Cape Hatteras, 500 miles to a Waffle House

Blog inspired by The Mighty Diamonds...

Cape Hatteras is a stripe of land that runs parallel to the coastal line of North Carolina. For years it's been a prime spot on the East coast, visited by speed addicts attracted by flat water, as well as wave riders and free stilers.
In March of 2007 I was living in Boston and windsurfing in Pleasure Bay and Cape Cod. My windsurfing buddy Sean Kelly was planning to go to Hatteras for a week to try his "new" quiver: a set of North Sails that he scored at some guy's basement for $ 100. Needles is to say that by those days, necessity had pushed me and Sean to become experts in gear diggin'.

On our way we picked up two more guys: Jordan, a musician friend of Sean's, and Jim, ex dirt biker with some of the scariest accident stories that I ever heard.

Those days we were using Sean's Chevy Lumina for transportation; no roof rack (Sean's rack went flying in I-93, and a truck rolled over his Mistral Explosion, another treasure found in a backyard), just a blanket between the roof, the boards and the sails. This fine machine was a prodigy of aerodynamics, a compact bullet punching a hole on the road. Truck drivers would stay away from us, afraid that at any moment we would take off and go back to Mars.


Probably the most remarkable feature of this veicle was a hard drive under the passenger's seat with 300 GB worth of Beach Boys recordings: the band's rehersals, the band on a plane trip, the band using the restrooms after a concert, Sean had it all. When I got out of the car in Avon, NC, I was certain that there is more to the Beach Boys than California Girls... Jordan in the picture, another big time fan of the BBoys.




500 miles to a Waffle House: I think it was 2 in the morning, perhaps in Delaware, when we started craving waffles, we were listening to a jamming session the Beach Boys had at one of the member's grandmother birthday party. After passing by the Jesus Megastore, Jordan mentioned the waffles. All we needed was a Waffle House. We just passed one, no use to go back, there is one in every exit, or that's what's what we thought... beyond that last Waffle House, Finis Terra, darkness and cold asphalt, we should have stopped at the Jesus Megastore...

We found a Waffle House by next morning, after spending the night at a luxurious motel. The food was worth the wait. By then we were in the south, somewhere between New England and Mexico.

Chesapeake Bridge: In the sunny morning of our second day on the road we went through this bridge. Definitely one of the highlights of our trip, 45 minutes of highway above the ocean, the idea that we would be windsurfing in that water in a few ours was unbearable... total silence in the car... well, silence and an interview to a guy that once went to a Beach Boys concert.