This is the trip that really started it all! Our New Bern trip gave us the idea but this was what we consider the inaugural intracoastal waterway trip. This trip was planned on a Wednesday date night and we left that Friday! This was definitely the easiest trip to plan.

Since we had done so much boating around eastern NC, we decided to start a little farther south for this trip. We trailered our boat two hours to Surf City, NC, put the boat over, and started our journey to Southport, NC. We left on Friday morning and returned on Sunday. The trip to Southport is only 55 miles (about two hours). We took our time heading down as we passed through Wilmington, NC and lots of great islands.

In Southport, we had made docking reservations at Southport Marina and reservations at Lois Jane’s Riverview Inn. Both were outstanding!!! The inn was less than a mile bike ride from the marina. This was our first time staying in a bed & breakfast but we instantly were hooked. We stayed in the beautiful main house and we had the most amazing breakfast each morning.

Restaurants we loved:

• Provision Company (on the water; great food and drinks)
• American Fish Co. (on the water; great margaritas)
• Mr. P’s Bistro (downtown on the main street; excellent dinner spot)
• Fishy Fish Cafe (on the water; good casual dinner spot)

Things we did:

• Bald Head Island- A quick boat ride from Southport (about 10 minutes). The marina had hourly docking and we rented a golf cart to explore the island. There are some great restaurants and shops but the scenery is the best!!!
• During our stay, there was an antique car show going on downtown. It was a lot of fun to walk around and look at the cars on our way to dinner.
• We attempted to fish… yes, attempted. We were still figuring out the off shore fishing thing.

Things we learned:

• Bikes are great!
• Biking with duffle bags… not so great!
• Don’t overpack food. We had this grand idea of grilling on a camping grill we brought. We brought burgers, corn on the cob, hot dogs, buns, all the fixings, and so many snacks. Needless to say, we only ate half of what we brought and grilling on our short trip was not as fun as we thought it would be.

I promise these will get more interesting! It’s hard to remember everything from three years ago and it was a shorter trip so not as much went into planning.

Next week’s blog post- How to plan the longer trips with more stops and more moving parts!

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•