Well, what a whirlwind of a weekend! We arrived in Bideford’s twin town Manteo on Roanoke Island on Friday around 4 o’clock and we have had such fun catching up with buddies.
We drove down here in our rental car that we picked up in Richmond on Friday morning – we had wanted to make our way by public transportation but this was not possible as there is simply no connection of any sort by train or by bus.
We came because it’s been 12 years since we last visited and that was a follow-up on the back of Sadie’s Winston Churchill Memorial Trust travel fellowship in 2010. Sadie spent six weeks in Virginia and North Carolina to visit collections of ElizabethanNorth Devon pottery, but also to make first contact with the Community of Manteo.
We haven’t flown at all since 2019 in a conscious decision to keep our carbon footprint as low as we can when we travel. We know quite a few folks down here and have kept in virtual contact all that time so we decided to visit for a few days at the start of the trip as it has been too long, we had a lot of catching up to do!!
The weekend has been a heady mix of socialising, eating and drinking in local bars, at peoples houses for dinner and visiting coffee shops and sandwich shops.
We left the island on Monday morning to drive to Colonial Williamsburg.