This past weekend, I took my wife to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She had been asking to go there for a while because apparently there are some great shells on the beaches that you can’t find elsewhere. We figured out a weekend that would work, hoped for decent weather and set off on our adventure.

It would have taken 11 hours to drive to Ocracoke Island (the shell mecca) from home so we decided on the following itinerary: Fly to Norfolk Friday morning, drive 90 minutes to Kitty Hawk, NC (basically where you can enter the Outer Banks from the northern end), spend the night there, get an early start Saturday and spend it on Ocracoke, spend Sunday in or near Kitty Hawk, then spend Sunday night near Norfolk airport and fly home early Monday morning.

Overall, the itinerary worked with one issue: there were no decent shells on the beach in Kitty Hawk so we had to drive 30 minutes Friday to Coquina Beach and then 90 minutes Sunday to Hatteras to find decent beaches that met my wife’s standard for shelling. In the end, it was a lot of driving for me, but the weather was great and despite the beaches having no facilities of any kind, they mostly had good cell phone reception so I could catch some soccer matches and the end of the college football game when I got bored.

The trip to Ocracoke on Saturday was pretty long. We started at 5:15am and drove to the ferry terminal on Hatteras, arriving around 6:45am for the 7am ferry to Ocracoke. I was pleasantly surprised that the ferry was free as it’s basically just an extension of the highway. Despite the actual distance being just a few miles, the ferry takes over an hour as it has to maneuver around some sand banks and go way out into the sound and then loop back to Ocracoke.

Once we got to Ocracoke, we drove on one of the off-road paths right to the beach on the northern side of the island. We were the only ones there for a couple of hours. I drove down to the village and back for coffee and pastries when I got a bit bored and stir crazy.

Ocracoke village was cute and very touristy, but it seemed that most of the visitors confined themselves to that end of the island. It wasn’t too busy (except for the long line at the coffee shop), because the island is only accessible by ferry either from Hatteras or the mainland. There’s also a small airport if you want to fly your Cessna there.

Around lunchtime, we grabbed some delicious smoothies in the village and then went back to the beach for a while. At 3:15pm, we left the beach and got onto the ferry back to Hatteras. It was much busier than the early morning ferry. We got to Hatteras at 4:45pm and made it back to our hotel around 6:15pm after a long day.

Despite all the driving, it was nice to get away for the long weekend. We also managed to see some of my wife’s cousins who happened to be staying in Corolla Beach just north of Kitty Hawk on our way back to Norfolk on Sunday afternoon. Thankfully, our Delta flights were on time and the hotels were OK. I’ll have a review of the Hilton Garden Inn Outer Banks/Kitty Hawk in my next post.

If you have questions about this post, let me know in the comments or send me an email at emptynestermiles@gmail.com. If you are thinking about opening a new credit card, please use one of my links.