May 15 – To Kitty Hawk Area

Today we headed up to explore the northern end of the OBX and moved to The Refuge on Roanoke Island Campground.

Since we had some time in the morning before we left, so as to not get there before checkin time, I decided to work on our rooftop satellite dish. It will automatically find the satellite based on your GPS location so it has motors to raise and turn the dish. The problem is that the dish is massive and in heavy winds it puts quite a load on the drive mechanism. As result it has gotten loose and actually flops around in the wind causing us to lose reception. I pulled the cover off and discovered a chain drive between a small gear on the motor and a large gear connected to the dish frame. There was a lot of slack in the chain. Thankfully they designed it such that if you loosen 6 bolts the whole motor assembly can slide back and forth to take up the slack. After a bit of cursing and fiddling to get the nuts loose, I got the chain tight again. I have already added a bit of aluminum L channel to brace the dish once it is place, in the windy locations. I just have to remember to remove the brace before I tell the control box to lower the dish.

Onwards.

The drive up is actually pretty boring. If you are not in a village then there are large dunes to the ocean side and tall trees to the sound side.

We got stopped twice by construction. They are building a huge new bridge over the Oregon Inlet. Originally I had been going to stay at the National Seashore Oregon Inlet Campground until I saw a notice on the website saying that the campground is only a few hundred yards from the bridge site and there will be construction noise 24/7.

We had to wait while they drove a huge bridge girder in to be lifted into place by the two massive cranes.

The campground we are it is the only private campground we will stay in on this trip. Of the 5 campgrounds up to now, none have had water or sewer hookups and only 2 have had power.

Unfortunately this one is also twice the price of any other. The state and national park campgrounds have been in the $25 to $28 range, This one is $52 a night. I don’t want to do the conversion to Canadian $.

Having no water or sewer hookup is no problem for a stay shorter than about a week and a half as we have some pretty big storage tanks. It just means you take quick showers.

Having no power hookup is not a huge problem. We have a lot of battery capacity and it has been quite sunny so the solar panels charge them up during the day. On the cloudy days we just need to run the generator for about an hour to get enough of a charge. We also have to run it if we want to use the A/C, microwave or the toaster.

Also, only the first campground had WIFI and it was spotty. We have been relying on our pay as you go, very limited data cap cellular internet. You just don’t feel free just to surf and have to be careful how much you use.

So yesterday, after we arrived at this full hookup, good WIFI campground, we didn’t go out to check out the neighbourhood as we usually do. I took a very long shower and we spent the afternoon surfing all the sites we have been putting off for the last month.

The campground is next to a small pond. The overnight sites are at the edge of the ponds, while the seasonal sites take up the rest of the sports.

They have a walkway around part of the pond.

We are here for a week.