Outer Banks, North Carolina

One of the reasons that we wanted to come to the East Coast was to do some bicycling on the Outer Banks. The area was part of our bike trip of the East Coast back in 2003 and we fell in love with it and the people. We planned on leaving last Tuesday but with Hurricane Ida heading towards the area we waited until Thursday afternoon. We rented a uhaul because we've found they are cheaper than car rentals and there isn't a problem with hauling my big recumbent. We drove about 3/4 of the way and when we woke up Friday morning we watched the Weather Channel - as Jim Cantori was describing the coastal flooding in the OBX he mentioned that highway 12 by Oregon Inlet (which is where we were headed) was closed but that it should reopen by that afternoon. We drove the rest of the way to Kittyhawk where we were told the highway would reopen Saturday morning. We checked into the hotel and started seeing the destruction that had taken place...
I overheard a hotel employee say "every cloud has a silver lining - there will be lots of jobs this winter for the re-building." We also found most of the locals were calling this the "storm of the century."

These stairs were some of the few that escaped the storm - many more were destroyed. I wish I would have taken more pictures - most of the damage we saw while driving so it was hard to get them. Most of Hwy 12 had sand and beach debris on it, many of the parking lots were flooded and there was a hotel next to the one we were staying at that had lost most of it's foundation - but most houses escaped unscathed because they are built on pilings.

Lots of debris in the water - often that did more damage than the waves.

By Saturday at noon DOT was reporting the road might be opened by Sunday "sometime" so we decided to cut our losses and head back to Charleston. The frustrating thing was that u-haul charged us twice as much to go back to Charleston as they did to go North...