urban bicycle journeys

Tootie rented a classic beach house in Wrightsville Beach NC for two weeks and invited friends and family. The star of the show was my grandson Frankie, now nearly nine months old.

We were also all smitten by the house. Built in 1923 they do not make them like this anymore. While the plumbing has been somewhat updated and they have added partial air-conditioning, the house looks otherwise unchanged for a hundred years. We were surrounded by newer monstrosities.

Wrightsville Beach started in the late 1800’s as a vacation spot for the port city of Wilmington NC, ten miles to the west. “Our” house sits across the street from the structures lining the oceanfront. Its layout is tropical and built for hot summers, with windows open on many sides to allow breezes to blow through, blurring the line between indoors and outdoors. I doubt the house has heat or insulation. A porch looks west towards the Intracoastal Waterway.

Norfolk and Virginia Beach, where I grew up and where my father was born in 1911 have similar geography to Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach. Dad said prestigious summer properties before air conditioning were not always oceanfront but houses with “south and west exposure,” the best breezes flowing the other direction from the ocean, from the inland waterways. Here in Wrightsville Beach NC we embraced that breeze. There were hardly any mosquitoes. We could gaze at the sunset west across the water, heavy car traffic sometimes interrupting the vibe.

The house’s interior is entirely beadboard. There are “only” two bathrooms. In 1920’s style the upstairs bathroom has no sink, but each of the adjacent three bedrooms has its own vanity, along with a louvered partial door which is an old-school pre-air conditioning tool to keep air circulating.

Downstairs the original wooden screen doors were all intact.

The downstairs bathroom was partially outdoors.

Tootie often sat outside doing her puzzle.

As short term renters we do not know the future of this house. The owner, who lives nearby, is ninety years old. Many families avoid capital gains taxes by waiting to sell until after the death of the owner. The website Zillow says this lovely but small thirteen hundred square foot house and its lot are worth three point one million dollars. The house certainly might end up being scraped into the sand.

I need to bicycle every day to retain my sanity. I am sure I suffer from ADHD although I have never been formally diagnosed. Cycling clears my head.

I could have cycled up and down along Wrightsville Beach , but the riding is not particularly safe and the narrow north – south island is only four miles long. The best ride would be west towards downtown Wilmington, ten or fifteen miles inland. Coastal communities often have dangerous cycling situations where all car traffic gets funneled into bridges and other choke points.

Cycling west towards Wilmington there is a modicum of a bike path along the first couple of miles of the big highway but one also has to cross two quarter mile long bridges. The sidewalk to each bridge is labelled NO BICYCLES. Myself and other cyclists ignored these instructions.

Once across those bridges and now in the city limits of Wilmington, Wilmington has done a great job of putting separate walking and pedestrian paths along the big highway. Two miles later the bike path juts away from the highway and you can cycle for miles on a peaceful and quiet paved wooded path before entering the safer older street grid of central Wilmington and its historic district filled with eighteenth and nineteenth century houses. On the Bike Friday I cycled this twenty something mile round trip nearly every day of our vacation.

Each day I sought out a coffee spot downtown. I would sit for half an hour then ride back to the beach. I don’t need much breakfast but I do like something. An oat milk latte with one pack sugar, plus some kind of roll, would be perfect. It is not downtown Wilmington’s specific fault; it is all over America; pricey and trying-to-be-trendy coffee houses for three to five dollars each sell a stale two or three day old pastry. Crap. It makes me ashamed to be an American. My current theory is that everyone other than me just doesn’t care.

Nevertheless, central Wilmington is a lovely old city. Usually after cycling most of the way back to Wrightsville Beach I would stop at the Harris-Teeter supermarket on the highway, buying supplies for lunch and dinner. I would lug it all on my bike, back to the beach house.