptive feral cats. Right across the narrow street was a private home with a pick up truck parked in the driveway that was painted to resemble military camouflage. there were gun racks, animal traps and God knows what else lay beneath the heavy green tarpaulin.  

We met another couple while visiting here. They were from Aurora, North Carolina. A town whose sole claim to fame,they said, is the Aurora Fossil Museum. It seems that a large collection of fossils was uncovered during years of phosphate mining in the area. We had previously been advised that a trip in that direction would be disappointing because all you could see and travel through for miles and miles was swampland, as if there was nothing there. 

This couple put the lie to that summary assessment. They and others like them had spent their entire lives in that region and loved it. They were farmers, living far removed from any population center. Droughts like the current one had almost no effect on farmers in that area because the area is part of a tidal inlet. The land and the lakes are irrigated naturally, by the incoming Atlantic high tides. Yet their home was never flooded.

Even now in retirement they were in a townhouse in a small community and had to travel for shopping to New Berne or Washington N.C.  They had never visited the northeast and had no desire to do so. They made frequent trips to Ocracoke and Booford, as they pronounced it. Could they possibly mean Beaufort S. C. a place we had fallen in love with on our last visit. 

No, they meant Boofort in N.C. I asked how it was spelled and indeed the spelling was identical. When I commented on how we knew it as Beaufort, Ezra explained there were different pronunciations in North and  South Carolina. Ah yes, I responded, the old north-south divide lives on. Ezra smiled and asked, “Between the two Carolinas?”                 

We were advised the previous evening by the old salt at the ferry gate to arrive at least 30 minutes before the ferry departure at 9:30. The next morning we were there at 8:45 and wound up the third car in line and in the first row for boarding the ferry. The line alongside and behind us kept growing and the ferry appeared to be too small and growing smaller by the minute. I was glad we took the sailors advice because we certainly would board. But then at 9:30 our line was instructed to move to one side so as to allow a large produce truck and two substantial motor homes to board first. I watched impatiently as they carefully ever so slowly maneuvered those behemoths aboard. The rest of us then had to squeeze on alongside those privileged wheeled sardine cans.   

We were standing on the second level, forward deck of the ferry facing into a pleasant tropical breeze as we searched the distant horizon for signs of our   destination, Cedar Island. There was another ordinary looking couple nearby whom we engaged in conversation. They were a bit younger than us but the difference did not negate how much we had in common because of having lived through identical decades

But it was what we did not have in common that was the primary topic of our discussion. The couple were the proud owners of one of those motor homes, the larger of the two as a matter of fact. We spent the next hour learning about these peoples experience of living year round in a motor home. It was a vastly different fascinating lifestyle. 

Perhaps some day.